Blue Hat SEO-Advanced SEO Tactics

LOL, be truthful. Did you honestly see this post coming? People wanted to know how the tool works, but I think I can do you all one better. I’ll explain in detail how exactly it works and how to build one for yourself so you can have your very own, hell one to sell if you wanted. Would you guess there’s a demand for one? Haha Sure why not? I can’t think of a single good reason why I shouldn’t (I never considered money a good enough reason to not help people). However I would like to ask a small favor of you first. Please go to RobsTool.com and subscribe. Throughout this month we are adding a new section called “The Lab” inside the tool where we are going to be hosting a multitude of crazy and wacky SEO tools that you’ve probably never thought could exist. Even if you don’t have a membership please subscribe anyways so you can get some cool ideas for tools to build yourself. That out of the way, lets begin.

The Premise
SQUIRT works off of a very, very simple premise. Over the span of the months you promote your websites from their infancy to well aged mongers, you make dozens of small decisions daily. All the tool does is mimic as many of those decisions as possible and boil them down to a small yes or no; true or false; boolean expression. This is just very basic AI (Artificial Intelligence) and decision making based on some data. There really is nothing complex about it. Think about the first time you promoted a website in the search engines. You looked at what you considered some factors in ranking. You saw what your competitors had that you didn’t. What was your first initial reaction? You likely thought, “how can I get what they have?” A script can’t do this of course. This is a human reaction that can’t be duplicated by a machine. However, now think about the second, fifth, tenth website you’ve promoted. Once again you looked at what your competitors had that you didn’t. From there you may have noticed your mindset changed from “how can I get it” to something like, “how did I get it before?” This a machine can do! Experience just made the difference between a decision that needs to be made and a predefined decision that sets an orchestrated path. I know this all seems overwhelming, but I assure you its all really, really simple. The trick is, just build a tool that would do whatever you would do, based on the current situation. The situation of course can be defined by what we all know and study everyday of our professional SEM lives, Search Engine Factors. So the best place to begin is there.

A List Of Factors
Since the tool will make its decisions based on stuff you consider to be factors search engines use to rank your sites, making a list of all the known factors is a big help. Sit and write down every search engine factor you can think of. Break them down to specifics. Don’t just write “links.” Write Link Volume, Link quality, links on unique domains, percentage of links with my anchor text..etc. The SQUIRT utility I released looks at 60 separate factors. So at least you have a general goal to shoot for. Come up with as many factors as possible. Once you got a good clean list of factors start figuring out a proper way to measure each of them.

Factor Measurement
How many times today did you go to a search engine and type in link:www.domain.com? That is a measure of a factor. How about site:www.domain.com? Thats another. Each of those are a factor that when explored by either going to your own site, or going to the search engines can result in some sort of figure or number you can use to calculate how your site fairs in comparison to the sites currently ranking. Let’s use an example. You go to google and you search for your keywords that you are wanting to rank for. You make a list of all the sites in the top 10 and separately do a link: command for each of their domains. You then take all those figures and average them out. That gives you a rough idea of how much “link volume” you will need to get into the top 10. You then do a link: command on your own site to see how close your site is to that figure. From there you can make a decision. Do I need to work on increasing my link volume factor or not? You just made a boolean decision based on a single factor using data available to you. It probably took you a good 5 minutes or more to make that decision. Where as a script could of made that decision for you in less than a second. Now I know you’re all just as much of a computer nerd as I am, so I don’t have to preach to you about the differences in efficiency between yourself and a machine, but at least think about the time you would compound making these very simple decisions for each and every factor on your list for each site you own. There goes a good five hours of your work day just making the predictable yes or no decisions on what needs to be done. This sounds ridiculous of course, but I’d be willing to bet that at least 90% of the people reading this post right now spend most of their time doing just that. Ever wonder why most search marketers just trudge along and can’t seem to get anywhere? Now you know.

Making The Decisions
Okay so let’s take an example of a factor and have our script make a decision based on it. We’ll look at the anchor text saturation factor. We look at our inbound links and find all the ones that contain our anchor text versus the ones that don’t and only contain some similar words somewhere else on the page(most other documents). We then make a percentage. So we’ll say after looking at it 30% of our inbound links contain our exact anchor text. We then look at our competition. They seem to average 40%. Therefore our script needs to follow a promotional plan that increases our percentage of links that contain our exact anchor text. Very good, we’ll move along. Next we’ll look at inbound links that don’t contain our anchor text but contain our keywords somewhere in the document. Looking at our site we seem to average about 70%. Our competition seems to average about 60%. So we are doing much better than our competition. Therefore our script doesn’t need to increase our links that doesn’t contain our exact anchor text but do have relevant text. Wait, did I just contradict myself? These two factors are complimentary. So the more our tool increases one factor the further the other one drops. Wouldn’t this throw our promotion through some sort of infinite loop? Yes I did contradict myself and Yes it would put our promotion through an infinite loop. This is called on going promotion. The fact is THEY rank YOU don’t. Therefore you have to keep improving the factors you lack until you do rank; even if they seem to almost contradict each other. By the end of the analysis your script ends up with a long list of DO’s and a long list of DON’T NEED AT THIS TIME. So now all you have to do is use your own experience and your own site network to make all the DOs happen to the best of it’s abilities.

Establishing A Promotional Plan
So now that we have a list of all the stuff we need to improve with our site we can program our SQUIRT script to just simply do whatever it is we would do to compensate for our site’s shortfalls. To give you a better idea of how to do this and how SQUIRT handles these exact situations, I’ll take 3 example factors and let you know exactly what it does when you hit that submit button. However keep in mind, no matter how much information you gather on each site, every promotional situation is unique and requires a certain amount of human touch. The only thing you can do is define what you would do in the situation if you had no prior knowledge of the site or any extenuating circumstances. Also keep in mind that you have to remain completely hands off. You don’t have ftp access to their site, you can’t mess with their design. So anything you do has to be completely offsite SEO. Also, anything you do can’t hurt the site in anyway. Every plan needs to be 100% focused on building, and any method of promotion that may possibly cause problems for them, even if you plan on only running throw away black hat sites through the tool, needs to be 100% positive. So if you want to go get links. You need to do it within your own network of sites. You can’t go out sending spam comments or anything.

Page Rank
Your Site: PR 2
AVG Competitor: PR 3
Decision: Increase Page Rank
The Plan: Create a network of very large sites. Since pagerank can be gathered internally just as easily as from external sources. Than you need to build a network of sites with lots and lots of indexed pages. Take a look at the current volume of sites you plan on running through your SQUIRT tool and decide how big you need to build your network before hand. When we decided to make SQUIRT public, even though not all the sites would require a Page Rank increase we knew a TON would. We launched the tool with the capability of handling 500 members. So we knew that 500 members, submitting 10 sites/day with each link needing to hold on a single page for at least a week, could result in needing 150,000 links available to us each week. If each link was on a page with a PR 1 than each page would send a tiny page rank increase to the target link. Likewise if each indexed page had a PR1 and we put five links up on each page, than each page would give out even more page rank through the links. There is a point of saturation of course. We decided 10 was good for each page. So we could get the maximum amount of pagerank sucked out of each indexed page while maintaining the highest possible volume of links we could spare. So if we built a network of sites that contained a total of about 1,000,000 pages indexed(you heard me), each averaging a PR1. Than we could transfer enough page rank to 150,000 links/week to constitute a possible bump in page rank to each link. For your own personal SQUIRT of course you don’t need nearly that volume. However make sure to preplan ahead because even if you make a 1 million page site, it doesn’t mean you will get 1 million pages in the index. So may have to build quite a few very large sites to reach your goals. This of course takes time and lots of resources.

