Slightly Shady SEO | Making Money Online, One Script at a Time

Ok. So when one thinks backs to the pre-Matt Cutts days of Google, what comes to mind? For many, it’s link farms. The golden scepter of early SEO, a properly implemented link farm allowed you to rule your niches with an iron fist. Guess what? The same is true today. It’s just a lot more complicated.
And with fresh link spam sources getting trickier(though not impossible) to find, there is no doub that link farms will become the primary blackhat tool in the future of the internet.

For that reason, I’ve compiled a few tricks for pulling it off.

1. No_You_Can’t_Use_The_Same_IPs
   • There’s thousands of free hosts, free blogs, and other sites out there for the taking. There’s no excuse for your lazy arse trying to put the 300 unique domain blog farms on the same shared hosting account.
   • Keep your IPs a long way apart. Statistically, there is a incredibly low chance of 2 sites from the same IP organically linking to eachother. Stay off the same C-class IP block if possible.
   • Parasite hosting is the current big thing, and it will be around for a long time to come. Ask.com had the only algorithm that I can imagine preventing it, and they’re no longer doing real search.
   • Ethically opposed to parasite hosting? No big deal. Hosting accounts from different providers can be gotten for what, $4.50 per month? Split your massive link farm into several minifarms that never link to the same money-domain. That way, you can use the same IP for 20+ sites farm sites, and not have the same IP linking in to any given domain.
2. Vary Your Architecture
   • In this day and age, are you really using only wordpress for your link farm? Talk about a fingerprint. Use pligg, joomla, blogspot, and any other CMS you can find. If they allow new user registrations, rename the registration file so only you can find it, and automate that crap.
3. It’s All About the Signal to Noise Ratio
   Is your site linking to only your own? Don’t be stingy. Yet another footprint of a blogfarm. While obviously I have not seen exactly the given code Google uses for finding these, I’d be willing to bet my ass that linking to the same domain as other sites in the suspected farm is fine, so long as there’s other links that the sites have that are not the same as the rest in the blogfarm. Remember the idea is to look “natural” and non-SEOed. Which means no, don’t nofollow those random links. In addition, this makes it much harder to figure out what your “money” domains are.
4. Hide Your Backlinks Like a Pro
   • Google did themselves a tremendous disservice by disabling their “link:” tool, or making it borderline worthless. Now, if you don’t want people to dig around your link farm, show the NOINDEX tag to Yahoo bots, or if that still shows your backlinks, just deny them with robots.txt. Yahoo is really the most common path people use to find backlinks. Alternatively, you can simply cloak the pages so Yahoo doesn’t see the backlinks in the first place.
   • If Google decides to eventually ban you, you can always switch out your robots.txt so yahoo can access em again, then voila. You’ve got some ranking power again.
   • If you’re ok with the footprint, remember that sites Google sees the NOINDEX tag on can still accumulate link juice, and still distribute it. While the footprint is huge, having your backlinks on a site that no one can find in Google or Yahoo sounds pretty appealing, doesn’t it?
5. Do Not Interlink Your Link Farm Any More Than Necessary
   • Alright. So you’ve got your 5000 blogs/pliggs/whatevers set up. Now you need them indexed(and need some link juice). No matter how you go about this, you’re going to piss some people off. That means you do not not not want to have them all interlinked. All it takes is one decent tech to bring the whole thing down if they’re all interlinked. Remember, these things need to prop the money site up, not eachother.
6. You Have all The Control: Use it.
   • It’s hard for a lot of blackhats to separate their thinking for blogfarms from their thinking for link spamming. Link spamming is short term. A proper link farm can be long term. Which means don’t bone your sites over by unleashing a fury of 20,000 inbound links in 20 minutes. This is where your skills/understanding of whitehat SEO come in.
   • Alright, so we know that explosive link growth can [sometimes] get your site a wary gaze by Google. So how about you create yourself a nice little cron job that drops links for your sites from 12:00AM-3:00AM every morning. A little random number generator to select the number to drop. You can make this look organic. Do it.
   • Mix content links, footer links, and blogroll links. Part of using the control you have properly is making it look like you have little to none.
7. Layers are your Friend
   • If you have a lot of sources for links you can get, and a lot for parasite hosters you can have, layer it up(like the infamous BluehatSEO post). The more layers you can use to seperate your money site from your spammy sites the better. Even a SpammyLinksForIndexing->Blog->Blog->$$$ site should be enough to avoid penalization in all but the most severe instances. If the 1st blog is the one taking the risks, it seems a bit odd to punish a site 2-3 down the line, yes?

Conclusion
There’s a lot more to this that I won’t cover simply because it would make it ineffective, but it’s not brain surgery. And maybe you’ll think of something better. But each type of site has a different way to promote it. Create your own directories blogs and everything else, and you’ll see your linking footprints disappearing so quick it will make your head spin.

-XMCP

PS: I’m sorry to those I haven’t gotten back to lately that asked me to contact them. I really am glad you enjoy this blog, and really am trying to get in touch with everyone(and I will eventually). But at this point, I have an absolutely ungodly number of people that are dropping comments asking for assistance, or in some cases e-mails, PMs, or IMs. Please understand that I have to do my own work as well, and I’ll get to everyone soon as I can. Also, if someone does want to get in touch in the future, if you leave instant messenger information, I will get back to you about 20x faster than if you leave me an email address. I don’t do e-mail if I can help it. I do Yahoo, AIM, and MSN.

Posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 10:25 am in the category:Grow Some Balls, automation, backlinks, google. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment it , or trackback this post.