Black Hat Links – Anonymous

1. Google’s pagerank system benefits existing sites, not new ones

2. Google would tell you that “Blog Search” is designed for newer material, not the search index

3. All the obvious sites for backlinking are now “nofollow”, even if you’re manually creating white-hat “valid” backlinks

4. The web is just plain saturated with websites, which is nobody’s fault but even “long tail” terms are now highly competitive

5. Since everybody posts links on Facebook & Twitter, you’re less likely to get backlinks from other webmasters nowdays.

What this means to the average Joe:

1. Most white-hat link building that the average person does is nofollow

2. Most of the backlinks that other people create for you are nofollow

3. Most of the great “word of mouth” advertising is going to get lost in the mix on social networking sites

OK, so let’s say you make up the difference with Black Hat Stuff:

Scrapebox: You’re going to be posting either comments or trackbacks to WordPress & a few other blog engines. If you write the comments well, webmasters will approve them, but the success rate is maybe ~5%. The solution is to buy an AutoApprove list for $35 to $50 each, which lets you post 100,000+ comments or trackbacks at a time. They get automatically approved, but based on list quality typically only 50% make it though, usually from PR 1 to 3 sites. Of that 50%, only 5% of those links are do-follow, the rest are nofollow.

So for Scrapebox, you’re talking about $100+ software investment, plus $20 a month for proxies, plus $35+ for the first 2,500 do-follow backlinks, and a cost of 1.4 cents for each additional backlink after that. Plus, you’re dropping 100,000 comments for a net 2.5% success rate. So, if you want to talk about “Google inspiring linkspam”, this would be the case: estimate 1,000 guys in the USA do this once in a year, and you’re talking about 100 million spam backlinks. Presumably they wouldn’t be doing this kind of volume without the importance of pagerank or the nofollow link tag, but historically I’m not sure if that’s true.

 XRumer: This software contains a bot-net Trojan virus, but Black Hat SEO people use it regularly because it lets them drop “dofollow” links into forums. I personally believe that XRumer is the distribution tool for the giant DOS bot-net infections out there: it’s the perfect mechanism, because you’d want a tool that’s wildly popular and nobody will report when it causes trouble.

I don’t have much personal experience with XRumer, but I can tell you that it’s difficult to use, very expensive, and the people using it in forums are attempting to build pagerank for “domain spam” Adwords sites. So to reiterate, you’re downloading a virus to get a software program that only creates spam, and even its proponents recommend using only for sites you expect to get shut down after a couple of months.

AutoPligg: Used correctly, this isn’t necessarily a Black Hat tool, but nobody uses it correctly. It works reasonably well, but involves a lot of automated CAPTCHA cracking, so it gets expensive and since Pligg sites were affected by Panda there’s no assurance that the “dofollow” backlinks have value anymore.

SE Nuke X: This is used primarily for linkwheels, and seems to have decent results. It’s more expensive – high monthly cost, and about $3 in CAPTCHA codes per run. The links have higher value, but it’s only creating about 200 links per run. Nuke seems to work reasonably well, but it takes several Nuke runs to have an effect. If you’re running a larger site, it might be worth running it on a per-page campaign basis, but it won’t have much effect for promoting an entire website.

~Anonymous