Anchor Text
Your Site: 30%
AVG Competitor: 40%
Decision: We need to increase the number of links that contain our exact anchor text.
The Plan: Now since the tool can’t directly affect the site than we can’t exactly go to every inbound link the site has gotten and figure out a way to get them to change the anchor text. There are just too many ways to gain links and its completely unreasonable to attempt. So the only way to increase the anchor text match percentage is to increase the total number of links to the site and then have them all match the anchor text. This is where you need to queue up the blogs. All you have to do is create a bunch of blogs all over, and take steps to increase the chances of each individual post getting indexed. Than you can fill the blogs with the anchor text of the site. This however is no easy task when dealing with a large volume. Since you need plenty of authority you will need to get accounts on all the major blog networks. Remember, the average blog usually has less than 5 posts/day so you will need to compensate in sheer volume of actual accounts. These will also need to be maintained and anytime one gets banned another needs to be automatically created to take it’s place. Those of you using the tool have probably already noticed links from these places showing up in your logs and Technorati links. Since we knew so many links/day would be required we had to create an absolutely HUGE network of blogs on various places as well as the automated system to create new ones if another gets buried. Once these links have been dispersed over time, the anchor text percentage will start to rise.

Deep Indexing
Your site: 3 pages in the index.
Crawl Stats: 10+ subpages identified
Decision: Need to get more bots to the subpages of the submitted site.
The Plan: So the script grabs the main page of the site and immediately sees more subpages available than are currently indexed in the search engines. This lets us know that the submitted site is having a hard time being properly deep indexed. So this is when we queue the Roll Over Sites to help get some SE bots to these subpages. There is one problem however. When dealing with my own sites it’s fine to scrape the content then redirect as detailed in the strategy that I talked about in the Power Indexing post. However since this tool will be a public one I can’t scrape peoples content because there is the odd chance that my rollover site may temporarily outrank their actual site and it could draw some anger from people who don’t know what it is. Remember the rule. The tool can’t harm the site in any way. So we had to go another route. Instead we pulled from a huge list of articles and just used that as the content then pushed the spiders to those pages then when they got indexed, redirected them to the site. These of course don’t show up as links so it’s all backend, however it does a fantastic job of getting subpages indexed. Since Rollover Sites use actual content than there is no problem making them absolutely huge. Therefore you don’t need a very large network of them to push a very large amount of bots. Yet at the same time you still have to follow the rule of no interference with their site. So if their site is having a hard time getting deep indexed and you can’t exactly ftp a sitemap over than you have to bring in a large network of Third Party Rolling Sitemaps. So what you do is, you create a network of sites that are essentially nothing more than generic sitemaps. You drive a lot of bot traffic to them on a regular basis and have them roll through pages that go through the tool. Once the tool has identified up to 10 subpages of the target site than it can add them to the network of third party sitemaps. The new pages go in, old pages go out(The technical term for this is a FIFO algorithm). If you have a solid enough network of third party sitemaps you can hopefully push enough search engine crawlers through them to get every page crawled before it gets pushed out. This of course is a huge problem when dealing with a large volume of sites. If we originally wanted enough power for 500 members than we knew that 500 members submitting 10 sites/day which each contained up to 10 subpages would mean we would need enough third party sitemaps to accommodate 50,000 pages/day. While the efficiency of a single third party sitemap site may be big, a massive network would be needed to push that kind of volume. It’s just beyond unreasonable. So instead, we incorporated a gapping system. So anytime there wasn’t a new page coming in and it had a chance to display a set of links to a SE bot for the second time than it would grab some older entries that were already rolled through and display them as well. So if you push enough crawl traffic through than eventually every page will theoretically get crawled.

Rinse and Repeat
So thats all there is to it. It’s really quite simple. As you build your SQUIRT work your way through every factor you wrote down and think about what you would do as a hands off Internet Marketer to compensate if a site didn’t meet the requirements for that particular factor. This also applies to flaws in onsite SEO. Let’s say for instance the page doesn’t have the keywords in the title tag. You can’t touch that title tag, so whats the offsite SEO equivalent to not having the keywords in the title tag? Putting them in the anchor text of course. Just keep relentlessly plugging away and build an established plan for each factor on your list. With each failure to meet a factor there is potentially a problem. With each problem there is a potential solution your script and personal site network can take care of for you. It just may require a bit of thinking and a whole lot of building. It’s tough, trust me I know but it’s worth it because in the end you end up with a tool that comes close to automatically solving most of the daily problems that plague you. Here’s the exciting part. Once you start building and going through all the factors you’ll find some you probably can’t solve. Just remember, every problem has a solution. So you may just learn a few tricks and secrets of your own along the way. Shhh don’t share them.

Is SQUIRT Biased?
ABSOLUTELY! Think about what it uses to determine the site’s standing on it’s strengths and weaknesses. If you do a link: command there is a delay in time between what the search engine shows and what actually exists that may range up to days and weeks. This causes major problems. The tool may think you need a bunch of links when it in fact you already got plenty and they just haven’t shown up yet. It may think you have a ton of links when those links were actually only temporary or you lost them before they had a chance to disappear. Essentially the tool operates off of your site’s potential SEO worth. So lets say you have an old site that you haven’t really done anything with, then you run it through your SQUIRT. The tool will stand a much better chance of making an accurate analysis, and likewise any boosts you receive in the factors will more than likely be the right ones. Therefore it will appear as if your site just skyrocketed up simply because of one little submit through the tool. When in fact the site had that sort of potential energy the whole time and it just needed a little shove to get moving. The same could be said about an established site experiencing extremely slow growth. It fairs well, maybe even in the 60%+ range, so it appears to not need very much. Then at the same time, everything the tool does do, matters very little in the large scheme of your escalated promotional campaign. Also, the tool can only focus on one site during one phase in it’s promotion at a time. So if you got a brand new site that you submit, than the tool will naturally focus more heavily on getting the site properly indexed and less on helping it gain rank through the SERPS. So if indexing methodologies don’t completely work in that particular case than it appears as if your tool didn’t do anything at all. Remember, this is only a tool, its all artificial decision making. There is no substitution for the human touch. No matter how complex or how efficient a tool you build is, there is no way it can compete without an actual human element helping to push it. All your competitors are humans. So there’s no logical reason why you can expect to ever build a tool that is the end all solution to beating them everytime. So even though you now have a really cool tool, still remember to be hardworking, smart, and efficient…never lazy.

Sorry about the long as hell post, but you guys wanted to know what the tool was doing when you clicked the button. Now you do, and hey…least I didn’t go through ALL 60 factors.

Get Building

Thanks guys/gals sooooo much. This launch went crazy good. In fact it was downright record setting.

We almost double sold out in 2mins 21 seconds. We managed to stop the registrations at about 250 members(The tool can easily handle more than that). The server looks great, even though it underwent what can easily be considered a digg effect X5. Thanks to everyone who sent in reports of anything not working. We fixed them all and a few minor changes will be made to make sure everything is in perfect working order.

Couple things:
The domain errors was a result of not being able to find the whois information for a domain. This was fixed but some bugs may possibly remain with .co.uk and .c* domains until further notice.

Most of the accounts have been activated and been made to full member status. If your account isn’t activated by tomorrow please send an email to rob [at] robstool.com with your account email and paypal email information.

If you accidentally double paid through paypal, just email rob [at] robstool.com and let us know your account email and paypal email and we’ll make sure your account gets activated and properly credited.

