Blue Hat Technique #17 - Keyword Fluffing
I’ve gotten a couple requests asking me to keep the Link Laundering, Madlib Sites, and Power Indexing Tips series going. I think that’s a great Fuckin’ idea. Let’s not only do that but throw in a related Blue Hat Technique at the same time. This is a little technique I learned back in my warez and mp3 site days. You’ve probably seen it used before, but if you’re like most marketers you’ve probably just skipped right by it without ever giving it a second thought. It’s called Keyword Fluffing. It’s fairly simple and works pretty damn well, especially if you have a large site(eg. A Madlib Site).
Objective
We’re going to fluff all of our individual pages’ keywords with additional targeted long tailed phrases. We’re going to do this by creating a search box with static results and inner link within the appropriate pages. This in a sense will attempt to triple or quadruple your long tailed search traffic. This of course is an unrealistic performance result, but it will work and help quite a bit. Worthy of mention, there is an extremely blackhat version of this technique called Keyword Drafting, but for this post we’ll keep it very white hat and by the books. Yes, many major sites use this technique and it’s well within the rules. ![]()
The Process
1) Create a search feature on your site. Using Mod-Rewrite have it print the results to a separate subdirectory. For instance the results for the search “My Keyword” will result in a static page of the results located at www.myexample.com/search/mykeyword.html.
2) Pick up to five keywords related to your site’s niche to fluff. These will need to be common keywords that people looking for your site may tack on to their search. As an example, many software directories and crackz sites use the terms, download, crack, keygen, & serial to fluff. So when they have a page targeting “Adobe Photoshop” that page will also fluff for the terms, “Adobe Photoshop Download”, “Adobe Photoshop Crack” and “Adobe Photoshop Keygen.” Many of whom are common phrases people might add on to their search terms in the engines.
3) On each individual page on your site at the bottom put a little Div that says “Related Searches” or something similar. Then put in a link to the search results for each of those long tailed phrases. For instance the Adobe Photoshop page will have a link to www.mydomain.com/search/adobephotoshopserial.html with the anchor text “Adobe Photoshop Serial.” Be sure to make these links crawlable and pass PR. You will want them to get crawled and indexed so they can start ranking for those individual terms.
4) Make your site’s search box record the most recent searches. For added value, on your main page put up a link to the “Recent Searches.” Be sure to filter out unwanted html tags and inappropriate words. You don’t want people abusing this feature. You do however want to start gaining some extra targeted phrases you may not have thought of in the indeces.
The real trick to this technique is to scale it according to your sites’ current indexing power. I’d recommend you don’t just immediately implement this off the get go. A rule of thumb I use is to wait till my site has reached at least 60% saturation in at least 2 major engines.
For this technique I used an example that I thought people may have openly noticed. You have probably heard the recent news that Youtube has announced that they have quit using this technique, not because it’s against the Google TOS but because it was “unfair to the integrity of their results.” Meaning it worked too damn well, and other more relevant sites couldn’t compete against their saturation levels. There are of course other more prominent examples I could use, but for the sake of exercise I encourage you to reread my Madlib Sites post and think about the advanced version of this post, Keyword Fluffing with Replacement. I’ll give you an example directly. In the madlib post we targeted the phrase “Dating in ___.” The blank represented a targeted geolocation(ie. New York). Consider replacing the “Dating In” with “Single Women In” or “Single Men in.” That way you not only target the several thousand phrases related to the actual dating terms but you also got the substitution for people using different versions of the searches.
There you go! You just over tripled your saturation and keyword targeting. With any luck and time this will bring in quite a bit more organic search traffic. Hell, who needs luck.
this is exactly what all the dam crack sites do, excellent info for the longtail!
I used this technique on quite a lot of sites and as I’m always on the lookout for not only good SERPs but ‘any money that you can squeeze’ I did something more for some of the sites that I don’t know if it’s against google TOS (it probably is) but I didn’t have a problem yet.
I put up a search results page with 5-8 results then I added a link like “find more single women in south dakota >>” linking directly to adsense for search results for single women in south dakota [well this is just an example, if it was really single women that was the case I probably wouldn’t link to adsense search
]
And from what I saw, designing the search results layout fairly different from a ’search engine’ layout helps too.
Sometimes I just throw in a couple of affiliates about the subject sometimes random -not very high quality- search results and it makes me an extra couple of bucks constantly
LOL…ok, I am a single woman in South Dakota!
Too funny!
Sherri meet Menguzar, Menguzar - Sherri.
Matt Cutts talks about this technique and YouTube blocking their search results at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/
Great tip once again..
My MadLib site is taking off very nicely.. I’ll be sure to add another 100k pages this way hehe
LOL your blog is funny cause when ever I read it I am reminded of how your nieve readers are going to try your methods and subsequently fail.
Here is the deal. Generating pages and keywords and lists is easy. Ranking them in Google and Yahoo is h a r d. I can guarantee that any noob reading this who trys to get traffic with a long tail keyword list will fail. There are only a very few base keywords that generate easy traffic. The remianing 99.99 are way too competitive and or have very low volume.
Perhaps you should create an entry on ranking and keyword sellection instead of the usual vague, innefectual advice
There’s a right way and a wrong way to get help from someone. Posting a bunch of hateful comments is probably the wrong way. It’s okay to admit if you have a site that isn’t doing so well. A change of keywords is always difficult. If you are needing a bit of help developing a plan to get to the top of google and yahoo for a set of more competitive keywords I’ll be more than happy to point you in the right direction and maybe establish a plan that will fit within your skill set. If you want help all you got to do is ask.
