Scrapebox Spammers: You're Doing It Wrong
That's right, you are. But first, a badass Warning graphic because quality content isn't just about flowery prose and keyword stuffing anymore.
WARNING: THIS POST IS GOING TO PISS OFF A LOT OF "SEOs"!!!
And I'm alright with that. Because you idiots are pissing me off with your constant mis-use of one of greatest SEO tools ever made. And possibly more important than ending up on my shit list, you've become the lowest common denominator of link spammer...maybe.
photochop courtesy of blokblok
The credit card dump and camwhore forum posting xrumer guys deserve a special spot in internet hell too, but I'm sure more than one happy union has grown from those links being dropped, while your hitting every page on a wordpress install with the same poorly spun comment + link drop truly creates nothing of value.
Even worse, it appears (and truly is) completely amatuer. You're the egg on the face of the automation SEO community. And it's past time to stop. If I end up outing you or your lame ass SEO tactics with this post, too bad. You should be more careful who you comment spam.
Because I care, I'll assume it's not simply abject stupidity that led you down this road but said lack of cognitive intellect combined with a lack of proper instruction. What's that? Speak engrish? Big words hurt head? Fine...I'll dumb it down for you.
I.AM.GOING.TO.SHOW.YOU.HOW.TO.BE.LESS.OF.AN.IDIOT
And possibly improve your rankings while I'm at it. But I'll probably berate you some more first..
Let me backtrack a bit first though, as I can already hear some of my readers:
Grind, wtf with the holier than thou bullshit stance? I know you dropped more scrapebox comment links than Dead Heads (and phish heads too) dropped acid, why you fronting?
Full disclosure mode: You're right. I did. Mega volume link drops. Back in 2009. When it worked...when it worked well at least.
And I only brute forced comment drops (what you tards are doing when you try to drop the same shitty content on all indexed pages for a single site) a couple times (and even then, only hit multiple pages on a target site if I was linking to a property tier, blasting your money site out to every page on a site is just SOFA KING STUPID!) until I realized there had to be a better way. There is. And the fact that some of you haven't figured it out 3 years later...well, frankly, I'm embarrassed for you, and you're embarrassing anyone who calls themselves a SEO by continuing to pepetrate this behavior.
Here's the thing: SEO changes constantly. Google changes the rules on us all the time so the algo can't be gamed (consistently). So are using techniques that worked well in 2009 and into early 2010 really going to help you in todays SEO landscape? And is irritating every webmaster with a wordpress install on a constant basis going to help ingratiate SEO automation into acceptable practices? Not likely on both counts. One of my shared servers got hit so hard with comment spam that the automated emails wordpress sends out pushed my resource usage above the allocated limit, causing my host to threaten to take me offline. Easy enough fix, disable email notifications on pending comments.
But Grind, why were you getting emails sent anyway?
Because of the inherent stupidity coupled with laziness of many "SEOs", those comments are gold, when used correctly. I'll get to that shortly.
First, here's how NOT to use comment spam:
So we've got a bunch of the typical standard fare "oh hai, i love your website the worstest, it's great, cured my dogs herpes after reading this, http://PleaseDieInAFire.com" fake compliment + link drop type comments, some horribly spun bullshit, and to top off the spam de jour, a little domain kiting + viagra spam. Screenshot is only missing something about how my website doesn't display properly or my feed link is brokebacked and we'd have hit the holy spam trinity.
Moving on, remember when I mentioned email notifications? I could accomplish the same thing by logging in and grabbing spam comments manually, but gmail nests them up so nicely, expand all and you've got a whole slew of target rich environments at your fingertips. For this example, I just used comments that have shown up on this blog post over the last couple weeks.
Via the red highlighted section above:
Oh wow, 7 results, how impressive!
Fine, let's check out another comment, one of many from a site that has spammed this blog no less than 40 times since it's recent inception.
Oh what, you're a real black hat? You poop 4180 links before breakfast and you need something of substance to tide you over? Need a pallet full of canned spam?
How you like me now? Getting the picture? I found these footprints in the first page of my spam comments. In fact, in the first five I checked, I found more than enough potentially comment spam friendly locations. Sure, you're going to be sharing those PR0 link drops with 1000 other comments (I'm not that hot at math but 0/1000 doesn't push the needle much, I'll take low OBL links all day every day plz) but at least you're:
So what now? You're feeling properly chastised because I showed the shame in your game and you want to move forward? Great, stay with me.
Option 1: Quit brute forcing link drops. Use the examples I showed above to find comment friendly drops. Filter them by PR and OBL, use the high PR and low OBL ones direct to your money sites, use the other ones to your tier 1 links. Still not what post Penguin SEO calls for, but gawdammit, you're a scrapebox spammer and you're not gonna give it up. I understand. Option 1 is better than what you've been doing. Kudos for realizing that and moving forward.
What's that? You're not sure how to harvest all 3.6 Million results from that last footprint? You already got scrapebox (obviously), you should have some fast ass private proxies, you have the footprint, now you just need something to get you over 1000 results from good old Googs. And that's keywords. Which ones you say? All of them...find a dictionary list, break it up into chunks (if you care about not reconfiguring your banned proxies constantly), dial in your connections:proxy ratio (not telling, don't ask, this isn't some $7 ebook) and get busy. Randomly ran the keywords I already had entered, came up with a few targets.
Rinse and repeat until your thirst for salty meat in a can is quenched.
Option 2: Automate white hat link building. Use scrapebox not for link spamming (it's not called SpamBox for a reason, ladies) but for what it truly excels at, finding and sorting massive amounts of data in a short time. What kind of data? All of it...
Seriously though, if you want to rank well right now, you need relevant links from quality sites. Guest blogging is an easy way to do that. So are reciprocal link exchanges (wtf Grind, is it 2006 up in hurr again? Sadly, it appears like it just might be...) with relevant sites. There are a ton of ways you can use scrapebox to help you rank, but being a lazy ass toolbag isn't one of them. Not anymore. Sorry bros, that ship sailed. Adapt or sink.
Back to guest posts, this isn't how I'd power scrape these targets but for speed of finishing this fucking War and Peace style epic tome of crap sometime soon, and illustrating my point, it works.
You now have a list of sites that more likely than not will take a guest post (or be amiable to other SEO related outreach) that you can contact via their contact form or email. What? Short on time? Too lazy to visit the sites and fill out the contact form? You could either scrape for contact form pages on those sites (not 100% successful, some will be lightbox) or for quick and dirty data management, just grab the emails from the ones with publicly posted email addresses and send them a quick introduction email regarding your (lack) of qualifications to write a guest post for them.
There you go, 1400 wasted words on how not to be the bottom feeding ass clown of the SEO industry. For the minute few of you who actually listen, kudos. Your ranks will improve, you'll be less of a nuisance and maybe just possibly, this little exercise in thinking outside the box will open your eyes to more creative methods of using automation in your SEO efforts. For the rest of you, I'll see you in my SPAM folder.
Cheers,
Grind
P.S. Expecting some guru shit here? Looking for the $7 ebook link? Maybe next time. There's always the seo consulting page until then.
P.S.S Final full disclosure mode: I still use blog comments for SEO purposes. I just don't use scrapebox, hit wordpress sites (you think after 99.9% of ALN sites being on wordpress, there's no platform filter? #smh), link drop on moderated sites with generic comments, or use any tools you can buy publicly. This doesn't make me better than you, just smarter. Adapt or sink, boys. It's not 2009 anymore.