The analysis tool is 100% free and uses no credits. So go ahead and use it at will, if you don’t have a subscription just create a guest account and you will still be able to use it.

The bunny in the logo is my real life bunny named Roady. He’s a 4lb fully grown 5 month old dwarf rabbit. He is potty trained, loves people, and makes the best mascot ever.

If You Missed The Registration
Send a blank email to waiting [at] robstool.com. This will automatically add you to the waiting list. Then as slots open up we will systematically move through the list on a first come first serve basis and give out invites to those next in line.

I’m always open to constructive criticisms. If you have any suggestions or feature requests definitely let me know. Any ideas to make this subscription gain value month to month is more than welcome.

Also, many people want a private forum here. This is being moled over however most of you already know that I am adamantly against people paying for SEO information. However, this place has a huge amount of very very smart readers, and I think a place where the readers here
can network with each other and share ideas privately would be great. So in the next couple days I will be opening a chatroom up. It’d also be really nice to meet some of you and get to talk to you outside of email.

Thanks so much and enjoy,
Eli

PS. Sorry for the long string of announcements. Lets get back to some SEO shall we?

Upcoming Changes

Alright let’s get this over with

SQUIRT Is Now Open
squirt.robstool.com

Please be sure to register using the same email address as is on your Paypal Account.

Once you have registered and subscribed your account will be activated shortly and you will be notified by Email. If your account isn’t activated by the end of the day please send an email to Eli at BlueHatSEO.com with your Paypal email address and Email address on your account.

Good Luck

This is kind of exciting

The tool will be released in 22 hours. I will post up the url to it here at exactly 9am PST(United States) Monday Morning.

Time Zones
9am US-Canada/PACIFIC
10am US-Canada/MOUNTAIN
11am US-Canada/CENTRAL
12pm US-Canada/EASTERN
6am US/Hawaii
6pm EUR/Germany
5pm EUR/London

Oh and I got a little surprise for you guys
After you register and login, check out the Vault inside your account. I posted up a badass commercial trackback spammer I made almost a year ago and chickened out of making it public (you’ll find out why once you try it).
But, screw it, you can have it for free. I’m too excited about this launch to even care.

Tomorrow is the day we show the industry what real tools are

PS. Fair warning. The subscriptions will require a Paypal account. So if you don’t already have one with a credit card attached, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to set that up in advanced.

PPS. The Vault currently has 36 databases and the one script. I think this will more than suffice for grand opening. However I plan on putting some hardcore work into this week and absolutely flood it with content.

I got a few quick announcements to get out of the way if you don’t mind.

You’ve probably noticed that even though this blog is over a year and a half old I haven’t done any montenization on it. I’m not personally against the idea of it (I am an Internet marketer after all) but I’ve been holding out for a really good idea of how exactly to do it. I don’t want to just throw up some banners or become super lame by getting people to signup through my Algco account (kidding! I don’t do MLM schemes). I also would NEVER dream of putting the information here on a paid model. I want to monotenize it in a way that directly makes people money and helps them become more successful. That’s obviously easier pitched than done. But I think I came up with a good solution of how to do it.

Since the release of the Quick Indexing Tool I’ve gotten a lot of requests from people to buy access to my own personal tools. I’m really happy with the way QUIT turned out. It’s been thoroughly put through the ringer by over 50 bloggers and popular forums as well as thousands of readers here and has more than proven itself. It has finally been PROVEN to the industry that not only is it possible to get indexed in less than 24 hours but it can be done as easily as filling out a very short four part form and clicking a button. The concept actually goes one step further than that. Rankings can be just as easily acquired and admittedly for my own ego’s sake I want to prove to the industry that not only is it possible but anyone can do it.

So Here’s What’s Going To Happen
Sometime within a week I will be releasing a subscription based access to a version of my own personal toolset. The subscription will cost $100/month (canceling will be allowed anytime and none of your personalized data on your account will be deleted).

Here’s what the subscribers will get
1. SQUIRT- Super Quick Indexing and Ranking Tool.
  A. Does everything QUIT does but even more efficiently, also includes a ton of extra social bookmarking sites. Including the virgin ones that no tools as of yet has the skills to automate submissions to.

  B. Gets your site deep indexed faster. So not only will your main page go in faster but the rest of your site will get indexed faster and more efficiently.

  C. Utilizes many of the techniques talked about here automatically. This includes Rollover sites, third party sitemaps, keyword real estate and several others that I haven’t even talked about yet. NONE of which can possibly get you banned or penalized. You are perfectly safe using this tool.

  D. Deep analysis of your site. The tool looks at every possible ranking factor you can think of; including both onsite and offsite. It then rates your site on a percentage scale. 100% of course being the perfect site with perfect existing promotion(none exist that i’ve managed to find yet) and 1% being essentially brand new site with no promotion and horrible onsite factors. The analysis tool is an exact clone of the same one I use. It is all 100% custom and I use it everyday to analyze my sites as well as my competitions. As far as SEO analysis tools go it’s about as accurate as it gets.

  E. Custom promotion. After analyzing your site and current levels of promotion the tool determines your weaknesses and strong points and automatically determines the perfect promotional campaign you will need to reach the top 10. There are literally thousands of different combinations the tool can go from there to determine the absolute perfect path to success for any given site. Can you guess what it does with this information?

  F. It promotes your site. It uses it’s analysis to determine what techniques are needed to get you ranking in the top 10 and it automatically does them. The whole process from the time you fill out the two part form (URL and up to 3 keywords/phrases you are wanting to rank for) takes less than 3 minutes to run. So in other words you can build a site and have it promoted perfectly and precisely within a couple minutes. Sorry skeptics, there’s no B.S. here

2. X amount of submissions/day will be allowed
  A. You will be allowed so many submissions a day through the tool. We haven’t quite worked out what the numbers will be yet, but they will be more than ample for the high producing webmaster, and at the same time low enough so the tool doesn’t get overly saturated.

  B. I’m only going to allow 100 members. With the obvious power behind the tool I can’t let every Joe Schmoe play around with it. As neat as this tool is, it is definitely no toy and the use of it needs to be taken seriously. Which is why I’m giving you guys the first heads up. I know once I release it several large forums and blogs will catch wind, and while thats all fair I am personally biased with the Blue Hat readers. So I’m letting everyone here know in advanced. So if you’re interested in joining, be on the look out and if this site isn’t already in your reader or live bookmarks be sure to add it, because idealy I want you guys to have the first crack at it. Than if there are any extra slots others are welcome to it. This tool is for you after all not them.

3. Access to my personal content club
  A. I’m going to be throwing up a HUGE collection of custom databases and scripts for you to download and use at will. They will all be free with the subscription. After all, what good is a tool that helps you mass promote a ton of sites quickly if you can’t easily produce sites just as quickly and easily. So I really want to help people build their networks and become more powerful in their markets. I think a private content club will be the perfect way to do that.

  B. I also am cutting a deal with a good friend of mine (and avid reader here) to continually produce databases. He is incredibly talented at collecting high quality data and he sells his databases for big bucks. However since he’s a reader and commenter here he’s been cool enough to join in and help everyone out. So we’ll see what kind of deal we can cut so he can get paid for his work while at the same time getting to help you guys out with more quality data than you can handle.

4. Discounts on Blue Hat Tools.
  A. A lot of posts here require custom coding. I’ve always encouraged programmers to join in and code my techniques for the readers here and sell them through the comments. I think thats a great way to not only reward the people who create the scripts and share them but to help the nontechnical people get their hands on the tools and scripts they wouldn’t be able to any other way. However there have been several large unforeseen problems this has caused. I have no idea who is trying to rip off my readers and who is legit. grrr. So this way I’m going to team up with my own personal highly talented programmers and giving them heads up on all my upcoming posts that require custom scripts made. So when the techniques get posted here, you can log into your account and buy the script for a hugely discounted price.

