Link Spam - What and Where to Drop your Links
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So I get a lot of questions about link spam, not surprisingly. It does require you to be careful in several different respects, one of which, I will cover today. Today I will be telling you the pros and cons of the different places to drop link spam. That’s right. Today is a day with a shady ass entry. Maybe 2. I’m feeling zesty.
If you don’t know HOW to drop link spam, I reccomend you take a look at my article on XRumer; by far the most popular link spamming software out there. I will add in however, that rumor has it, the ruskies will be bringing us a new product in the next month, freshly translated into english, that may serve as some long overdue competition.
But without further ado, here’s the list.
- Message Boards - I have a love-hate relationship with Message Boards
- Pros:
- They’re MUCH more quickly indexed than things like guestbooks, and you can frequently get a temporary(or occasionally permanent) link with a lot more juice than anything else.
- There’s a lot more activity on these than blogs, so it’s harder for admins to control. Creating a topic that no one would possibly be interested in can help, as is trying to formulate a generic message that applies universally.
- Cons
- Forum admins are completely fucking insane. Many bans that occur are not the result of competitors, or of Google’s algorithm picking them out, but rather by really fucking pissed off forum admins. Chances are, if you’re hitting up a list of over 50k forums, at least one admin will get pissed off enough to try and hunt your site down.
- Google frowns upon lots of temporary links. If they find all your links quickly, chances are they’ll be a bit pissy when half of those get deleted by zealous admins.
- Spamming forums makes it impossible to guage how many links to drop, since you can never be sure how many will stick. Too many, and Google might spank your ass all over the place. Too few, and it wasnt worth the time and risk.
- Forums that don’t allow BBCode dirty up the results for your keywords, making it hard to scrape again. There have been occasions where I end up scraping linkspam I let out in the past.
- XRumer is slow as balls at posting in these. It has to register, verify accounts, login, and post. That’s a LOT of steps. In some cases, over 7-8 page loads, and at least 3 post requests. That takes time.
- Pros:
- GuestBooks -Not good for ranking, good for indexing
- Pros
- Guestbooks have little, if any fallout from administrators.
- Easy to mine, easy to spam, high-ish success rate.
- Frequently allow HTML
- Rarely rank high enough to dirty up serp results
- Lightning fast to spam
- There’s MILLIONS of them out there.
- Cons
- A lot of false positives
- Serve as what is essentially a GLARING spam alert. Come on now, how many legitimate sites drop links in some guestbook from 1994?
- If they can be spammed, they have been spammed. A lot. Theres been some I’ve tried to visit where any browser I use actually LOCKS UP from the sheer amount of data on the page.
- Many cannot pass PR
- Many require admin approval from admins that have not logged in in years
- Too many damn types of software, none being overwhelmingly popular. Takes a long time to footprint
- Pros
- Blogs - Oh god, the no-follows.
- Pros
- So many, that a lot are not sarurated with spam
- Have about a million different footprints
- You do not need to drop a link in the content, since your “name” itself is linked. Makes creating inconspicuous links easier.
- Dropping one proper, innocent link, makes it easy to drop links in the future if you use the same information. Once you get admin approval, you’re good to go.
- Admins are not quite as contemptuous as a lot of forum admins, especially since many that would actually give a rip have anti-spam software, so they will hardly even see your link to track it down.
- Easy to identify admins checking your link, so they can be redirected.
- Cons
- Anti-spam plugins. You need clean IP addresses, all the time, and that’s hard to achieve.
- Admins are more tech saavy then guestbook/forum admins, so can frequently identify spam better.
- The VAST majority of links are no-followed. Like 99%. They can help for anchor text, but very little for ranking. This does significant damage.
- If you’re like me, and try to filter out your messageboard/guestbook/blog traffic, blogs are MUCH harder to footprint by referrer, so you can tell when/if to block them.
- Pros
- Shoutboxes, Galleries, and other Custom Rigs
- Pros
- You can sometimes find software with very little anti-spam protection, and bypass it.
- Many are not saturated by link spam.
- There’s a almost infinite number of pieces of software out there you can hit. If one tightens up, hey, you can just find another.
- Really, this is the best way.
- Cons
- Harder to find the software, harder to footprint.
- Other blackhats might see your tricks, and emulate it
- Many of these require custom software to be written. It’s well worth it in most cases.
- Hitting these too hard can lead the coders of the software to update it, making it harder to hit int he future.
- Lower in quantity than almost any other link spam possibility.
