SEO Shadow

Alright, guys. I’m gonna run you through a technique that I’ve used for the mass production of Black Hat affiliate websites. The beauty of this trick is that it’s actually quite lateral in its scope for use. You can take it as far over to the dark side as you want, but it’s equally rewarding to modify it for your White Hat projects.

I’m going to cover the White Hat side in the next post. For now, we’re going to veer in to some deep end Black Hat SEO.

The Black Hat essentials

We’re going to need a content generating script or some kind of mechanism to rewrite chunks of text. Now, as you’re probably aware, quality rewriting softwares are few and far between on the web. Thankfully, we don’t need something that’s going to read like a white paper. We just need to slot our pages in Google’s index and let them grab some keyword traffic.

We also need a little PHP experience, or a touch of knowledge when it comes to dealing with referrers and search strings. I don’t have the time to dedicate an entire blog to PHP - or indeed, any other language - but I’m going to trust that you’ll be able to find a script for what we need. It’s foundation stuff.

The root of the problem

What is the number one problem that we’re faced with when trying to sell an affiliate product? Assuming that the product is legit and presented tidily, it’s not about the volume of traffic. It’s about directing the right people to the right offer.

Affiliate websites are generally prone to pitching too many products at too many audiences. The number of web hosting affiliate sites I’ve seen trying to cross-sell bargain shared hosting, alongside private virtual servers and premium packages is enough to make my eyes bleed.

It’s a mistake that new kids on the block make all the time. We dip our feet in the riches of the affiliate pool and try to sell every last offer, every last bargain and every last scheme. The more the better, surely? The greater the chances of success?! Well, no. 

The result is a mish-mash website lacking focus. Mr. Megabucks lands on your pages wanting to buy a dedicated server but catches sight of your shared hosting bargain range. He immediately gets confused and travels elsewhere to splash his cash. If you’d just had a way of knowing that he wanted a dedicated server, you could have drawn his focus to only those offers that were going to make him part with his credit card.

Well, we’re not going to focus on information architecture until the next post, so let’s cut to the chase and address this problem the Black Hat way.

Give your customers what they want (now that’s not very Black Hat!)

Every time somebody lands on your website via Google, the search term they used is logged and accessible in the search string. We can get to this string dynamically and capture the search terms that are bringing traffic to our site.

Great, you already knew that. You’ve had Analytics for the last six months so I should stop patronizing you.

But have you thought about what this information means? You can SEE what the user came for! 

Let’s propose that a user gets to my language product site with the search term cheap discount Italian courses. If the user lands on a page that is promoting premium top-of-the-range Italian courses, it’s likely that his stay will be a short one. You might think about skirting this issue by making a page for cheap Italian courses, a page for premium courses, and a page for just about every other keyword variation.

Feel free, I’ll see you in a few weeks.

What we need is a way to grab that search string and dynamically output the exact offer that our visitor is looking for. We’re so much more likely of capturing their attention and making a sale if we immediately present them with their exact requirements. And here’s how.

Do your market research

We need to set aside an hour and draw up a list of all the keyword variations that correlate to the products we’re going to be promoting. I would suggest you find a niche market which offers a variety of budget offers and premium solutions. Now what are the customers going to be searching for? Using our example of Italian courses, here are some secondary terms to consider.

Cheap, bargain, discount, quality, excellent, best, top, number one, in USA, in the UK

All of these phrases are interchangeable. For example we could have somebody searching for Italian courses in the UK, and another after quality Italian courses.

Now we do some more research. Scout out your market and draw up a list of products that you can promote. Analyze the product and decide for yourself what category it falls in to. Is it a bargain course? Is it an advanced premium package? Is it restricted by location?

Note down the URL of each product and plug it in to a database or a simple holding script.

We want to start drawing direct connections from our keyword terms to affiliate offers.

So I might have a list that looks like this:

cheap italian course  —  http://www.cheapcourses.com/italian-product.php?aff=myaff
italian courses in the uk  —  http://www.ukstudy.com/our-italian-course.php?aff=myaff
quality italian courses  —  http://www.bestcoursesonly.com/premium-italian.php?aff=myaff

Naturally, if you’re using a database, things are going to be looking a little different at this point and you’ll be relying on tables and IDs.

The execution

We’re going Black Hat so the last thing we want to do is pull together a website with endless pages of hand written copy. We just want to grab some content that ranks, spin it a few times, and output it with the same keywords in tact.

Get your hands on a functional content rewriter. It won’t pass you any English Lit exams (and if it does, I’ll be the first in line to pay for it), but as long as it scrambles the copy enough to be untraceable by Google - we’re sitting pretty.

Now the last thing we want to happen is to click Start on our rewriter and watch it go through and replace our keywords with utter nonsense. If I’m rewriting an article to target cheap Italian courses for sale, I don’t want my robot friend replacing the term with, oh I don’t know…easy Italians in corsets for hire. That’s not the kind of search traffic that I’m looking for.

So do be careful when spinning your content and make sure that your key phrases remain in tact. We couldn’t care less how it reads - we just want it to get chomped up by Google’s spiders and thrown in to somebody’s search results.

Now, the clever bit.

Using our PHP script, we place an include on every page and grab the search string as soon as the file is requested. Your visitor isn’t even going to see the content. We simply match up the key phrases that they’ve searched for to get to our site. We scan down our list and match up the most relevant affiliate offer based on those keywords. Now all we have to do is redirect the user to the closest matching offer and send them on their merry way - towards something that we KNOW they’re going to be interested in.

The only way anybody is ever going to find that you’ve been rewriting content is to access the site directly (and who’s going to if we only ever link to it from non-related sites?!). 