What To Expect As Far As Ranking Capabilities
The tool is designed to rank a site within the top 10 for most medium and small sized niches. All the promotion in the world of course can’t rank a poorly designed site so that part is of course left up to you. However with adequate onsite SEO the tool by itself should be able to perform quite well within most medium sized niches alone. I also encourage everyone to test that for themselves.

So there you go. If you’re interested, keep your head up. It’ll be coming within about a week or less. I’ll post it here first and it’ll be hosted on a another server of mine as well as the blog of my business partner(an awesome programmer). I’ll be honest, I’m kind of scared of selling out and I’m even more scared of hyping something and having it not turn out to be as great as people were hoping. So please feel free to help me out with this. I really want to hear your opinions and ideas of what you would like to see to make this tool/club be of even more value to you. I want the $100/month to be pennies compared to what people actually get, so anything you can think of to make it even more badass let me know.

Thanks,
Eli

Gray Hat SEO. Gray Hat SEO. Gray Hat SEO. I’m not keyword stuffing, I’m thinking. If gray hat is so widely accepted as a popular tactic than why are there no good articles on what it is and how to do it? Maybe, and this is just one theory, its fuckin’ impossible to write about. It’s just too damn much of a gray area in the industry (pun intended). Well, we’ll see about that.

So what exactly is Gray Hat SEO? Most define it as a site that uses questionable tactics? I think thats an excellent analysis, because the number one rule to gray hat is to be questionable. In fact the more you can get a trained eye to scratch their head wondering if your site is black hat or white the better. If you can fool the average visitor than you more than likely will fool a SE bot. In my opinion the best way to do this is to have an innate eye for structure.

In designing a structure for your gray hat site the best way to go about it is to steal a structure from a site that couldn’t possibly be banned. Let’s take Digg.com for example. Digg is setup in various primary categories where each contains news related stories. Each news story consists of a title with the link to the original article and a small, 255 character or so description. Each news story is accompanied by some user contributed content. Upon a indifferent perspective this is a very questionable structure. The content itself is very short and aren’t organized like a standardized article would be, the user contributed content is always very short and dispersed. Not to mention there is an enlarged lack of control over length of and quality of the user contributed “comments.” However the structure gives us some possibilities. We know that since Digg, Reddit and other social sites of the likeness are authoritative and standardized in the industry than naturally the search engine antispam algorithms couldn’t possibly automatically consider it of bad taste or a possibility of being considered a black hat site. This gives us a huge opportunity for a possible gray hat site.

Okay so the next step would logically be to figure out our content sources. Sticking with the Digg.com example we know that they get their content sources from large and small news related stories, mostly technology but that can excused for whatever niche we decide to target. This is a great place to start because Google has already been quoted as saying news related stories can’t be counted as duplicate content because they are so widely syndicated. It only makes sense. So getting news stories are easy. In fact it can be done by scraping lots of popular news RSS feeds. If we’re attempting to duplicate the Digg structure than we don’t need the entire articles despite what we’ve come to believe about SEO. We only need the partial story along with a title and then pad it with some user contributed content.

Where are we going to get some user contributed content? In this particular example I can’t think of a better place than the place we’re ripping off the structure from. We might as well pad each article with scraped user comments from Digg itself. So we can take the titles of each news piece and remove all the common words such as: “why”,”but”,”I”,”a”,”about”,”an”,”are”,”as”,”at”,”be”,”by”,”com”,”de”,”en”,”for”,”from”,”how”,”in”,”is”,”it”,”la”,”of”,”on”,”or”,”that”,”the”,”this”,”to”,”was”,”what”,”when”,”where”,”who”,”will”,”with”,”the”,”www”,”and”,”or”,”if”,”but” and any various others we find that aren’t commonly associated with the article subject. Then we can do a search on Digg and scrape several comments from the results, change up the usernames and make it all look unique. Hell if we wanted we could even markov some user submitted content in the middle of the scraped user content. Naturally not every user contributed content will match the topic exactly but who’s to say it’s not real? Once again as long as you remain “questionable” who can possibly deny you rankings? “Wow great article.”, “I pee’d in your pool.” <- users always submit this kind of shit, search engines are used to it and are more than well adapted to handle it. I realize this goes against the long preached world of “poison words” and such, but with the evolving net of social networking it directly conflicts with the true nature of the web and thus must be compensated for. Remember, its not what content you have, it’s how you use it. If it helps think about it like this. If you took all the comments on Youtube(which is the majority of their actual text based content) and truncated it all together in paragraph markers, how fast would you get banned? In no time, right. However when clones of places like Youtube organize it under headings of Comments and heavily break it up, somehow it all becomes legit. Take a moment to think about that.

More on this in a later post…

So now that we got our two elements of a successful gray hat site we can cook ‘em up together. We can even create a little mock voting and submission system. It doesn’t even have to work properly just as long as upon inspection it all looks legit. It’s all 100% autogenerated of course but as long as it’s laid out cleanly and correctly there’s no reason why we can’t generate hundreds of thousands of pages of stolen content while keeping visitors and the SE’s none the wiser. There’s no doubt we can do this exact technique for just about any authority site on the web. Let’s jump back to our Youtube example for a moment. Youtube isn’t the first nor the last video site on the web. As far as actual text based content goes it obviously takes a large piece of the brown cake. So how does it get away with it, and all it’s pages rank and do well while your clean and lengthy white hat articles struggle? Some would argue links are the answer. Well not all video content sites have tons of links but they can still survive and don’t get immediately banned for spammy content, but we’ll humor the notion anyway. So let’s get some links.

Gray hat sites frequently have an advantage over black hat sites in link building because since they can pass human check their links, more often than not, will tend to stick more. So of course the first place I would go is to attempt trackback pings on all these stories. If my link ends up on a few authoritative news sites, great, on a few blogs, just as well. Since it’s all legit and not only can we pass human check with our essentially black hat site as well as actually linking to them then there’s no good reason the links won’t have a high success rate. Which leads me to a bit of custom comment spam. Might as well find blog posts talking about related stuff to each story and leave something like, “I saw an interesting story related to this on www.blahblah.com/story123.” Sure why not, between just those two simple and common black hat techniques we somehow ended up with plenty of white hat links. Thats the beauty of gray hat. If you can at least get people to question whether or not your site is legit than you stand a very good chance of succeeding.

So essentially what we’re trying to do is play around within the margins between the pros of black hat and white hat till we can find a happy medium that is both acceptable to other webmasters and the search engine antispam algorithms, but how would an advanced Blue Hatter spin all this? Very good question. I personally would take a look at my potential competition. Since I’m taking these articles from other sources, they are the originals I am the linking to copy, naturally they will beat me out in all the SERPS. I can still drive traffic off their coattails perhaps by utilizing a few techniques to improve my CTR in the organics. However I’m still not ever going to reach my full traffic potential with the current gray hat setup. This is mostly due to my article titles being the exact same. I might have better luck if I can change up the titles and monetize on the surfers who search for slightly different variations to the topic. Let’s say for instance that one of the titles is, “Hilton’s Chiwawa Caught Snorting Coke In Background of Sex Video.” Alright so when I import my titles I can do a simple replacement algorithm to swap any instances of “Hilton” without the Paris for “Paris Hilton.” Or “Congressman Paul” for “Congressman Ron Paul.” If I wanted to capitalize on these possible search variations on a mass scale I could easily incorporate a thesaurus and swap out nouns for instance. Rock becomes Stone…etc. etc. IMDB also has a huge database of celebrity names I could possibly use for the example above. It’s all pretty endless and can get quite in depth, but I know if I do it right it’ll pay off big time. I may even get lucky and hit pay dirt with a big story coming out where everyone searches for something similar but not quite the same as the original headlines.

