Blue Hat SEO-Advanced SEO Tactics

I’ll be dedicating a few posts to grabbing questions in the Open Questions post.

There were several questions like it, but I think this one represents it the best.

From Matthew

Hi Eli,

I’ve read through your blog and its amazing info. Thanks. I have a question. I’ve read through and I find the link building stuff (black hole SEO) a bit too complex, could you suggest any other effective link building techniques? I’ve heard great stuff about TNX.net.

Thanks!

I haven’t heard of TNX, but here’s a really simple one most haven’t thought of. Much like ugly girls tend to have better personalities pretty and clean sites tend to be harder to link build, or at least take more effort initially. So a little technique I’ve been using a lot lately is to build sites that gather links really easy. A quick easy way to do this is to build a site that distributes something people want to either put on their websites or social site profiles (ie. myspace, facebook, youtube and such). I’ll give you the most basic of examples. In a really old post on this blog I put up this picture:

Since then everyone and their dog has been hotlinking to it, especially since it’ll often times show up in Google images for the term Middle Finger. Not that I care but it illustrates the stupid shit people spread and its effectiveness can be used for links as minuscule as it is. So lets say all I had in my arsenal was this stupid picture of a flaming middle finger. I post it up on some site get it in google images and such just like i did. Then under it I put a textbox that says something like Put this on your ____ copy past etc etc. The code has a link to a random domain of mine, the domain doesn’t even have to be active, or it can be a money site. Who really cares? After awhile the flaming finger image gathers enough links to that domain that i just 301 redirect the domain over (doesn’t even have to be an entire domain as I’ll mention below). All the links goes to my new pretty site.

This is a really weak example I realize, but it can be done with just about any media (video, image, flash, etc.) you’d like. It can be done with any type of site you’d like. As long as its the type that tends to be able to gather links faster than your other type of site. If I got big pretty sites coming out on a future date i can build several of these site and by the time the main site goes live I can have plenty of link volume to rank properly. The only reason why this extra work is necessary is because viral link building tends to be exponential. In other words you got to have links to get rankings and got to have rankings to have links. More links means more links. So it creates a nice little shove on a boat too big to leave the dock on its own. Best of all its really easy and rarely costs anything at all to do.

If you’re wondering why this all kind of sounds familiar or like you should already know it, its because its a creative spin on two of the more popular techniques on this blog, Link Laundering Sites, and Cycle Sites. On a side note I’ve found that this also works on subdirectories. So you can create a site that distributes media or allows people to upload their own and it has em all on a separate subdirectory or page, the links can even go to the same page the item is on. Once each subdirectory or subpage gets enough links to it, cycle it out and let the links go to a site that needs em. You can also put the media up on another subdirectory to be used again in gathering more links. The best advice I can give you on this is to look for types of sites that gain links quickly right out of the gate. They may not make a lot of money, they may be high bandwidth, it doesn’t matter if they’re all temporary. You can still steal the idea to do some easy link building on the harder sites.

More answers coming soon

Hi guys!
Sorry I haven’t had a chance to post lately. I got some great posts coming up, I just haven’t had a chance to sit down with ‘em yet. I was going to write today but alas…I didn’t

So to hold you over here’s a quick five minute black hat tip

Finding Link Injection Possibilities With Versions & Changes Logs
Search for popular file names that include version update information and changes logs that are typically found in downloadable website scripts.

Two good places to find them would be:

1. Popular PHP and CGI scripts.
2. Searching directly for the filenames.

Check the changes and version logs and look for vulnerability fixes that happened recently. These typically mean theres a possibility for a link injection or spamming possibilities.

Try to download the versions of the script before the bug was fixed.

Look for the vulernability and figure out a way to exploit it.

Search for sites using the same script and attempt to link inject on all of them.

Avoid hacking

New posts coming out soon

I have a couple posts almost ready to go, but I simply don’t have enough time to finish and make them live yet so I’ll make a quick one just to hold you over.

Here’s How To Get A Free Link on Amazon.com
1) Create an Amazon.com affiliate account.
2) Select the aStore option.

3) Fill in the keywords you would like to use and select a product category related to your site.

4) At the bottom of that page while still on step 1, Insert your link and anchor text.

5) Complete the last 3 steps. They are very short.

6) Parse or copy the custom affiliate URL. It’ll be in this format: http://astore.amazon.com/username

7) Run the URL through the QUIT tool.

8) Do it again before they catch on that everyone is starting to do this.