- Pros
December 12th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
What about spamming the social sites? I’ve seen multiple bots submitting to sites like SU and a lot of the smaller sites to drop some deep links.
December 12th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
Hey, you forgot to tell the brothers about:
* wikis (did I tell you about the anime club that set up a wiki in .edu and forgot about it?)
* scraper bait (you expected one backlink and got 150…)
* shades of grey (write the perfect spam and you’ll get more complements than complaints)
I like targeting, even if it slows things down. Years ago I was working for a guy who started a new community site in a third world market that gathered around 300,000 by the time I walked. We started out with a good e-mail list and spammed 20,000 people… We got 10,000 signups and didn’t get any guff from our ISP.
The week after, he gave me a list that he bought from a less reputable source… The kind of list that has addresses without any “@”. I fired a shot at the first quarter million and got about 1000 signups — and a service provide threatening to pull the plug.
Moral: I got 10x the response with 25x fewer spams — I could afford to spend 10x the time and $$ per spam and still come out ahead with the targeted shot… Not to mention less heat.
The same applies to link spam.
December 12th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
@Brandon: Social sites would fall under “custom rigs”. Right now I’m actually coding a badass one
@NoTimeForSuckas:
Properly forumulated spam is another entry, coming soon. I like to mixup the white/blackhat entries to keep all the readers happy. As for wikispam, I didn’t comment on it simply because I have limited experience in spammy wiki’s, and I don’t like talking out of my ass. As soon as I got more familiar with it, I’m sure it will make it into a post.
December 12th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
I haven’t seen anything out there yet for a full on social attack that hits them all. I imagine you’ll hit the clean IP problem again.
For that I use the good ole att dsl line with dynamic ip’s. Threw together a little tool to drop and get a clean ip every 20 minutes. works like a charm for pretty much everything. Only problem is they’ll only give you five without a bunch of snarky questions.
December 12th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
There are some bases you didn’t cover.
Also, you leave out the ping factor. Guestbooks work fine if you ping their URL after posting to them. It doesn’t take much work either. Either insert an identifier or look for what you dropped and if it shows up, ping it. My Ping Rape script I posted on syndk8 is a good one to use because it will ping very quickly, and it will ping all the major services that are confirmed non-honeypots. Once again, multiple IPs is not a bad idea.
December 12th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
haha alright alright! There’s a lot if info for this topic, I’ll make a part 2. Thanks vsloathe.
December 13th, 2007 at 5:38 am
Excellent information. I was tempted to Sphinn it but I think that would have just pissed a lot of people off more than I want to deal with right now. I run a controversy blog, not a suicide blog.
Anyways, get in touch with me via Sphinn. I’ve got a question for you…
Sam
December 13th, 2007 at 10:12 am
haha good point Sam. I had the same thoughts.
I’ll hit you up via sphinn.
December 13th, 2007 at 10:45 am
@Sam: sphinn PM isn’t working. Check the e-mail you use to post here with.
December 13th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
I would really like to see if you could help to post your finding about dropping deep links on those social bookmarking sites.
December 13th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Great guide. I love your pros and cons breakdown
December 13th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Well dood… dat was fishing gay! I was hoping for some love and goodiness…. nuaught here but fodder for the noobsters… he he
Nice round up and awful nice of ya to give the kiddies some treats, so close to Xmas and all…
It’s time to crank it up to Spamming 2.0 he he….
Cheers on the post….
December 13th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
@ Sam Freedom…. don’t be such a pussy bro… ya should’ve Sphinned it man…. ha ha haha….
December 13th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Psh don’t sweat it gypsy. If I jumped into something more complex, I’d have a bunch of people bitching that I hadn’t covered the basics. At least after posts like this, I can point back, and explain that yes, I’ve talked about this before.
Juicy stuff will come.
December 13th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
Shady, I prefer to leave foot prints on hallow grounds…
Guess that is why, come here..:)
December 14th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Sometimes the “gungho” approach works do all of them … drop as many as you can, everywhere (yes i know this is so last year!)… hell the site(s) may be short lived but for $8 for a domain + subs …which can get 20-30k visitors a day for a couple of days…. makes a hell of alot of sales! …
December 14th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
it can also generate a hell of alot of complaints … just to add to my previous comment
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:10 am
Heh, speakin’ of (edited so your target lives on)… I posted a few links directly to some affiliate programs and pulled $106 in a week, that is, until people kept deleting my innocent links and permanently banned the first half of my URLs. Hmmmph.