And that is how you be a gray hat

For shits and giggles I want to throw one more possible site structure available out there and get your opinions on it….How about Del.icio.us?

Alrighty I’m moving this post up a bit to answer a few questions. In my Real Life SEO Example post I talked a bit about the technique of Log Link Matching. It’s an awesome technique that deserves a bit of attention. So here we go.

Description
The reality of the search engines are that they only have a certain percentage of the documents on the web indexed. This is apparent by looking at your own saturation levels with your own sites. Often you’re very lucky if you get 80% of a large site indexed. Unfortunately this means that tons upon tons of the natural links out there aren’t counting and giving proper credit to you and their respective targets. This is a two edged sword. This means your competitors actually have quite a bit more links than it appears, and more than likely so do you. Naturally you can guess what has to be done.

Objective
Saturation usually refers to how many pages you have in the index in comparison to the total number of actual pages on your site. For instance if you have a 100 page site and 44 pages are indexed than you have 44% saturation. Since this is a topic that never really gets talked about, for the sake of making it easy on ourselves I’m going to refer to our goal as “link saturation.” In other words the number of links you have showing in the index in comparison to your total actual inbound links. So if you have 100 links in the index but you really have 200 actual links that are identifiable than you have 50% link saturation. That aside, our object is to use methods of early detection to quickly identify inbound links to our sites, get them indexed, and if possible give them a bit of link power so the link to our site will count for more. This will have an ultimate ending result of huge efficiency in our link building campaign. It also will more than likely stir up a large percentage of long dormant links on our older sites that are yet to use the Log Link Matching technique. First let’s focus on links we’ve already missed by taking a look at our log files.

Methodology #1 - The Log Files
Our site’s common log files are a great indicator of a new and old inbound links that the search engines may have missed. Most log files are usually located below the root of of the public html folder. If you’re on a standard CPanel setup the path to the log file can be easily found by downloading and viewing your Awstats config file, which is usually located in /tmp/awstats/awstats.domain.com.conf. Around line 35 it’ll tell you the path of the log file: LogFile=”/usr/local/apache/domlogs/domain.com”. Typically your site as a Linux user has access to this file and can read it through a script. If not than contact your hosting provider and ask for read access to the log.

1) Open up the log file in a text editor and identify where all the referrers are then parse them out so you have a nice list of all the sites that link to you. If you use Textpad you can click Tools - Sort - Delete Duplicate Lines - OK. That will clean up the huge list and organize it into a manageable size.

2) Once you have your list of links there’s several routes you can take to get them indexed. These include but not limited to creating a third party rolling site map, roll over sites, or even distributing the links through blogrolls within your network. Those of course are the more complicated ways of doing it and also the most work intensive, but they’re by far the most effective simply because they involve using direct static links. The simplest of course would be to simply ping Blog Aggregators like the ones listed on Pingomatic or Pingoat. My recommendation is, if you are only getting a couple dozen links/day or are getting a huge volume of links (200+/day) than use the static link methods because they are more efficient and can be monitored more closely. If you’re somewhere in between than there’s no reason you can’t just keep it simple and continuously ping Blog Aggregators and hope a high percentage eventually will get indexed. After so many pings they will all eventually get in anyways. It may just take awhile and is harder to monitor (one of the biggest hatreds in my life..hehe).

There are several Windows applications that can help you mass ping this list of referral URLS. Since I use custom scripts instead of a single Windows app myself I have no strong recommendations for one, but feel free to browse around and find one you like. Another suggestion I have to help clean up your list a bit is to clean the list of any common referrers such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo referrals. That’ll at least save you a ton of wasted CPU time. Once you’ve gotten this taken care of you’ll want to start considering an automated way of doing this for any new links as they come in. I got a few suggestions for this as well.

Methodology #2 - Direct Referrals
Of course you can continue to do the method above to monitor for new referrals as long as you keep the list clean of duplicates. However it doesn’t hurt to consider accomplishing the task upon arrival. I talked a little bit about this last year with my Blog Ping Hack post, and the same principle applies except instead of pinging the current page we’ll ping the referral if it exists.

1) First check to see if a referral exists when the user display the page. If it does exist than have it open up the form submit for a place such as Pingomatic to automatically ping all the services using the users browser. Here’s a few examples of how to do it in various languages.

CGI CODE
if(($ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'} ne "") || ($ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'} =~ m/http:\/\/(www\.)?$mydomain\//)) {
print qq~<iframe src="http://pingomatic.com/ping/?title=$title&blogurl=$ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'}&rssurl=$ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'}&chk_weblogscom=on&chk_blogs=on&chk_technorati=on&chk_feedburner=on&chk_syndic8=on&chk_newsgator=on&chk_feedster=on&chk_myyahoo=on&chk_pubsubcom=on&chk_blogdigger=on&chk_blogrolling=on&chk_blogstreet=on&chk_moreover=on&chk_weblogalot=on&chk_icerocket=on&chk_audioweblogs=on&chk_rubhub=on&chk_geourl=on&chk_a2b=on&chk_blogshares=on" border="0" width="1" height="1"></iframe>~;
}

PHP CODE
if($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] != "" || preg_match("/http:\/\/(www\.)?$mydomain\///i",$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] > 0) {
echo "<iframe src="http://pingomatic.com/ping/?title=$title&blogurl=$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']&rssurl=$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']&chk_weblogscom=on&chk_blogs=on&chk_technorati=on&chk_feedburner=on&chk_syndic8=on&chk_newsgator=on&chk_feedster=on&chk_myyahoo=on&chk_pubsubcom=on&chk_blogdigger=on&chk_blogrolling=on&chk_blogstreet=on&chk_moreover=on&chk_weblogalot=on&chk_icerocket=on&chk_audioweblogs=on&chk_rubhub=on&chk_geourl=on&chk_a2b=on&chk_blogshares=on" border="0" width="1" height="1"></iframe>";
}

JAVASCRIPT CODE
I really don’t know. Can someone fill this in for me? It’s entirely possible I just don’t know Javascript regex well enough.

This will check to see if the referrer exists. If it does and its not a referrer from within your domain than it’ll display an invisible IFRAME that automatically submits the referrer to PingOMatic. If you wanted to get a bit advanced with it you could also check for Google, MSN, and Yahoo referrers or any other unclean referrers you may get on a regular basis.

If you have an older site and you use this technique you’ll probably be shocked as hell about how many actual links you already had. Like I mentioned in the other post, at first you’ll start seeing your links tripling and even quadrupling but as also mentioned its just an illusion. You’ve had those links all along they just didn’t count since they weren’t indexed in the engines. After that starts to plateau, as long as you keep it up you’ll notice considerable difference in the efficiency and accuracy of your link saturation campaigns. I really believe this technique should be done on almost every site you use to target search traffic. Link Saturation is just too damn fundamental to be ignored. Yet, at the same time, its very good for those of us who are aware that it is not a common practice. Just the difference between your link saturation percentage and your competitors could be the difference between who outranks who.

