(Note: I know I haven’t posted in a while, and trust me you have all let me know. I apologize, and hope this post somewhat makes up for it. I even included a diagram! Be happy! ) Often when I talk to people about what I do I can’t really sum it up with the [...]

(Note: I know I haven’t posted in a while, and trust me you have all let me know. I apologize, and hope this post somewhat makes up for it. I even included a diagram! Be happy! )

Often when I talk to people about what I do I can’t really sum it up with the term Blackhat SEO, or anything of the like. Usually it ends up being Automation and Scalability. First, I do want to say this though: automation is not simply a field or a thing to do, it certainly is a mindset. Once you start thinking in the right way with automation your mind hardly ever stops as you try to break down every little thing behind a certain task and make it all powered by scripts and programs. One of the concepts I’ve thought about lately when thinking about new scripts and programs was for niche research – but why stop there? Originally it was very simple.

• Check root keyword search volume (organic).
• Check average CPC on adwords.
• Report to me.

The whole goal of automation is to take as much human interaction out of it as possible, and the goal of scaling is to be able to replicate this many times over and over. So let’s take this one step further and look at automating almost the entire process.

• Check root keyword search volume (organic).
• Check average CPC on adwords (if over a certain number, continue)
• Check exact match domain names.
• Find exact match that’s open on any TLD worth using.
• Register using the eNom API or writing a cURL script through NameCheap.
• Point DNS to my servers using API.
• Create cPanel account via WHM on server to allow resolving and showing of said domain.
• Use FTP to upload YACG and do the initial installation of it, posting adsense on pages for initial monetization.
• Install in-text script for secondary monetization on terms in content itself, Kontera comes to mind.
• Ping out said website, submit to a few aggregators.
• Drop 100-200 backlinks (including deeplinks) to website.
• Social bookmark a few of the pages for initial indexing (autopligg come to mind?)
• Report to me.

See the huge difference when you go with the automation mindset and see how much is really possible? Total we’re talking about $2 cost per 500 keywords researched (Going under the 1000 captcha’s for $2 from Decaptcher). This could most likely end up being a $100 a day after domain costs, but the sheer numbers alone would probably start making it back via monetization within a week or two. Now, will this always work? No. Will it work for now? Probably yes.

Back to the original idea behind this post though, Automation is a Mindset. Once you really get on a roll you’ll start thinking about how to automate damn near everything. One way you could comparably think about what I’m talking about is a dish washer. Someone figured out how to make a device that washes dishes. That’s amazing! Helps everyone on a daily basis, but it would be in my mind to try to figure out how to create some way to get all of the dishes in the house into the dish washer so I can literally leave them anywhere and have them picked up. Robotics FTW. The bottom line is that anything can be automated even more and to a better extent, the question is how and how much.

Let’s go with another example, though. I drew up a diagram for a WickedFire thread that was posted in the Traffic & Content section over there about a SEO Network. Here’s the diagram, and then I’ll explain somewhat on how I automated it:

Now comes the somewhat impressive part. I have this entire system automated but the social bookmarking. Sadly I still have to type about 5 keys and click 2-3 times before the social bookmarking works how I want it to. The WPMU’s are all autogenned and uses the WordPress backup file to load about 150,000 markov’d posts delay posted over 3-6 months (think DataPresser but a little less clean on the output). The micro URL’s are added via the blogroll so they expand out with all of the new posts, and then a few of the posts are all bookmarked for fast indexing and incremental indexing with the growth. The micro’s themselves are basically article re-writes, only about 5-10 pages per site. These are somewhat of a way to “link launder” your links to your main site, so you can some-what clean them from completely spammy and automated to clean and respectable. After time if done right, the micro’s will end up around PR4ish with a gooooood number of backlinks, including deeplinks.

The whole point behind that example is that everything under “Money Site” is automated, and can be scaled out almost infinitely. That’s actually all that I have right now on this subject – but please for the love of God let me know what else you all want me to write about. I’ve been considering posting some scraping classes that I have and the like but I’m still not sure whether I should post them in Ruby or PHP, etc.

As always, hit me up on Contempt.me (Skype username) with some feedback.

I know one thing that I deal with all the time is duplicate content penalties. If you do even basic forms of blackhat you’re heard of automation of blogs, scraping content, RSS feed’s and the like. Everyone with half a brain cell knows that there are duplicate content penalties in Goog’s algorithm that prevent scraper [...]

I know one thing that I deal with all the time is duplicate content penalties. If you do even basic forms of blackhat you’re heard of automation of blogs, scraping content, RSS feed’s and the like. Everyone with half a brain cell knows that there are duplicate content penalties in Goog’s algorithm that prevent scraper sites from gaining too well of ranks. But the real question is, to what severity does Google evaluate your content as “duplicate”?

A while ago (we’re talking about 2 years out) when I was just getting started in Blackhat SEO, Brad101 from WF introduced me to something that I like to call the 30% rule. He taught me that if 30% of the content on the page is unique, that you should pass most of the duplicate content penalties. At first this made a little sense but not enough to try, then I started to dig a little deeper. How exactly do news sites get away with it? Most of news sites is duplicate content anyway. Is it a per-domain uniqueness factor? If so, the 30% rule would make it work great! What if it was a per-page factor (which there’s enough proof already that this is most likely the case) – in which the 30% would work great as well again!

Once again, if duplicate content was so harsh that it was per paragraph or something – then news sites would be penalized all over. A lot of people would read that and say “but usually the backlink back to the author clears penalties” – ta-da! Think about that. Could that possibly be why autoblogs work so well *gasp*? If you post duplicate content and link back to the author, most of the time it’s a win/win. The author is -usually- happy due to a backlink, you’re happy because you may actually rank with your authority over the original site, and you can do this on mass quantities.

There’s a few tricks and tips you’ll find out as you mess more and more with these. One of the things that I’ve found quite interesting is that links themselves count as content, yet don’t have duplicate content penalties. I’m not obviously 100% sure on that one, but my sites wouldn’t be doing so well otherwise. If you read my EPN experiment I was able to send around 55,000 total users from Google to Ebay Partner Network via my splogs. This was actually click thru’s to EPN, not just to my sites. Probably on my sites alone I pulled a little over 100,000 uniques/month which equates to almost 3500 uniques/day. Not bad for a total setup time of a little under an hour, huh?

Don’t always assume that Google is going to fuck you. You shouldn’t be afraid of the Algorithm, you should be afraid of the manual reviews. This is just my opinion, of course – Google is getting smarter by the day. Have fun, and try to stay ahead of the curve!

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.