I’m excited. I just put up a new Wordpress plugin that I’ve been wanting for awhile now. It’s called Recommend It.

Recommend It - Allows your blog’s veteran readers to recommend posts to first time visitors through a simple voting system.

You’ll notice that at the bottom of every post is now a button that allows you to recommend that post to first time readers. So now first time visitors here will be greeted with the posts that got the most recommendations from the veteran readers.

I’ve been wanting a plugin like this really bad. I think it’s a great way to point your new readers to the real meat of your blog. I first got the idea for this when I saw several blogs that recently got links from bigger blogs and so they made special posts to welcome the readers. They all recommended a few of what they felt were their best posts for the new readers to check out. My reasoning was that they might be worried that the new flood of visitors would leave after not being able to find the good posts, or get the wrong impression about their blog from the most recent post. I started thinking about how much I could use something like that. Sometimes my most recent post isn’t always the best representation of the rest of my blog or the best for new readers to get introduced into the community with. It’s often best to leave it to the people who know your writings the best, your readers, to point your new visitors in the right direction. I personally would like to see this at the top of every blog I first visit.

So I asked a buddy of mine, , who is a great coder if he could possibly make me a plugin to automated the process and leave it to the visitors to decide which posts would be best for the newbies. I think he did a great job.

If you would like to use Recommend-It on your blog he was gracious enough to allow me to share it.

Download Recommend It

Installation Instructions

If you need any coding work done I’d strongly recommend you contact . He does some great work.

E-mail:

Sorry I haven’t been posting lately guys. I got lots of pretty damn good excuses for it but I’ll spare you of having to hear them. This week I’m back on the ball and I’m going to attempt to up my post volume to make up for the slack the last week and a half.

Today’s post is a detailed way to deal with pesky hotlinkers. Hotlinkers are people who use your binary content and instead of hosting it themselves they just link directly to it on their site. I saw a funny article awhile back about a guy who threatened to sue another webmaster for removing the images he was hotlinking to on his server. That’s pretty funny stuff for anyone with half a brain, but there must of been a better way for the victim to get his rewards from the hotlinker instead of having to rename or remove the images. So true to tradition here at Blue Hat we’re going to look at some simple ways to not only stop them from hotlinking to your material but to try to get some of their visitors out of it as well. Personally I see hotlinking as a compliment. It means you have quality content. However there in lies the opportunity. If they are hotlinking to your content then their visitors must be of the similiar niche as yours. So I see no moral dilemma in trying to grab some of their visitors while politely letting them know that you don’t appreciate them sucking up your bandwidth. Let’s look at a few media formats and determine some ways to draw their visitors to your site using your .htaccess file. If you don’t know what a .htaccess file is please go here and do some reading.

Images
Images are the most commonly hotlinked to content so lets tackle them first. The trick here is to simply replace the image they are hotlinking to with an image that advertises your website. So make an image saying something like, “Go To www.MyDomain.com To View This Image.” Then name the file hotlinked.jpg and upload it to your server.
Then add this to your .htaccess file
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://mydomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mydomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ hotlinked.jpg [R,NC]

Flash Files
You have two options with flash. You could use the same method as the images and show a different flash file that displays an ad for your site. A more aggressive option might be to use the getURL() method inside the flash file and have it actually forward the user to your site. So your essentially hijacking any hotlinkers site or dare I say Myspace page. Create this file and name it hotlinked.swf then put this in your .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://mydomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mydomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mydomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule [^hotlinked].(swf)$ http://www.mydomain.com/hotlinked.swf [R,NC]

Music
Sometimes sites users from MyPlaylist.org, Musiclist.us, and other sites will jack your mp3 files for their myspace pages and other sites. So its not a bad idea to have some fun and create a short audio advertisement for your site and put it into an mp3 file called hotlinked.mp3 then put this in your .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://mydomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mydomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mydomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule [^hotlinked].(mp3)$ http://www.mydomain.com/hotlinked.mp3 [R,NC]

Another one? Haha didn’t see that comin’ did ya! If you haven’t already; be sure to read one of my favorite posts on Abandoned Wordpress Accounts before continuing to read this post. Got it? Good!

So by now you’ve had about 6 months to hopefully grab at least a couple hundred already indexed and quality built Wordpress accounts. Good! You’ve also probably added links to your sites that could use a good IBL and page rank boost. Great! Your on your way except now we just need to convert these medium quality links into great links. Awesome! Lets get to it.

