Your First Blackhat Setup: Blackhat 101
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I get a lot of people coming here looking to get into blackhat. They’re pointed here by friends, find it attempting to do fruitless research online, and just want the information on how to build a blackhat system. So I’m going to give you guys a starting point here with what you need. I’m not going to give you the code, but I will at least give you what you need as far as what you should be concentrating on creating. Sorry to those who are more advanced/more whitehat, I figured out that making this post will save me a lot of time manually explaining things.
Don’t worry whitehats! I’ll get you covered tomorrow. And more advanced blackhats, don’t worry, I’ll get you covered as well.
Some Points Before I Start
- Do not start blackhat because you don’t want to learn whitehat. SEI is SEO, and if you don’t know anything about links or internal SEO, you don’t have a chance. Most blackhats can whitehat like crazy.
- Blackhat SEO is not a “fast money” option. It is portrayed as the “lazy way” by a lot of whitehats, but it’s not. It takes time to setup these options.
- This is a super basic setup. Blackhat is everywhere online, not just in the Search Engines. So take this, and improve on it or branch out.
The Software Components to a Basic Setup
- Content Generator/Scraper (Mandatory)
- Think about your method carefully. If you have a good enough generator, you can get away with not cloaking.
- Should be able to create hundreds of different pages on any given base keyword, or several dozen on any subkeyword
- Make sure to strip out all HTML from any scraped data that you acquire; no sense in leaking link juice.
- Can be deployed one of two ways. Either on your base, cloaked site, or on a splog farm that link back to the less sketchy money site.
- For reading on the basic techniques, head on over to our previous entry on content generation.
- Link Dropper/Spammer (Mandatory, unless you run a splog farm)
- There’s a lot of scripts out there without a captcha code on them. You can write a basic CURL script to signup/post relatively easily.
- If you cannot make your own and have some spare cash sitting around, XRumer is always an option. In my experience, this works best with cloaked/autogenned sites rather than ranking sites.
- Link Spam is a nasty reality of blackhat today. People are not going to voluntarily link to a cloaker site. Although, you can always have some proper content to display to non-bots that are not from search engines, so it looks like something linkable.
- Cloaker (Semi-Mandatory)
- There are a few of these commercially available(via SSEC or Fantomaster)
- The basis for any of these are IP based filtering. You can reverse dns the incoming IPs(and search for given strings) to build your bot list, or you can use a method highlighted here to pull each search engines functional IP range.
- Be sure to make sure that people NOT coming from search engines, that are NOT bots are shown a different page. Redirecting them to an affiliate or showing them your PPC is a bad idea.
- The Hardware Components to a Basic Setup
- x1 VPS/Dedicated server for link spam. You should never do this stuff off your home IP. It’s legal, but an ISP may not tolerate too many angry calls.
- x1 Hosting Account for…hosting. Hosting on your VPS can lead to the IP being hotlisted for banning by the big G
The Basic Anatomy
Converting The System To Cash
- If you’re a beginner, you’re going to make mistakes. It is for that reason, I suggest you do not use a large affiliate network(like Commission Junction) unless you’ve heard they really don’t care. Start out with the smaller, independent affiliate programs. For the same reason, I recommend you not use adsense until you’re really comfortable. You can use Peakclick to start, then decide from there. (NOTE: Peakclick pays crap unless you get put on the “quality” feed. To do that, you need a > 10% CTR, and your software should pull ads from their XML feed querying for exactly what the user queried the search engine for. You’ll also need a bit of volume. So don’t expect to profit until you can get upgraded, or switch avenues). MFA style sites are allowed though, so don’t sweat the CTR.
- Remember, your first site or two are experiments. Do not be depressed if they don’t work out well, or if you’re not making that much cash. Blackhat is a game based largely on quantity. All you really need is to be able to reliably make a little bit more than the costs of running/promoting the site, and the ability to replicate it a lot of times.
There’s a lot to cover, so if anyone has any questions, shoot em here. I’ll make a special effort to answer them quickly.
PS: Feel free to drop by our Social News Poll so I can figure out which widget I’m adding here.
-XMCP
January 28th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Who would you suggest for registering the domains and keeping the info from being tracked back to you? I’ve heard that GoDaddy is pretty quick to reveal private data if questioned.
January 28th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
What? you mean I can’t just push a big red “SPAM” button and make it work???
January 28th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
@Paul: Moniker is quite good, but expensive. 1and1 has free privacy protection(and cheap domains), but suck in every other way(transferring domains, hosting).
Also, you can probably get away with fake whois information. If you get especially worried, I’d say to get a LLC, a pre-paid cell phone, and a mail drop box. You can make up the name, but so long as the address/phone are legit, no one can prove it.
@TheMadHat: Well come on, if you want do it the easy way…haha
January 28th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
An idea I’ve been toying with is that you could have those ‘will post for food’ people doing posts for like a buck-two per post. That would be genuine content so no need for either a scraper or a generator nor even cloaking/redirecting bad traffic and an IP list.
Each couple of posts they link to the money site or to buffer sites that then pass the link equity on. They could also interlink amongst each other.
You can get about 200 - 500 posts/month done that way, on $1000 budget. And you needn’t worry about getting the domains banned for spam, because you would really just be having shitty arse content, which is a short step above spam. So you might save on domain registrations that way, which could cover some of the costs of paying for the posts. And if you host it at blogspot, then the hosting costs are eliminated too.
