Some Blackhat Math: How to Predict Your Profit
Ok. So before going headlong into any venture, it’s important to map out potential revenues to make sure you’re going to be making money. This is how a blackhat might do it. HOWEVER; most blackhats try and top off search results for competitive terms. This is not the formula for them. This formula is for people mass producing long-tail PPC scraper sites. And the outcome is pretty lovely.
In addition to reading this, I reccomend you read my post about Automating Your SEO System. It will help you understand how a setup like the one I discuss is possible.
Everyone always pokes fun at blackhats, saying “Haha that really works? That domain will be banned in a month!”. To that I’m saying, yes it will, and no I don’t care. And here’s why.
Disclaimer: I’m not good at math. At all. There may be an error or two, but god willing it won’t alter the result much.
Also, this assumes that you have your system in place, so you start out with domains in existance already. So it’s once the sitting is setup, and running at capacity.
| Variable | Equation |
| Income Per Year | 365*[(# Of Domains Per Day) * (Average Domain Life) * (Income Per Domain Per Day)] |
| Expenses Per Year | CostPerDomain*(365* # Of Domains Per Day) + WebHostPerYearCost*(365*DomainsPerDay)/MaxDomainsPerHostingAccount) +(12*NumberOfLinkSpammingServers*LinkSpammingServerCost) |
| Profit | Income Per Year – Expenses Per Year |
Ok, so that’s out of the way. Now I’ll give you an example setup.
- Link Spamming Servers=1 (Cost: $160/month)
- Average Domain Life Span Before Ban=30 days
- # Of Domains Per Day=5
- Avg Income Per Site Per Day: $1.75(not terribly difficult to do)
- Cost Per Domain: $2.25 (Achieved already, yay!)
- Hosting Cost Per Account Per Year: $80
- Maximum Sustainable Domains Per Hosting Account:250 (yeah, you better be caching your output to manage this)
| Total Income |
| 365*[(# Of Domains Per Day) * (Average Domain Life) * (Income Per Domain Per Day)] |
| 365*[(5domains * 30DayLifeSpam) * $1.75] |
| 365 * (150 DomainsAliveAtAnyGiventime * $1.75 per Day per Domain) |
| 365 * (150 DomainsAliveAtAnyGiventime * $1.75 per Day per Domain) |
| 365 * ($262.50) |
| $95,812.50 per Year |
| Total Costs |
| CostPerDomain*(365* # Of Domains Per Day) + WebHostPerYearCost*(365*DomainsPerDay)/MaxDomainsPerHostingAccount) +(12*NumberOfLinkSpammingServers*LinkSpammingServerCost) |
| [$2.25* (365 days * 5 domains per day)] + [$80* ((365 * 5 domain per day)/250 DomainsPerAccount)] + (12 Months * 1 Server * $160 Per Month) |
| [$2.25 * 1825] + [$80 * 7.3 Hosting Accounts] + (12 Months * 160 Per Month) |
| $4106.25+$584+$1920 |
| $6610.25 |
*Looking back on this, the hosting needs some adjustments. But the # of Domains Per Server varies SO wildly, that it’s hard to fix. Either way, hosting is a pretty negligible cost overall, so I’m not going to sweat it.
Profit= $95,812.50-$6610.25 = $89,202.25
So there we go. If the previous setup is managable(which I believe it to be), the profit is around $89,202.25
Remember that the figure $2.25 per domain is only doable with a high CTR. But since blackhats have the ability to setup MFA pages(although I do not reccomend using Adsense for this), a 15-20% CTR is entirely doable. Also remember, that you can have several subdomains(3+) per base domain. Each subdomain can have several hundred pages indexed, so the traffic has many places to hit.
Now, let’s get the average PPC Cost to see how many clicks we need per day per domain(divided up amongst subdomains) in order to make this work.
- Using my PPC company, I’m going to lookup their “quality feed” results for 4 longtail terms. I’m going to keep the general topics worth promoting for.
- “herbal herpes medication safe for women” – Average CPC is about .10, going up to .13
- “silk comforter for twin sized bed” -CPC ranges from .20 to .30 per click
- “spare saab 900s tail light” – CPC ranges from .149 per click to .18 per click
- So we’re sitting at an average income of about 0.17 per click. At that rate, We need 13.23 clicks to reach our goal.
- Assume a 20% CTR for the site, we need about 66 clicks per domain per day. That sounds pretty difficult buttttttt we’ve got subdomains!
- Given there’s 5 subdomains per domain(spread out into different topics, so they don’t get grouped in the SERP results), we only need 13.2 clicks(to the site, not to the ad) per subdomain per day to make a profit! Loooking a lot more do-able, eh?
Remember that while this is a pretty damn nice setup, it’s doable. Beyond that, certain sites will produce MUCH higher earnings(the highest I’ve seen from my PPC program is $4.45+ per click), and some will barely make anything. In addition, while I used 30 days as the life time for a site in this, in reality some sites last 2 weeks, and I’ve had some go over 3 months. No blackhat setup is exactly the same.
Enjoy.
-XMCP
January 7th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Hey XMCP,
just love the site and your writing style. This post is a bit mind boggling but once I read it over a few times I got the message.
