I know one of the biggest challenges with my splogs when I ran a smaller network (when I say smaller I’m talking under 1500) was keeping the content to stay with the times. Running a blog on “Brittany Spears” only worked for a while until Lindsay Lohan took the lime light. This method would actually [...]

I know one of the biggest challenges with my splogs when I ran a smaller network (when I say smaller I’m talking under 1500) was keeping the content to stay with the times. Running a blog on “Brittany Spears” only worked for a while until Lindsay Lohan took the lime light. This method would actually keep my content on the blog current with keywords, but not sidetrack it from the original concept. So here’s the “situation” I’ll be running through. Let’s say you’re just starting with Blackhat SEO and you decide to give a markov-based blog farm a try. Your goal is not to just generate links like everyone else usually does, but cloak all visitors from search engines to one of your CPA (Cost Per Action) based landing pages.

Your goals for this first farm to get your feet wet is simple. Cloak content to the search engines, and foward all SERP based hits to the landing page to try to convert to a lead. But there’s a kicker: where will you come up with these topics? What about the content and monetization? This is where good ol’ Google comes in. Google has a nice little tool called Google BlogSearch and they were nice enough to allow output to RSS feeds. Lucky for us RSS is the format that our blog farm will use to get the content and input it into our blogs. This is broken down into three different stages of operation from start to finish.

1. Content – The content is controlled by GBS (Google BlogSearch) and is given as original work. This is not unique what so ever, and will be seen as duplicate content in the SE’s (Search Engines) unless you either add more content to it or change the structuring and use synonyms using Markov and the like. This is where the plugins come in that will handle all of this for you. First off, grab a copy of Eli’s zipped wordpress install that’s mentioned in his SEO Empire post. To find it, you’ll have to read it (hint: look for “wordpress I compiled”). This one has a feature I didn’t want though, which was post trackbacks to each URL. It also doesn’t morph the content, but I’ve given you the keyword to help you out which is markov. Then look at GBS for your link (for example, heres the url for blue widgets). This is the feed you’ll want to use.
2. Hosting – You’ll either need to find free hosting or purchase some, I highly suggest you keep the number of results on the GBS feed low – in fact, probably under 20. Your blog will grow slower, but at the same time it will grow more consistently. This will also help you keep under the radar with your host, and if you’re not in their head about running their CPU through the roof the complaints may be easier to handle if you receive any.
3. Linking – This is up to your imagination. If you keep the trackback feature in Eli’s install, taken care of. Personally I would throttle that back to 1 in 100ish so that you don’t get too many backlinks too fast. The goal of these sites is to get the content indexed over time so it doesn’t raise any red flags.
4. Monetization – If you’re cloaking you also need to get another plugin to read off the referrer and/or IP address and cloak the correct content to the SE’s and display a landing page to users. This I’m leaving out there for you to figure out on your own. To get you pointed in the right direction, try looking up PHP scripts that have the variable $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']. This is a very dated way to do it, but it will get the job done 9 out of 10 times and won’t take that long to setup. Other ways to monetize are obviously adsense (which I HIGHLY discourage) and CPA (which I highly suggest). If you haven’t started with CPA you should signup as soon as possible and take a look around. Use the A4D square advert on the right, they have some great offers for traffic like this.

So now that this is taken care of, the content read from GBS will automatically also take other titles and content as the other blogs in the niche are updated. Using the brittany spears example this could give a few of your farms posts such as “Brittany Spears vs Lindsay Lohan” or “Brittany Spears and K Fed”. The whole point of the GBS is not just unique content from multiple sites, but also to increase your traffic as much as possible without setting off any alarms.

Just figured I would throw this out there for anyone interested in trying to get started, and yes these methods still work; I’m using them right now. If this is too basic for you, feel free to say so, I’m taking suggestions for future post ideas and concepts.