What do you think?
January 28th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
@Gab:I think it’s possible and decent, but the expense…eh I dunno. I can’t see the returns justifying it. Unless I’m not understanding something properly.
January 28th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Thanks!
I found this for Moniker, it’s old but I heard they’re still offering the promotion.
http://www.namepros.com/for-sale-advertising-board/250033-moniker-namepros-pricing-6-95-com.html
I’m sitting on about 100 domains, so at $7.95 / year for private it’s the cheapest I’ve found.
I’ll contact them and find out if the offer is still live and report back.
January 28th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Privacy doesn’t do anything for you from my experience.
dotster has 99 cent infos right now. code 99infodot
Use fake info for each batch you register and you have nothing to worry about.
Godaddy will occasionally call to verify but that is unusual. I use fake info in my godaddy accounts too except for the phone for that reason.
I have an aff like for dotster on my shitty blog if you found this post helpful.
January 28th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
@Paul - I’d use ResellerClub.com. Always had a good experience with them. Never transferred domains, but easy to use and cheap.
January 28th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Your MS Paint Skills have left me in awe.
January 28th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Incredible techniques for us gray hats…makes me want to fly wherever you are and be your intern for about 3 weeks. THANKS for this post.
January 28th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
@Barman: It’s photoshop thank you very much! And yes, I’m an incredible artist. Perhaps we should all take sometime and figure out what PacMan is trying to tell us…on the inside.
@Marty: Glad you enjoyed it! And who knows, maybe someday
I’ve thought of doing commercial SEO, but decided I’d like to hone some techniques first, and see how profitable I can be on my own. Really, I’m glad to hear this entry had some Grayhat application.
January 29th, 2008 at 4:28 am
Good post. As XMCP says, you’re going to have to repeat this on a large scale to earn any real $. Networks like CJ are getting better at catching these kinds of set ups, as well as Google. This is pretty “old skool” cloaking.
You might be better off keeping people on the same page and simply having a dozen or so “blocks” on that page cloaked/redirect. This can be seen as user “multi-variate testing” rather than cloaking. I believe I heard someone refer to it as “mosiac” cloaking.
Anywoo, you stand less chance of getting busted. Good luck all
January 29th, 2008 at 4:32 am
Just to clarify:
1. The link spam creates link juice which allows your page to rank
2. BUT, the page won’t rank if it’s just a MFA or affiliate page.
3. SO..you need to show Google a page which looks like it’s actually useful.
4. The page will then rank, and you convert the search engine traffic into $.
Is this fundamentally what’s going on?
Thanks!
January 29th, 2008 at 9:26 am
I confirmed with Moniker and my pricing for 80+ domains has been lowered to $7.44 per domain with $1 for privacy bringing the total to $8.44. That’s better than my current price with Godaddy. He also said when I get the the 500+ range he can lower it closer the the $6.95 pricing. Not bad.
Reseller club is a bit lower when you include the free privacy, but I’ve never heard of them before. I’m a bit hesitant to move all of my domains to someone I’ve never heard of. Anyway I hope that helps.
January 29th, 2008 at 11:44 am
For us whitehats it’s always interesting to get a peak into the workings of a blackhat setup and I think this helped things a lot. Thanks!
January 29th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
@barcelona: Yup! That’s the overall concept.
@Paul:Thanks for the confirmation!
@Tom:You’re welcome!
January 29th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
I have a question about the kind of page you’d send traffic to that is not from the search engines or is not a bot. Would that page be like a blog page and/or something equally benign?
January 29th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Interesting post!
All your posts blow me away….
Off Topic question –> Where and how did you get your start? Self-taught?
Thank you…
January 29th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
I’m a bit new to SEO so I must say I’m still learning this one bit by bit..^^
January 29th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
good post! keep it shady baby…..
January 29th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Man. You never seem to run out of great posts. I must admit I have lapsed in my visitation to your blog. I see I missed alot
January 29th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
[…] I started my daily blog reading with SlightlyShady’s primer for black hat networks and decided to travel through the blogroll and comment links. Every […]
January 30th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Love the blog. Way too many holier-than-thou SEOs out there. Being able to hang out a white hat shingle doesn’t drive low CPA traffic to your (or your clients’) sites. I’m almost entirely white hat not because it let’s me feel self righteous but because, frankly, black hat SEO seems exhausting!
Anyway, I added you to my feed reader, but you might want to put an RSS button in your template - for those of us who don’t rely on auto discovery.
January 30th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
@Melanie: Glad you enjoy it here!
And I have a big somewhat explicit button in the top right, but perhaps I’ll add something more along the lines of a standard RSS button.
January 31st, 2008 at 9:07 am
Yeah, it wasn’t explicit enough for me. It’s all about the call to action, man. Or a shiny orange icon.
February 29th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Hi, I would have a question concerning the image you have presented in your post. I see the bad referrer barrier in the system structure. Could you give me something reference about the technical backgound which would help me understand how this defending solution works.
Thank you in advance!
March 5th, 2008 at 10:26 am
[…] http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com/?p=180 […]
October 9th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Interesting post, Bookmarked, Will read up on more of this