True, many people ‘try’ ideas from Eli’s blog and don’t get results as good as Eli claims. For instance, consider the original Black Hole SEO article. Many people have tried following his instructions and gotten no links at all — that’s because Eli didn’t spell out exactly where the scrapers are looking and where they are looking for.

On the other hand, if you’re doing a vigorous job of promoting your sites in various channels, you’re most likely getting scraper links.

Let’s consider a little example where names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Suppose you post a news story to a social bookmarking site like Mixx that has the word “flying” in the title. You might find there is a site with a name like “flying.my-splog-empire.mx” that sucks up the text of the Mixx post and stuffs it into a stock wordpress install — didn’t even change the template. He’s even kind enough to send you a trackback so you know that he did it… Too bad he gets rejected by Askimet.

A little investigation shows that he has at least 100 of these things running on the same IP address.

At the moment I’m happy to get a little “force multiplier” from him — I can’t complain about getting two or three links for the effort of one.

If, on the other hand, you do a little investigation, you could certainly find a situation where you could feed a scraper enough content to generate hundreds of links an hour… Like Eli says. But you gotta think a bit and work a bit.

A lot of Eli’s stuff is like that — once you start thinking about it, and using it, you discover deeper and deeper truths.

The other day I came across a Sucka who started a porn affiliate site with Wordpress, did one referrer spam to get it a backlink from a .gov site, and he thinks he’s Hugh Hefner… Suckas like that aren’t going to make $50 a day following instructions from ANY blog — there’s a reason why they are poor and “The Rich Jerk” has all the money.

The link structure I talked about before is actually my current setup, and appears to work excellent. Everything is open to tweaks of course, but it seems to work quite well. I need to mess with the dynamic linking part still(this code is kind of rapidly expanding), but the tests thus far have gone incredible.
Glad to hear from ya!

I’m not referring to this post, but your other articles in general.

How accurate is the link structure you discussed for blackhat sites (based on experimental design or theory?, ie main page links to 100 backlinked subpages, etc etc).