Any other ideas for methods of early detection you can use to identify new inbound links? Technorati perhaps? How about ideas for ways to not only get the inbound links indexed but boost their creditability in an automated and efficient way? I didn’t mention this but when you’re pinging or rolling the pages through your indexing sites it doesn’t hurt to use YOUR anchor text, it won’t help much but it never hurts to help push the relevancy factor of your own site to their pages while you’re at it.

Every so often I get an Email from someone who instead of having a question or comment they give me a url and ask me to give them SEO advice on it. I normally don’t respond to these emails other than maybe a quick “did you have a specific question” type response. It’s not because I don’t want to or I take any offense to it, in fact its the complete opposite. Sorry to say I just don’t have the time to do full blown SEO analysis jobs for people. It’s not that I don’t want to, trust me I do, its just that I’m not one of those SEO bloggers whose career is blogging about SEO. I’m in the thick of it just like you guys are; day in and day out. I’m out there doing the techniques I talk about on this site everyday. Thats my job, and there’s no shortage of it. However, every once in awhile I’ll hit a gem. One of those unique situations that I can’t help but mole it around in my mind. One such example came to me last week by a reader here who was referred to by Jon Waraas(excellent blog; check out), and I think it could apply to a lot of other people in the same situation. He was kind and patient enough to allow me to publicize my response in an effort to help out others. So out of the usual context I’m going to take this example and show you all exactly what I would do in his situation.

The Situation
His site is going for the term “Myspace Layouts.” He already used to rank #1 for a solid amount of time. However after some time he admittedly got lazy and lost his ranking. He now still ranks in the top 10 steadily, but not quite top 5. He wants to rank number one again and was wondering if implementing my Keyword Fluffing and SERP Domination strategies would help.

I consider “Myspace Layouts” as a highly competitive term so this will be a great example. It’s also has the added difficulty factor of being an extremely fast growing niche; especially in just the last year. However, our mission isn’t just to take the number one rank, but to keep it intimidating for the others thinking about trying to take it themselves. So first we’ll look at what we got and then we’ll analyze what we’re up against and see if we can spot any weaknesses we can use to our advantage.

What We Got
Without even having to look at his site I can assume his on-site optimization is near perfect. He used to rank #1 steadily and where he’s at now he’s holding firm. Obviously, if he ranked at one point there’s no reason why he can’t rank again. So my first suggestion would be to not do a damn thing to the site itself. In my SERP Domination post I talked about how to break into the top 10 on a highly competitive niche by splitting up the site into a network of smaller content sites. In this situation he’s already in and has everything he needs to rank in the top position, so I would definitely advice against breaking up the site or making any drastic on-site SEO changes. Instead we’ll focus on off-site optimization and getting what links we need to earn that coveted spot again. Right now he has about 320,000 inbound links according to the Yahoo linkdomain: command. About 303,000 go directly to the main page. ~86,000 of his links come directly from Myspace Profiles. He also has a PR6.

What They Got
His top competitor has about 551,000 inbound links. 344,000 come directly from Myspace Profiles. Taking a quick look at the second and third placed competitors they are slightly less than the number one and theres nothing too notable about them. So for now we’re going to say fuck ‘em and not concern ourselves with what they’re doing because we know if we take the #1 site we’ll beat them as well. That after all is our main target and without extenuating circumstances they can be ignored in this case. So with that information out of the way for now, lets look at some strong determining factors and some weaknesses of both sites in respect to their rankings.

Spotting The Weaknesses and Loopholes
Lets analyze the math real quick. Without Myspace profile links he has 234,000 links on his own from other sites. His competitor has about 207,000. He is the clear winner in this instance which gives us a huge advantage. However, his 86,000 links directly from people’s Myspace profiles account for only about 27% of his inbound links. While his competitor clearly dominates by having his 344,000 Myspace profile links account for a whopping 62% of his total inbound links. We now have both a strength and a weakness for each of the sites. More importantly we now know why we’re loosing. Thus, we know what loopholes we’ll need to exploit in order to win.

What Do We know?
By looking at both our site and the competition we know that if we can increase our links from people’s Myspace profiles in the index to at least 62% than we will win. That means we’ll have to gain about 112,000 links on Myspace Profiles. We also know that our competitor is getting these profile links the same way we are. By giving out free Myspace layouts that include a link to our sites. There is a big problem standing our way though. Since they are ranked #1 and we’re ranked lower than we can assume they are getting more traffic than we are. Therefore, they are gaining these profile links faster than we are by giving out more layouts. It’s quite the pickle. We’ll have to do one of two things. We’ll either have to increase the value of each profile link or we’ll have to increase our volume at a much much faster rate. Neither sound like a fun solution, so we’re going to have to take a few shortcuts. One of which includes a twist on a technique I’ve already talked about, the other is an upcoming Blue Hat Technique I’m yet to discuss. First and foremost we need the proper mindset. We can’t just try to beat this guy, we need to brutally destroy him and get him so far below us that he’ll be stuck in the same situation we are in now. It’s the only way to maintain our competitive edge. So get any thoughts of playing nice out of your head right now. They aren’t going to do you any good.

Establishing A Plan Of Attack
First we’ll need to do an interesting twist on my Link Laundering technique and merge it with our SERP Domination tactic. Remember when I mentioned in one of the comments that all the techniques I’ve talked about on this site fit together perfectly like a puzzle to create an ultimate ranking strategy? I wasn’t fucking around. There’s no reason why you can’t create a network of sites within subniches that launder targeted links to your main site. He already mentioned in his original email that he wanted to create a few sites based on Myspace subniches to help build link popularity to his main site. Except, knowing what we know now, he doesn’t need more links from outside sites. He needs more links from Myspace Profiles. So I’d recommend doing just that. Build several sites on Myspace subniches such as image uploaders, profile editors, webproxies..etc. However, anytime they have an opportunity to get a link on the persons profile, instead put in the url to your main site. Looking at the current scenario he’s going to need quite a few of these sites in order to catch up, I’d say about 15 that perform on the average or even a little below average. It also wouldn’t hurt to sponsor a few of these types of sites in exchange for them laundering out links to you. I know places like Myspace Web Proxies have a hard time finding and keeping converting ads on their sites, they could be a very cheap solution. Just as long as they are consistently getting your main site links on peoples profiles thats our ultimate goal.

You got to understand, this guy only has 344,000 links on profiles. Thats not a big deal. If his site has been up for the last two years thats only about 15,000/day, not counting a sharp increase from when he started ranking of course. Getting 15 subniche sites within your network getting about 1,000 uses/day isn’t too incredibly hard. You can get that within a month or two. Once you accomplish that, you are at least matching him which is progress in the right direction.

Matching him? I’m sorry I fucked up. At that rate you’re no where NEAR matching him. There is the inevitable law of diminishing returns standing in your way. There are over 100 million Myspace profiles, only about 10 million exist in Google right now. Therefore less than 10% actually gets indexed. Since it’s only the ones that get indexed that matters to your rank than that means even if you match the 15,000/day; You’re really only getting 1,500 that matter. That’s not nearly enough. Consider your ass kicked. Or is it? We may need the help of a good Ol’ Blue Hat Technique to bridge the gap and turn that 10% into nearly 100%. The technique is called Log Link Matching. I’m not going to go into intricate detail about it until the post comes out of course, but I will hint to it and explain as it applies to this case.

Blue Hat Technique #XX - Log Link Matching
Anyone with experience can attest that not nearly all of the true links to your sites actually gets indexed and count in the search engines. It’s unfortunate but true. Not every page is indexed by the engines such as Google and therefore even if they link to you, they can’t pass a value. This is especially true for social sites like Myspace where only about 10% of the profiles get indexed. Log Link Matching is a technique used to ensure that nearly 100% of your real inbound links gets actually indexed by the search engines, thus
dramatically increasing your visible inbound links and bumping your rank in an indescribable way. Here’s how it works.