Alternatively, if somebody gets to the site using a search term that isn’t in our catch list, we can still send them somewhere generic. Just add a simple else if to the PHP script and sit down in unusual delight that absolutely nobody is visiting your site!

As for Google…well, Google doesn’t get to your site using any search strings. It will simply spider the rewritten mumbo-jumbo content and process it for ranking.

Turbo charged success…with limits.

This is an effective way of busting out websites for quick profit. Don’t expect them to pay your pension many moons from now. It’s incredibly likely that somebody will nark you out somewhere down the road. Of course, the swaying factor of success is that we can produce websites like these in mass volume and send fantastically targeted traffic towards our affiliate offers. It’s fast. It’s effective. It’s downright easy.

In the next post, I’ll be showing you how to convert this method for White Hat websites. I’m sure you’ve already worked out where we’re heading with this one… 

Google’s duplicate content filters have proved the stopping of many a great quick profit scheme. Here, we’re going to take a look at how we can scrape content and stay off the Google radar.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of scraping, it basically involves duplicating content and rehashing it for a new website. There are many scripts in the Black Hat world which can scan through large sites like Amazon and Wikipedia. grabbing the content they need along the way.

Of course, the great dilemma is what can we do to use this data without taking the duplicate content penalty from Google.

Well, there are suggestions galore. We can mash content together from a mixture of websites in the hope that it dissembles enough to pass without warning, or we can apply one of the many keyword re-writing softwares that attempt to render an article unrecognizable.

Both of these methods fall short.

Merging different content sources may work to offset Google’s suspicion, but it will also make a royal mess of your content. Expect articles and pages that read with the fluency of a foreign language - one which will make no sense to the reader.

Keyword re-writing softwares are to remain burdened by limitations until a machine reader is invented that can understand human context. If I chuck a 500 word article in to a re-writing script, the chances are it will pass the duplicate content acid text. But once again, it will read terribly with robotic word-for-word replacements. And these alone can act as a giveaway to Google - especially if a nark sends a tell tale report Matt Cutts’ way.

So what can we do? How can we scrape content and stay both readable to humans and original to search engines?

The answer is to grab content that no longer exists. Content that no longer exists in the index of Google.

Think about it for a second. Google may be the one stop shop for information on the web in 2008, but what it can’t let you do is search like it’s 1999 all over again. Well, it can, if you dip in to the Google cache. 

Every day, gigabytes upon gigabytes of web content are dropping out of Google’s index. It could be for one of many reasons. The site in question may have been banned, it may have started using inaccessible code, or it may have fallen by the wayside with an expired domain.

Either way, that web content is there for the taking and we simply need to get to it to claim it as ours.

Archive.org is your new best friend. Acting as a library for web pages using capture technology of how they existed at a point in time, we can target de-indexed websites and recycle their content for own needs.

Now, there are many ways in which you can go about doing this. I’m going to suggest two of my personal favorites but if you put your imagination to use, there’s some fiendishly tight plans that can be rolled out to make a quick and substantial profit.

First of all, expired domain lists. What about them? Well, they give us a great starting point for finding content that’s about to fall out of the Google index.

Now, you’ll find many expired domain lists on the Net. My personal favorite is ExpiredDomains.com, which offers both a free search and a full paid service. You can use the free search to find expiring domains, but it’s worth the upgrade to get ahead of the game and to save time otherwise wasted analyzing redundant domains. 

Run a simple keyword search for sites related to the niche that you’re marketing. I might search “Spanish” and receive a list of Spain related expiring domains. From here, I’ll use the member tools to scrutinize which domains have PR and backlinks attached - usually a giveaway sign that there’s content parked on the site.

Happy that I’ve found a soon-to-be delisted website, I’ll run the URL through Archive.org and use the captured archive pages to scrape my content. You may wish to use a simple PHP script for this purpose and set it to grab all content from within a set region. Remember, the content you’re scraping could be from last week, last month or even last century. The crux is that its no longer going to get a duplicate content penalty from Google.

I now have 15 or 20 pages of highly targeted pages for my niche market which I can recycle and implement on my money site.

Next up, we want to be sure that the content we’re scraping hasn’t been moved or duplicated elsewhere. I’ll usually run my pages through a simple Copyscape test and if the results return unique, we’re good to go. Google will soon find the recycled content and treat it as unique - or at worst, assume that the pages have been moved given that there’s no other copies of them. 

We sit back and let our scraped content do wonders for our long tail search terms and just like that, we’ve saved ourselves potentially hundreds of dollars that would have been spent outsourcing articles to the far east!

I mentioned that I’d share my two favorite methods of “desert scraping” as it’s called, and you’ve just heard the first. 

Well, the second has worked a real treat for me and I’m not even sure I should give it away, but I will regardless and hopefully I can draw some attention with this first post!

We’ve touched on expiring domains, but where this form of scraping really excels is on directories and old article websites. Need I explain the potential riches in scraping a de-indexed article directory from, say, 2001? I have found hundreds and hundreds of niche article directories that were big five years ago.

These days they sit derelict in web archives having been de-indexed from Google and rendered invisible by long-expired domains. By grabbing the contents, I have been able to reproduce highly targeted niche websites which roll in the money handsomely with a little affiliate marketing on top.

Here’s the trick.

Find a nice big PR directory (if you’ve been around the SEO block, you’ll know thousands). Take the URL of the directory and chuck it in to a dead link checking tool. Let the script run. This will probably take a few minutes, but you’ll soon be given a report of the dead links on the website. 

Scan through the report and look out for 404 errors where the directory has linked to external third party sites. In no time at all, we have a huge collection of potentially derelict websites which are just waiting to be desert scraped.

If you’re really smart, you can automate this entire process using a simple PHP script. That’s one technique I WON’T be giving out here, but one that’s well worth the time looking in to.

Good luck!