I guess my question is how does one get into all of this. How do you start???…. I have a basic knowledge of PHP as I can see that woudl be of advantage but what sort of basic structure i.e. servers, domain names etc do you need to start?
Cheers
January 7th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
sorry also how do you get domains at $2.25???
January 8th, 2008 at 1:15 am
15 Sphinns…I guess the people at Sphinn are getting less timid about endorsing posts that are blatantly bh in the title and content.
January 8th, 2008 at 9:00 am
Its like “woh!”
That was some serious detail and a wicked advert to encourage people to be come Blackhats… now if I only knew how to actually do an blackhat SEO;-)
January 8th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Is your domain cost based on a bulk volume rate? I am assuming so, but if not, please share where you are getting those prices.
January 8th, 2008 at 10:55 am
@Indigo: Drop a comment with some way to contact you(preferably IM), and I’ll try and forward it on to you.
@Jack Rack: We’ve officially gone hot! Never saw that one coming. Incredibill is going to be all over me for this one.
That was a pretty optimized setup, but factoring in other promotion methods(and targets, like affil programs) still quite doable!
@Rishil:Haha it comes with time
@Brandon Addock: Not bulk! I bought like 5 at a time, but that price is for .infos no matter how many you buy. I’ll try and get a spare minute today and hit you up with the place.
January 8th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
I found some cheap .99 .info domains, they are available here. Click on the right side for the coupon information. I just bought 100
January 8th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Must be doing some heavy duty linkspamming to require a server that runs 160 a month just for that.
I have one that runs that through softlayer that I have had over 4000 sites on with over 1,000,000 pages.
January 8th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
@XL
Yeah, it does a LOT of things. From scraping to [link]spamming to software testing.
I stay away from the vps/dedi for hosting, for fear Google may come in and wipe the IP.
January 9th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
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January 10th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
[...] ShadySEO has a nice article on black hat profits that you’ll want to check out. [...]
January 11th, 2008 at 11:42 am
[...] Think blackhat is dead? Whatever. Shady SEO again this week busting them out. Blackhat profits and I’d say those numbers are conservative. (PS: .99 cent .info on sale at Dotster. I grabbed [...]
January 13th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
hey you can IM me on MSN username indigoweb
January 22nd, 2008 at 2:14 am
Hey XMCP,
In your pursuit of your 66 clicks per domain you are setting up 5 subs per domain. Is this only for math purposes or have you done some testing.
I have always wondered if there is a sweet spot for the amount of subs.
Have you noticed any depreciating returns by adding to many subs?
January 25th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Nice Article.
Often people wonder if the time expense and bother of covering your tracks is worth it — this article gives the answer… It certainly seems possible and profitable to stay a few steps ahead of Butts and co.
That said, I get the feeling that black hat sites have been on the decline in the last few months, particularly since Jan 1. It seemed like I couldn’t do a single search without running across a black hat site, these days it’s not so common.
I put BH sites into my command and control system when I come across them and I see them deranking, even getting unplugged — of course, that’s part of the lifecycle you describe.
I’ve noticed Google get a lot better in the last few months. A certain #1 spot I’m gunning for has gone through the following progression:
* a junk affiliate site promoted by “blue hat” methods (was there for about two years)
* a disposable blog with a lot of real links and almost as many paid links from something that looks like sedo.
* a site with good content quality but very little quantity ran by one of the nation’s most prestigious nonprofits (the kind of site only a librarian could love)
* a site with good content and quality but an atrocious user interface
I’ll be ahead of them all in link volume a year from now, except maybe the disposable blog. It’s been fun to watch the churn.
A lot of people have complained about downrankings lately, but my stuff upranked this month. That includes the stuff that I’m promoting aggressively and also stuff that I haven’t touched in years (other than slipping in a few paid links
January 25th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
@dennis: I havent had a chance to do a real case study on it, but using the root domains, my sites have lasted longer. But using subdomains, they get more clicks more quickly.
The residual on banned domains seems to better from subdomains though(from yahoo/msn)
March 8th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
@XMCP
“I stay away from the vps/dedi for hosting, for fear Google may come in and wipe the IP.”
Do you recommend shared hosting then for the sites? or do you use free hosting?
I read over this post for the forth time. Its a really good read and i didnt read this comment you made last time.
October 10th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Hi XMCP,
Great blog! I am new to this so please excuse my naivete.
Looking at this article, as well as this one: http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com/index.php/automating-your-seo-systemthe-ultimate-goal/
Why not just set up ten machines running all of this, with different data dictating what sites are generated? Obviously there’s some costs there – $15K on hardware alone, not to mention yearly costs of $60K(!) – but presuming your set-up is mostly automated (requires ~1hr of your time each day), you can exponentially increase your income if you aim to this and quit your day job.
I mean, even if your blackhatting takes three hours of your time per day to turn thep rofit in this article – if you decide to turn it into your career, and run three machines, working 9hrs per day, you can still make >$250K per year.
Apologies once again if I am missing something! Thanks for your time and reply.
Cheers,
Felix
October 10th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
@XMCP
Hi, I posted yesterday on this page and it seems to have been deleted – was this a possible error, or did I break some rule? A reply to this would be appreciated, cheers.
Felix