First create an automated Roll Over Site using my Abandoned Wordpress Accounts Part 2 post. Did I mention all my techniques merge together? Well they do. Do this by first building up several Wordpress blogs into high PR blogs by doing the Digg.com method as described. This will get plenty of search engine spiders to the site on a steady and fast stream as well as give plenty of authority to the site(to boost each site). Lastly, make a system that allows you to quickly add links to your Blogrolls within these accounts (quit being lazy and learn how to code!).

After you got your Wordpress.com blogs setup start parsing through your site’s log files. The log files are the first indicator of someone linking to your site. Everytime someone pulls an image on their Myspace account from your server it will show up in there, regardless of whether or not their profile actually shows up in the engines. Where there is a profile pulling your images there is more than likely a link to your site. So you must get that profile page indexed in the search engines in order for the link to count. So parse through your log file for any referrers coming from profile.myspace.com or www.myspace.com/*. Remember profile.myspace.com/viewprofile.blahblahblah?friendid=blahblah is a page on its own just like www.myspace.com/myusername. Therefore BOTH count. So there’s no reason why our site can’t instantly almost double all of his links from Myspace profiles at the exact same time as getting nearly 100% of them indexed. All he has to do is start adding each of these referrers to his blogrolls. After so many Wordpress.com will automatically limit how many links actually show up and start randomizing which ones are shown on each and every pageview(or spider view). I think that limit is 15 currently but I’m not entirely sure. It seems to change every so often. Either way every time Googlebot visits the rollover sites it’ll be greeted by XX amount of Myspace profiles to index. Eventually it’ll get almost all of them. Thus the illusion of our inbound links tripling and even quadrupling daily will start happening. We won’t actually be performing nearly to the degree it appears, but we definitely won’t be short any needed momentum either. It’ll just appear that way because many links we’ve had for a long time will finally start showing up and giving us proper credit.

If we keep parsing the log files and checking for new people using our templates and ensuring they all get indexed eventually we will catch up to that #1 site. Coincide that with our link laundering sites within our network we should have no problem overtaking him and holding our ground. Once we are at that point, its check and mate for the time being. He’s either going to have to top that performance or back off and accept his second place trophy. If he does manage to pull something sneaky and come back, no big deal, persistence is worth more than gold.

I hope this little real life example helped a few people in the same situation, and I’ll move up the date on that Blue Hat Log Link Matching Technique so you can get the details of it and really learn how to utilize it in some very powerful ways. It never hurts to have more in our arsenal. Just remember, the fact that you already have more inbound links from other Myspace layout related sites than him. If you can just match him on his strong points you can beat him.

Go Get ‘Em Tiger!

This is a follow post to my 100’s Of Links/Hour Automated - Black Hole SEO post.

I’m going to concede on this one. I admittedly missed a few explanations of some fundamentals that I think left a lot of people out of all the fun. After reading a few comments, emails and inbound links (thanks Cucirca & YellowHouse for good measure) I realize that unless you already have adequate experience building RSS Scraper Sites than its very tough to fully understand my explanation of how to exploit them. So I’m going to do a complete re-explanation and keep it completely nontechnical. This post will become the post to explain how it works, and the other will be the one to explain how to do it. Fair enough? Good, lets get started with an explanation of exactly what a RSS scraper site is. So once again, this time with a MGD in my hand, cheers to Seis De Mayo!

Fundamentals Of Scraping RSS
Most blogs automatically publish an RSS feed in either a XML or ATOM format. Here’s mine for an example. These feeds basically consist of a small snipplet of your post(usually the first 500 or so characters) as well as the Title of the post and the Source URL. This is so people can add your blog into their Feed Readers and be updated when new posts arrive. Sometimes people like to be notified on a global scale of posts related to a specific topic. So there are blog search engines that are a compilation of all the RSS feeds they know about through either their own scrapings of the web or people submitting them through their submission forms. They allow you to search through millions of RSS feeds by simply entering a keyword or two. An example of this might be to use Google Blog Search’s direct XML search for the word puppy. Here’s the link. See how it resulted in a bunch of recent posts that included the word Puppy in either the title or the post content snippet (description). These are known as RSS Aggregators. The most popular of which would be, Google Blog Search, Yahoo News Search, & Daypop.

So when a black hatter in an attempt to create a massive site based on a set of keywords needs lots and lots of content one of the easiest ways would be to scrape these RSS Aggregators and use the Post Titles and Descriptions as actual pages of content. This however is a defacto form of copyright infringement since they are taking little bits of random people’s posts. The post Title’s don’t matter because they can’t be copyrighted but the actual written text can be if the person chose to have description within their feed include the entire post rather than just a snippet of it. I know it’s bullshit how Google is allowed to republish the information but no one else is, but like i said its defacto. It only matters to the beholder(which is usually a bunch of idiotic bloggers who don’t know better). So to keep in the up and up the Black Hatters always be sure to include proper credit to the original source of the post by linking to the original post as indicated in the RSS feed they grabbed. This backlink slows down the amount of complaints they have to deal with and makes their operation legitimate enough to continue stress free. At this point they are actually helping the original bloggers by not only driving traffic to their sites but giving them a free backlink, Google becomes the only real victim(boohoo). So when the many many people who use public RSS Scraper scripts such as Blog Solution and RSSGM on a mass scale start producing these sites they mass scrape thousands of posts from typically the three major RSS Aggregators listed above. They just insert their keywords in place of my “puppy” and automatically publish all the posts that result.

After that they need to get those individual pages indexed by the search engines. This is important because they want to start ranking for all these subkeywords that result from the post titles and within the post content. This results in huge traffic. Well not huge, but a small amount per RSS Scraper site they put up. This is usually done in mass scale over thousands of sites (also known as Splogs, spam blogs) which results in lots and lots of search engine traffic. They fill each page with ads (MFA, Made For Adsense Sites) and convert the click through rate on that traffic into money in their pockets. Some Black Hatters make this their entire profession. Some even create in the upwards of 5 figures worth of sites, each targeting different niches and keywords. One of the techniques they do to get these pages indexed quickly is to “ping” Blog Aggregators. Blog aggregators are nothing more than a rolling list of “recently updated blogs.” So they send a quick notification to these places by automatically filing out and submitting a form with the post title, and url to their new scraped page. A good example of the most common places they ping can be found in mass ping programs such as Ping-O-Matic. The biggest of those would probably include Weblogs. They also will do things such as comment spam on blogs and other link bombing techniques to generate lots of deep inbound links to these sites so they can outrank all the other sites going for the niche the original posts included. This is a good explanation of why Weblogs.com is so worthless now. Black Hatters can supply these sites and generate thousands of RSS Scraped posts daily. Where legitimate bloggers can only do about one post every day or so. So these Blog Aggregator sites quickly get overrun and it can easily be assumed that about 90% of the posts that show up on there are actually pointed to and from RSS Scraper Sites. This is known as the Blog N’ Ping method.

I’m going to stop the explanation right there, because I keep saying “they” and it’s starting to bug me. Fuck guys I do this to! Haha. In fact most of the readers here do it as well. We already know tens of thousands, if not more, of these posts go up everyday and give links to whatever original source is specified in the RSS Aggregators. So all we got to do is figure out how to turn those links into OUR links. Now that you know what it is at least, lets learn how to exploit it to gain hundreds of automated links an hour.

What Do We Know So Far?
1) We know where these Splogs (RSS Scraper sites) get their content. They get them from RSS Aggregators such as Google Blog Search.