Recovery
First things first, we need to recover some abandoned content and lost links. Lookup your abandoned blogs on Archive.org and see if you can scrounge up some old posts. For some more recent ones you can do a linkdomain: on Yahoo or something. Then pull the cached copy of the individual posts. Repost them on your blogs and try to match the Post Slugs (the url to the post itself ie. myblog.wordpress.com/my-awesome-post). This will ensure that all the old links that exists to the blog and individual posts will still be giving you credit and traffic instead of going to an ugly 404. Also be sure to put up a post about how the blog got abandoned but out of kindness you reposted the old posts for the users’ sake. How kind of you! This will also give the original owner a small opporunity to complain and ask you to take down the posts(don’t be a jerk do it if asked, no matter how small the chances are they will actually ask or care). This will keep everyone happy and preserve your linking and traffic.

Remodeling
A URL is just a URL. However a theme and topic is great link potential. Remodel the site to fit what kind of links you’re wanting. If your wanting tech news type links change up the keywords to match a technews type content. This’ll help transform your medium quality links to a semi-relevant stature.

Build
Now lets build some more relevant content as well as relevant IBL links to the blogs. This is where it gets interesting. Remember when I said to make a common Wordpress account and attach all your new blogs to the same account? If you didn’t take that advice you’re going to wish you did, because now we’re going to talk about how to get huge amounts of links and content to your blogs. Don’t worry it’ll be easy, it’ll be whitehat, and like the first part of the technique it also can be done completely by hand.

1) Go to Digg.com (Shoutwire also works) and signup with an account.

2) Go to your account settings and edit your blog settings. Put in your main login and password for your main Wordpress account. Digg will be kind enough to generate a nice list of all your blogs that are attached to that account next time you login. So in the future you can easily switch between them quickly.

3) Select your first blog and click update.

4) Search for that blogs terms and click “Blog It” on all the results. This will do three things. First it will grab the title and the description of the original post and insert it as a new post on your blog. You now got some great content. Secondly, it will post a trackback link on the original post. A percentage of the posts you grab will draw a huge number of backlinks to the original post which ups the quality of your trackback link. It’ll also drive some traffic(some of my abandoned blogs get over 200 visitors/day for this reason. Lastly this will give you a link on the Digg post itself under “Who blogged this.”

Lets do the math
You got a couple hundred blogs. Each blog has a couple hundred posts. Each post has at least 2 backlinks. Add the previous inbound links + content. You got yourself hundreds of quality blogs driving traffic and link quality to your real money sites.

Life is good

I wanted to make a quick follow up on the $100/day post in regards to monetizing the Google search. If you used the same screensaver program I use than this will be easy. If not then yo may need to make some modifications. Download any simple installer creation program. I’ve been using Setup Specialist for quite a few years now just because its super simple and quick. Create an installer for your screensaver. Copy over the self installing exe for the screensaver and then have it automatically execute immediately after the install finishes. There are two ways i know to pull some serious Google searches through your new install.

Desktop Search
This is the bit more technical way and since I have never actually done it I can’t go too specific on it. This will put a little google search box on their taskbar very similar to the Google Desktop Search. Go to Creating Custom Explorer Bars, Tool Bands, and Desk Bands and create the toolband. Then in the registry add the toolband to the taskbar. Like I said i’ve never done it but it doesn’t seem too hard to figure out. Use the Google search box that is easily created in your Adsense account

Changing Their Homepage
Create a small website that is something like myhomepage.com or greatstartpage.com, it doesn’t really matter what the url is. Make a snazzy but simple template and include the google search box on the page. Use the google search box that is easily created in your adsense account. Then in your installer program change the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\ change the “Start Page” to your new start page website address.

What will this do?
Everytime they search google you get proceeds from the adsense ads. As I’ll end up talking about in the upcoming Blue Hat Technique many internet users(especially the newbie ones) will never change their homepage. If it changes on them they will leave it. So you get small amounts of money over a very long period of time over massive amounts of users.

I was going to avoid this topic due to the new Blue Hat Technique coming out, but since this is extra info that won’t be covered in the post I figured I might as well get it out of the way.

I just realized something! This entire blog is filled with ideas on how to help your sites make more money and receive more traffic, but I don’t have a single post that says, HEY! HERE IS HOW YOU MAKE MONEY. I want a post that tells you exactly how to reach your goals. A comment in another post (I do read them and get inspired by them) reminded me of this. So I perused through some old projects of mine and grabbed one thats very easy, very automated, reciprocal (consistantly makes money forever), and makes about a $100/day. Most of all it requires very minimal time and investment. So here ya go! Follow the instructions carefully and do as I did.