Send me an email at Eli [at] BlueHatSEO.com and I’ll see what we can do to get you headed in the right direction.
I am very impressed, not only by your fabulous blog, but also by this polite answer to that comment.
Ahh you crack me up ELi,..
Probably way late on this and not adding much like us lurkers do. But I appreciate this blog and read it almost every day. Thanks man!!
I find it interesting that a ‘Nasa engineer’ doesn’t know how to spell naive. Nieve is not even close.
Now that’s what’s funny.
@ NASA engineer
Thanks for trying to discourage people from using the tactic to minimize serp flooding of madlib sites. The truth is, this does work and very well may I add. It appears that you simply don’t know what you’re doing. Calling people noobs when clearly demonstrating that you’re one yourself doesn’t help anyone. I only run 1 site that uses this technique for the body, but I’ve been applying this process for dynamically generated meta titles, descriptions and keyword lists for years. Original content is king, but if you’re lazy this is the way to go.
This keyword fluffing seems like a pretty good idea. How do you come up with this good stuff anyway. I am an SEO for almost 2 years now and I really don’t seem to be thinking anywhere close to you..
NASA engineer my left nut.
The tips and things on this site are way better than most of the stuff you normally get from jumped asses on forums who are merely using the forums to try and get links etc for their own site and for talking absolute rubbish. This site provides some excellent tricks and with detailed support. Since there are many things on here that work for most people, one can only assume you are a Richard Edward and if you don’t like the site then go and post on one of the other forums that is a waste of time.
Great site Eli and some quality posts.
Keep em coming.
I am er was a purely white hat, I now where your Blue hat since it is much more fun.
Dont you get banned by search engines for doing that?
Also to implment this how do I make it technicaly? ¨
Can someone suggets for my site www.pay-per-install.com how to implement this?
first thing right off the bat, your frontpage has 144 links. Azurehat seo is all about staying within the guidelines, or getting to the absolute edge of them, rather
Another way to approach this and get similar results is to put links to the fluffed pages in a site map and link to the site map in your footer. This keeps your pages from looking spammy and allows the fluffed pages to be two clicks away from the homepage. I have found that the hardest thing to do is keep these pages out of the supplemental index once they do get indexed.
I agree Chad. I’ve had some success getting out of the suplements by automating my meta descriptions to be unique. (I don’t think meta help your site rank but they seem to help in some way to determine if a site should be flagged as supplemental).
The Dino: I’d also like to see a php example for doing this. I don’t know how to use the mod-rewrite to do anything at all like this.
so you generate pages that contain search results.
don’t you generate a lot of dublicate content, especially on smaller sites?
how about searches that didn’t get results?
you will get lots of blank pages.
how about using the keys from the google refs?
you can book adwords for a while to get the long tails.
I love the way you write. I want to wear a tshirt that says “my hat is blue” just to get people to ask me what it means. The Internet has generated a whole new dictionary….keyword fluffing, SEO, Google sandbox, long tails.
Man do you sleep, it sounds like your brain is ticking 24/7. But I am enjoying the read
This sounds like an interesting idea. Do you know of a good program to do this for the search in a wordpress blog? Thanks!
@jaxia
http://www.thunderguy.com/semicolon/wordpress/search-meter-wordpress-plugin/
I think let us see all the options we have for SEO and let us make up our own mind if that strategy will work for us or not NASA guy.
Simple yet effective. It might find it’s way into Google’s algos though.
Excellent Post! Thanks! Very Practical and Useful Information. Thanks for taking the time to share it with us!
Does anyone have any example of this in action?
Can you Please recomment a script that I can install which will do exactly what you have mention in 1) Create a search feature on your site in this article. You have great information on this website.
Always made me wonder how they did that, well know I know… Thank you for making this clear, really appreciate it.
Daniel wrote:
“Does anyone have any example of this in action?”
There’s plenty of examples, especially when you search for warez…
Thanks for the write up, I was wondering how all those crack sites did it
Nice write up, thanks
Blog Quacking II: Tag Fluffing
To follow on to my previous post on Blog Quacking, I thought I’d riff on a technique from Bluehat SEO called Keyword Fluffing. In this case, I’ll assume you have your non-blog site quacking along like a blog and it
Your site is amazing! Really - the number of ideas you feed, are insanely great. I’m still having trouble with the mod rewrite function for this search I’ve got going on…
Can I do a dynamic search, save the pages and then replace the dynamic elements with static text for the URL?
I know there’s a better way, but I don’t know where to start. I’m trying to work on a lingerie site, and that market’s pretty tough…
Any pointers?
Thanks!!!
hi,
it’s always interesting reading your blog. i just have a small suggestion: can you make your blog title little more distinct? it is little hard to read it on the header image background.
cheers!
This is fascinating, like just about every other post I’ve read on BlueHatSEO!
I did notice that this post is close to a year old. Do you, or anyone else, know if this tactic still works?
and what content do we put on those “search result pages” so we can add value for the surfers?
i am wondering what content should go on these pages too. should it be database content? if so should it be randomly generated?
I am very impressed.
Nice information mate. Really useful, but I have a couple of questions
1) Is this white or black hat? Because if Google knows what you are doing, could they ban or give you a penalty?
2) This is not a really question, but I have to say that you are sharing interesting information. Thanks for that, but why are you doing that?