Black Hat SEO: Exploiting the Dumb Masses to Make a Profit

by ilikenwf

A steady income is necessary these days, especially for geek/hacker types.  With all the wonderful devices and hardware upgrades that come out every day, we tend to spend great deals of money to keep our technology addictions satisfied.  That said, a supplement to the wallet is welcome, right?  If you know your way around the Internet, there is a pretty simple way to make decent amounts of money online.  The only things needed are PHP skills, a good host, some domains, and ignorant people lazily surfing to your sites.  With these things combined, you're ready for black hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

What is It?

Black hat SEO is the practice of putting up automated content rich websites.  Once up and running, the goal is to get them indexed for a set of niche keywords.  Once indexed in the search engines for these keywords, a black hat SEO will place advertisements or sneaky redirects to affiliate offers in strategic areas on the sites.  The goal is to gain as many clicks and/or sales as possible from the unwitting users who visit.  Some people manually set up each site, one at a time, in order to avoid footprints that Google and its ilk are able to see.  Such footprints can get your sites removed from search engines' indexes very quickly.  I usually use WordPress, as there are easily modifiable templates out there which can help blend your sites into the blogosphere, and many plugins that provide SEO functions to get your sites indexed quickly are readily available.  There are specialized products, which I won't name, that are available for purchase to allow automation on a gigantic scale.  These usually have detectable footprints, unless they are designed to mass install a product and not actually create the sites.  Even then, sloppiness can leave footprints that end up getting all of your sites get removed from the indexes.

Set It Up

Assuming you have a good web host, the first step is to set up your Content Management System (CMS) on a domain.  Pick a domain that fits the niche you want to aim your site at.  You can use subdomains or set up folders within a domain in order to serve as multiple sites, although one site per domain will keep your sites indexed for a longer period of time.  Investigate keywords related to your site's topic, and try to find some that are often searched for, but which yield no to few search results.  Insert keywords into the content areas and meta tags on all of the site's pages.  Once this is complete, totally tweak the look of your site.  Modify an existing free template, or create one of your own.  Photoshop together some semi-good graphics and slap them up there while you're at it.  Assuming you are using WordPress, you should make sure to install WP-O-Matic, a plugin that converts RSS feeds into posts, allowing keyword rewriting.  Other WordPress plugins which are geared specifically toward SEO, such as the automatic meta tag generators, which are highly recommended.

Automatic Content

When your site is running live and looking good, find several RSS feeds off of sites related to your niche, and plug them into WP-O-Matic.  Use the replace function on all of them as a precaution to swap out common keywords, so that your content appears to be unique.  Make sure to set up a cron job to call one of the many free PHP ping scripts hourly, to publicize your pages and get them indexed.  Make sure to use a ping script that is on your server and which sends the RPC requests from your server.  This keeps your site from being reported as spam to the search engines by services like Pingoat.

Try to get backlinks to your sites by either outsourcing or manually submitting to a few hundred to a few thousand link directories.  Be gradual when building links to make the accumulation of these links appear natural.  The more links to your site, the higher in the search engine rankings your pages will appear.  If you feel like being extremely evil, you can find and use tools to mass spam links on forums, comments, or by using cross-site scripting.  Be careful when you do this!  These programs and scripts are easy to find, and I assume that 2600 readers are quite capable of finding them on your own.

Get Indexed and Monetize

The only step left is to wait.  There will always be a few of your sites that don't get indexed very quickly or at all by one or more search engines.  Sometimes it takes a long time in the slower-crawling engines that aren't as popular as Google to add new sites.  When you have a minimum of 100 results in at least one major search engine, put affiliate offers or pay-per-click advertisements on all the pages.  For affiliates, either embed the offers, or use cloaking scripts to send all non-spider visitors to a sales page.  Use an IP filter coupled with a user agent checker script.  For pay-per-click advertisements, make sure to place the ads strategically so that they are in places that users are likely to click.  The best areas are around the right-hand scroll bar, as well as in the dead center of the page.  Use multiple ad networks to avoid footprints search spiders can use to identify and remove your sites from their indexes.

From there, repeat on more sites.  If you feel brave, you can put a Google custom search up for each of your sites, as they allow you to plug in your AdSense ID for search result advertisements, and you can specify what sites your custom search includes.  Remember that you can put more sites on subdomains or in folders, or buy 99 cent .info domains for each of your black hat sites.  Once you get black hat SEO with WordPress down to an art, you can graduate to more advanced methods that involve cron jobs galore, mass installers, markov engines, and other ways of scraping content, or just keep doing what works for you.  Whatever happens, good luck, and be careful!

Notes

A good way to get traffic is to participate in StumbleUpon exchanges on the Digital Point Forums.  This works for both white hat and black hat sites.

Digital Point also has a free co-op advertising network going, in which one earns credits by displaying other people's advertisements, and can in exchange advertise their sites.  This is great and can provide many hundreds of free backlinks when your site gets significant traffic.

This practice is currently not illegal anywhere that I am aware of.  Spamming via email advertising is illegal in many ways.  Let's be careful so that this doesn't get outlawed as well.

AdSense is really strict and will ban your websites if they determine them to be "spammy."  Use PeakClick first, then use AdSense when you have several sites.  If you wish to use one ad network, have a PHP script that only displays your advertisements and their code to real users, and not to the search engine bots.

Another good way to make some money off of your sites is to install the TextLinkAds advertising script.  This script, which by design is carefully hidden from search bots, can either display contextual links or old fashioned links on your sites.  They are also working on a pay-per-click network, among other new monetization methods.

At the time of writing, new members are currently not allowed to join, but in the future, NetAudioAds provides another avenue in which you get paid for every real user by having audio-only advertisements play for five seconds when they visit.  Annoying, but effective.

I know many other methods, and tools, but I can't mention them by name, as I don't wish them to become useless in my efforts to turn a profit.  Discover them for yourselves.  It isn't that hard if you can find the right dark corner of the Internet.

If you can add some form of usefulness to any of your sites, do so, as it will attract traffic and dispel spam hunters from reporting you to the search engines.

Useful Sites

Syndk8 is the definitive resource for black hat SEO.  Register, and learn from the masters.

Bluehat SEO has many useful posts that describe link building, and a pay service to get indexed quickly.

Digital Point Forums is a Whitehat site, but can be useful for our own twisted needs.

PHP Ping Script  Copy it to your server, get the RPC ping list from Syndk8, modify it to fit your purposes, and use a cron job to have curl visit the URL of the ping script every hour or so.

YACG - Yet Another Content Generator is a great tool that builds sites automatically, pulling from various content sources and markoving them.  Make sure to modify or build a new template!  See the forums to learn about footprints and add-ons for further usefulness.