Here Is What You Do
1) Pick a generalized niche that is fairly popular. Celebrities work well, cars, animals. Anything will do.

2) Make a list of 300 items in that niche. For instance if you pick music artists make a list of the top 300 most popular music artists.

3) Download at least 20 public use(noncopyrighted) pictures of each item in your list.

4) Download or buy a screensaver maker. I don’t remember which one I use so I’ll have to update you in the comments when I get back to the office on Monday. Just make sure it is quick and easy to create the screensavers (saves you a lot of time) and comes with an exe output function that’ll easily install the screensavers on their computer without much dialog boxes or windows getting in thier way. This one looks decent. Easy Screensaver Maker and its only $25. Update: I use Screen Saver Builder. It’s $20 with fully functioning 21 day trial.

5) Create all your screensavers and put them up on a simple website. Give each screensaver its own page and download link. It also never hurts to SEO the site so it’ll do well in the search engines and make you even more money later on. Adsense also doesn’t hurt for a lil’ bit of extra cash.

6) Signup with Zangocash (Aff Link). This step is optional. See the comments for more ideas on how to monenize your new screensavers.

7) Talk to your account manager and ask him to bundle Zango software with your screensavers. Send him all the installers along with a textfile containing all the short descriptions and a sample picture. They are usually happy to do this for you. If they aren’t get a new account manager.

8) Get yourself a copy of Promosoft software submitter(nonAff link). I think it costs $95 for a copy but trust me it’s well worth it.

9) Follow the instructions on Promosoft to create the PAD files(product description files used for software sites) and submit each screensaver to hundreds of software and screensaver directories.

There you go. You will get paid $0.45 for every person who installs your screensaver. Once the screensavers are submitted you will have no problem getting tons of people downloading them everyday. If you get about 250 downloads per day(easy with 300 screensavers) you will easily make about a $100/day!

Okay so now all those people on forums and such who are bitching and moaning; saying stuff like “I want to quit my day job” and “I wish I could make a living online” can finally shut up. It is all right there, spelled out in plain english. You now have absolutely no excuses. Get off your ass and actually do it. Follow each step carefully and do a good job. It should take the average person no more than a couple days to get it done and you will make continuous money for a very long time. If you’re reading this and you suddenly realize that you are one of those people, just know that there is nothing wrong with that. We were all there. You just have to know when to quit. Quit searching forums for ideas. Quit buying ebooks hoping they’ll give that magical $100/day project idea. Quit asking “SEO experts” how they do it, and for God’s sake quit reading blogs hoping someone will post something like this, cus it just ain’t gonna happen(haha). All I expect from you is to read this post throughly and carefully at least two more times and actually follow through. There is nothing more I would love, than to hear someone tell me that an article I wrote helped them quit their job in the next 8 weeks. So make it happen!

Good Luck and Lets Get Back To Some SEO Shall We?

Update 3/20/07: The comments for this post are getting semi-ridiculous So a nice user has setup a forum especially for this post, where it can be discussed in a more efficient manner. Feel free to register.
http://www.zoomist.com/

Oh wow, I can’t believe it’s my 100th post already. Be sure to give me some kudos in the comments (haha I figure I’m allowed to fish for compliments every 100 posts or so). Well I can’t think of a better way to start the triple digits than by starting the first part of a four part tutorial on getting tons of links from Wikipedia. If PR is your concern please quit paying money for PR6’s, Wikipedia is full of them and waiting for you to post your link.

Lets begin with the White hat method since it is the simplest and will create the least amount of problems for you later on. It’s a little more manual labor intensive than the rest, but fuck it, it’s easy and worth it.
Methodology
1) Make a list of all your top terms. For instance if I were promoting Blue Hat SEO I’d make a list with something to the effect of: Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Link Building, Website Promotion, SEO Tools, Black Hat, and White Hat.

2) Create a small article section of your site. Write 2-4 articles for each keyword and put them in the terms section. So my site might be organized like this.
Search Engine Optimization
|-Article 1
|-Article 2
|_Article 3
Link Building
|-Article 1
|-Article 2
|_Article 3

You get the idea. Then just make sure each article only contains links back to your site or other pages on your site. However you want to distribute the new found linking power.

3) Go to Wikipedia.org and do a search for each one of your terms. Try to find the PR6 and above sections that directly use your terms. There may be anywhere from 1-15 for each one of your major terms. So dig deep.