2) We know they post up the Title, Description (snippet of the original post) and a link to the Source URL on each individual page they make.

3) We know the majority of these new posts will eventually show up on popular Blog Aggregators such as Weblogs.com. We know these Blog Aggregators will post up the Title of the post and a link to the place it’s located on the Splogs.

4) We also know that somewhere within these post titles and/or descriptions are the real keywords they are targeting for their Splog.

5) Also, we know that if we republish these fake posts using these titles to the same RSS Aggregators the Black Hatters use eventually (usually within the same day) these Splogs will grab and republish our post on their sites.

6) Lastly, we know that if we put in our URL as the link to the original post the Splogs, once updated, will give us a backlink and probably post up just about any text we want them to.

We now have the makings of some serious inbound link gathering.

How To Get These Links
1) First we’ll go to the Blog Aggregators and make a note of all the post titles they provide us. This is done through our own little scraper.

2) We take all these post titles and store them in a database for use later.

3) Next we’ll need to create our own custom XML feed. So we’ll take 100 or so random post topics from our database and use a script to generate a .xml RSS or ATOM file. Inside that RSS file we’ll include each individual Title as our Post Title. We’ll put in our own custom description (could be a selling point for our site). Then we’ll put our actual site’s address as the Source URL. So that the RSS Scraper sites will link to us instead of someone else.

4) After that we’ll need to let the three popular RSS Aggregators listed above (Google,Yahoo,Daypop) know that our xml file exists. So, using a third script, we’ll go to their submission forms and automatically fill and submit each form with the URL to our RSS feed file(www.mydomain.com/rss1.xml). Here are the forms:

Google Blog Search
Yahoo News Search
Daypop RSS Search

Once the form is submitted than you are done! Your fake posts will now be included in the RSS Aggregators search results. Then all future Splog updates that use the RSS Aggregators to find their content will automatically pickup your fake posts and publish them. They will give you a link and drive traffic to whatever URL you specify. Want it to go to direct affiliate offers? Sure! Want your money making site to get tens of thousands of inbound links? Sure! It’s all possible from there, its just how do you want to twist it to your advantage.

I hope this cleared up the subject. Now that you know what you’re doing you are welcome to read the original post and figure out how to actually accomplish it from the technical view.

100’s Of Automated Links/Hour

I really am holding a glass of Guinness right now so in all the authority it holds…Cheers! I’m kind of excited about this post because frankly it’s been a long time coming. For the last 7-9 months or so I’ve been hinting and hinting that there is more to Black Hat than people are willing to talk about. As “swell” as IP delivery and blog spam are there’s an awesome subculture of Black Hats that takes the rabbit hole quite a bit deeper than you can probably imagine. This is called Black Hole SEO. By no means am I an expert on it, but over the last few years I’ve been getting in quite a bit of practice and starting to really kick some ass with it. In the gist, Black Hole SEO is the deeper darker version of black hat. It’s the kind of stuff that makes those pioneering Black Hat Bloggers who dispel secrets like parasite hosting and link injection techniques look like pussies. Without getting into straight up hacking its the stuff black hatters dream about pulling off, and I am strangely comfortable with kicking in some doors on the subject. However lets start small and simple for now. Than if it takes well we’ll work our way up to some shit that’ll just make you laugh its so off the wall. Admit it, at one point you didn’t even think Advanced SEO existed.

In my White & Black Hat Parable post I subtly introduced this technique as well as the whole Black Hole SEO concept. It doesn’t really have a name but basically it follows all the rules of Black Hole SEO. It targets sites on a mass scale, particularly scraper sites. It tricks them into giving you legitimate and targeted links and it grabs its content on an authoritative scale (will be explained in a later related post). So lets begin our Black Hole SEO lesson by learning how to grab hundreds of links an hour in a completely automated and consenting method.

Objective
We will attempt to get black hat or scraper sites to mass grab our generated content and link to us. It’ll target just about every RSS scraper site out there, including Blog Solution and RSSGM installs including many private scrapers and Splogs.

Methodology
1) First we’ll look at niche and target sources. Everyone knows the top technique for an RSS scraper is the classic Blog N’ Ping method. It’s basically where you create a scraped blog post from a search made on a popular Blog Aggregator like Google Blog Search or Yahoo Blog Search. Then they ping popular blog update services to get the post indexed by the engines. For a solid list of these checkout PingOMatic.com. Something to chew on, how many of you actually go to Weblogs.com to look for new interesting blog posts? Haha yeah thats what I thought. 90% of the posts there are pinged from spam RSS scraper blogs. On top of that there’s hundreds going in an hour. Kinda funny, but a great place to find targets for our link injections none the less.

2) We’ll take Weblogs.com as an example. We know that at least 90% of those updates will be from RSS scrapers that will eventually update and grab more RSS content based upon their specified keywords. We know that the posts they make already contain the keywords they are looking for, otherwise they wouldn’t of scraped them in the first place. We also have a good idea of where they are getting their RSS content. So all we got to do is find what they want, where they are getting it from, change it up to benefit us, and give it back.

3) Write a simple script to to scrape all the post titles within the td class=”blogname” located between the !– START - WEBLOGS PING ROLLER — comments within the html. Once you got a list of all the titles store it in a database and keep doing it infinitely. Check for duplicates and continuously remove them.

4) Once you got all the titles steadily coming in write a small script on your site that outputs the titles into a rolling XML feed. I know I’m going to get questions about what a “rolling XML feed” is so I’ll just go ahead and answer them. It’s nothing more than an xml feed that basically updates in real time. You just keep adding posts to it as they come in and removing the previous ones. If the delay is too heavy you can always either make the feed larger (up to about 100 posts is usually fine) or you can create multiple XML feeds to accommodate the inevitably tremendous volume. I personally like the multiple feed idea.

5) Give each post within the feed the same title as you scraped from Weblogs. Then change the URL output field to your website address. Not the original! Haha that would do no good obviously. Then create a nice little sales post for your site. Don’t forget to include some html links inside your post content just in case their software forgets to remove it.

6) Ping a bunch of popular RSS blog search sites. The top 3 you should go for are:
Google Blog Search
Yahoo News Search
Daypop RSS Search

This will republish your changed up content so the RSS scrapers and all the sites you scraped the titles from will grab and republish your content once again. However, this time with your link. This won’t have any affect on legitimate sites or services so there really are no worries. Fair warning: be sure to make the link you want to inject into all these Splogs and scraped sites as a quickly changed and updated variable because this will gain you links VERY quickly. Lets just say I wasn’t exaggerating in the title A good idea would be to put the link in the database, and every time the XML publishing script loops through have it query it from the database. That way you can change it on the fly as it continuously runs.

As you’ve probably started to realize this technique doesn’t just stop at gaining links quickly, it’s also a VERY powerful affiliate marketing tool. I started playing around with this technique before last June and it still works amazingly. The switch to direct affiliate marketing is easy. Instead of putting in your URL, grab related affiliate offers and once you got a big enough list start matching for related keywords before you republish the XML feed. If a match is made, put in the affiliate link instead of your link and instead of the bullshit post content put in a quick prewritten sales post for that particular offer. The Black Hat sites will work hard to drive the traffic to the post and rank for the terms and you’ll be the one to benefit.

Each individual site may not give you much but when you scale it to several thousands of sites a day it starts really adding up quickly. By quickly I mean watch out. By no means is that a joke. It is quick. There are more RSS scraped pages and sites that go up everyday than any of us could possibly monetize no matter how fast you think your servers are.