Slightly Shady SEO | Blackhat is Back, Baby.

Introduction(Whitehat)
Not everyone can frontpage popular sites like propeller/netscape. But everyone wants that high PR link, temporary though it may be. Now, there are literally dozens of different tags that would apply perfectly to any given blog post, or any given article. Picking the right one can provide you with a lasting, high pr link. Picking the wrong one will lead your article to most likely get shoved into the background fuzz of the internet. Here I’m going to show you how to pick the right ones.

Introduction(Blackhat)
If you’re a blackhat, you know how much of the internet is moderated and subject to peer review/spam protection. Messageboards, blogs, wikis, sign up forms, social bookmarking, social news, it’s all got spam protection. It’s pretty challenging to sink a spam article past this system. But there’s an upside. Once you’re in, once the article has passed, moderation has forgotten about you. So here you’ll learn how to tag your posts and sites in a way that allows for the maximum backlinks, while garnering very little risk.

The Concept
Internal PR passes in complicated, and mysterious ways. For any given social news/bookmarking site that allows tagging, most tags go completely unnoticed. There are too many for the home page(which has the bulk of the link juice) to spread it’s juice around to. So many tags stay PR0, representing a low amount of internal or external linking. Some tags however, have not only internal links, but external. Getting one of these tags is not enough; why would you get 1, when you can get 10 or more, all where it’s on a high PR domain, and better yet, in a situation where the individual page itself has high PR.

For this example, we use propeller. Propeller is do-follow, allows multiple tags, and has a high pagerank. Keep in mind, that the difference in PR is more evident in other sites. Propeller has enough juice that the tag’s individual PR is somewhat static, but not quite.

The Tag Classifications - There are 4 general classifications for a tag.

1. Pre-Existing, High PR - Tags that were crawled before the last PR update(important so we can gauge their importance). They’re used frequently internally, and thus got a lot of link juice passed to them. They may even have external links going to them. For propeller, as the PR is somewhat evenly distributed, a high PR tag is a 6, with some going into the range of 7
2. Pre-Existing, low PR - These were also crawled bfore the last PR update. For netscape, a low PR tag is PR4-PR5. They’re not the best tags, but ok in a pinch.
3. Rarely Used Tags - May not have had enough links to get a PR bump in the last update. These are the least desirable, yet most common. A good example is socialmedia. These are the ones we want to dodge for the time being.
4. Custom Tags - Tags that are used only by you. For me, I might use slightlyshadyseo.If you’re a small time user, and lack the ability to front page, avoid these. However, if you can front page, even if only one or two times, and submit a lot of articles, this is your cash cow. Make sure to get some external link flow into these as well. The advantage of this is that these links serve as a consistant index of your pages; only you are using them. All the other tags, you will eventually get bumped out of them, as new ones come in to replace you. This one is controlled only by you. Since it is permanent, even if you can only get it’s PR bumped to the “low level” of PR tags for that site, it’s well worth your while.

Finding Your Tags
Ideally, you’re a super leet coder, and can set up a crawler to find yourself some badass tags. If not though, there’s a few ways you can scrape by.

1. Google Search: Google is lovely, in that if your search is one that would ignore anchor text, like, say for example, site:propeller.com inurl:tag intitle:”Stories Tagged”, it will pump out a link list based about 30% based on PR, much higher than your average search. So your results are likely to be the popular tags. The other 70% though is sheer internal references; the articles referencing them might never have gotten enough popularity or incoming links to hand out the link juice you need to that tag.
2. Your Own Mind: Think, what’s likely to rank highly on this site, and what tags would I put for it? Then check each tag. If you’re right, those should be nice.
3. FrontPage Examination: Watch the frontpage, and see what IS actually hitting up there. Check page 2 also. Load each tag in a tab, and get watchin that pretty green bar.

Some Examples:
Of course, I’m not giving away my big money tricks, but here we go. These are some for propeller(bear in mind, most tags are PR5, so this is just elevating that)
NFL - PR6
College - PR6
Health - PR6
So think it’s time to write an article about health of the college athletes going into the NFL this year? I certainly do! (or would if I cared about that)

Some Word about Quantity/Quality:
Remember something. Google does not necesarilly smile too much on a single link to a website from another. The more references to the same external link from the given site, the better. That’s why, to this day, I’ll admit I get pretty damn excited when I see I made a blogroll(don’t worry kids, blogroll coming soon to SlightlyShadySEO). It almost ALWAYS means a large jump in the search engine’s eyes, if the site has any kind of standing at all.
So applying this to tags, remember. The same is true for internal links pointing to your news page on their site, or to your site directly(depending on their architecture). The more, the better. If you’re a whitehat kid, keep em relevant, but try and keep the quality and quantity high. The more High-PR internal links pointing to your page, the better it itself will rank, and the more juice it has to pass on to you. Even if it’s no-follow, the page you created for your “news” item on their site can rank, and almost ALL of it’s traffic will end up going to you.

So, you Want Some Keyword Targetting?
Most major search engines nowadays do not just directly evaluate your site and the site that is linking to you, when they’re looking at a backlink. They examine further back. For example, let’s say we have a page, example.com/sitesthatrock/, and slightlyshadyseo.com is listed in there. That link makes me happy. However, that link is worth much more, if example.com/sitesthatrock/ have links pointing to it that have phrases I wouldn’t mind ranking for it. So if idontexist.com/whoaa/ links to it with the anchor text “blackhat seo”, and example.com’s anchor text linking to me happens to be “black hat seo”(doesn’t have to be near exact), then it’s worth even more to me.
So when we apply that to tagging, try this. Take 5 keyphrases you want to rank for, and split them apart into individual words. Then (make sure the tags are worthwhile), and use those as your tags. Now bear in mind, that sometimes article topics, and what you want to rank for, are completely different. But use what you want to rank for. Think of synonyms, and use those. Now use as many of those words as possible in the title(and what will eventually become your anchor text pointing to your true site) on whatever site you’re submitting a story to.
The result will be that you now have a 2 layer deep set of keywords linking to your site/your created page, that are all relevant, poised to give you a boost.
And if you chose them right, you can have most of those keywords be damn powerful too.

Enjoy, and get revising those tags!

Posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 1:25 pm in the category:backlinks, pagerank, seo. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment it , or trackback this post.