4) Click on the Edit This Page tab. Go to the portion that says
==External links==
and add your link using the following code:
* [http://www.example.com Anchor Tag] A collection of free articles.

Let the link hunt begin! This is particularly useful for Ecom sites that sell tons of different types of products. Once the articles are up it only takes a couple hours to gain a good 50 or so one way PR6 links. I’ve had one site of mine gain over 150 PR6 links and 72 PR5 links this way. It took a little bit of work, but its not spammy and your links are almost guaranteed to stick.

If the article creation is going to be a problem just be an asshole Look at the other related links listed. Steal some of their noncopyrighted articles and replace their link with yours. Chances are no one will even notice the change. Ouch I just caused a problem didn’t I?

I would like to take a moment to present a very powerful link building technique that has been long overlooked by webmasters. It’s actually quite a shame. Every SEM I’ve ever met has managed to just skip right over the subject of Document Links without a second look.

Search engine engineers are very adamant in talking about their engines indexing power in regards to the term “documents.” MSN, Yahoo, and Google all worked very hard so their engines can index and understand other forms of documents than just HTML pages. They also worked very hard so they can analyze the links within those documents and extract them for credit as well. If I was in the same boat I’d demand the people writing the FAQs and guidelines to use the proper term(document) as well. After all it’s the least they could do. So why not take it literally?
So how does this apply to link building? Consider other forms of documents that are indexed such as Acrobat files, Excell documents, Power Point presentations, and Word documents as a direct line to link building through content creation. After all, they are treated just as weighty as html files are. Infact you can even find them in the site: and link: command.

The Proccess
Lets pretend you sell refrigerators online. There’s tons of competitors and informational sites on fridges out there, but it’s tough to get the links you need to compete for a term like “Refrigerators.” So you spend a little time and create a PDF document that is a nice compiled list of all the major fridge manufacturers and their warrantee information along with direct phone numbers to their warrantee support departments. That’s useful right? Fuck yeah. Hell thats even useful for your direct competitors that also sell fridges online. So you insert your little link with your desired anchor text into the footers of the document’s pages and lock the file for editing(so it can’t be changed). Then you send out an email to the top 3,000 sites that rank for your terms and say something like:

Hey,
I really liked your site, but I had a hard time finding warrantee information for the products you sell. Warrantee info is something I definitely would like to know before investing in a new unit. So I created a useful document with…….blah blah blah describe your file…I thought your visitors might find it useful. Feel free to post it up on your website. Perhaps in your “Contact us”, or “Product Support” section where people can easily find the information when they need it.
So then the other webmasters like the document and put it up on their website. They link to it on a prominent page(the contact us and support pages are usually linked to on every page of the site so can be counted on to have high PR, so target them if you can). A couple days later the engines come around and index the document. Boom you got yourself a ton of quality links. It’s such an incredibly, easy powerful, and yet completely ignored technique it’ll keep you up at night searching for other types of documents to create and mass distribute. More importantly, people can steal your videos, they can steal your flash, but if they steal your documents you’re the one who benefits.

Just to give you an idea of how well this works I’ll list an example. I did this same technique for an older Ecom site of mine about 7 months after sending out a link exchange request to the top 2,000 sites for my various terms. Since I’m promoting an Ecom site I naturally got a very low response rate. I then used that same list for this technique; my response rate was in the upward 30%, which is absolutely huge. If you do that on a larger scale with a less experimental formula and you get the idea of how well this works. Especially since the sites that accepted the link exchanges were the relatively small sites that usually buried my link. The documents also stole success in infiltrating the huge sites that have strict no linking policies as well as succeeded in being placed on prominant pages. Think of it like spreading a virus. Your job is to convince other webmasters to upload your content onto their sites when they normally wouldn’t even give you a link.

If it’ll help you out, Here is a list of Google’s 12 document “types” they index. Note that the types are not specific to a format, there are actually many different formats you may use within each of the 12 types. Just be creative.

Since this post is so incredibly directed to the white hat sites, and I hate to be biased, I thought I’d also throw in a quick thought for the blackhatters out there that are now bored out of their skulls by reading this. Doorway pages get banned all the time for spammy text and such, but have you ever heard of a PDF repository getting banned? How can you determine if a PDF document contains spammy text? Since they are naturally image rich and quick excerts of random text and slogans, as well as repeated text in footers, it makes it tough wouldn’t you agree?