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Old 10-13-2010, 04:46 PM  
harvey
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tutorial: make the spammers work for you!

This tutorial comes after some discussion on here regarding traffic, subdomains, Google and what not. As I promised there, I had an idea for a tutorial and here it is, hope it helps you all

So, we were working on this site, for which we did an ultra customized site working on WPMU engine. The ultra customized part isn't really important, the thing is you'll need to use WPMU or WP 3.x Multisite (see some instructions on how to do it here). This site was a full community setup which communicated in real time with tube section users (it was Mechbunny's script which we had to customize for this), webcams, dating and such. Of course, an adult site. And of course, we offered space for blogs for community members.

So, what happened? After 2-3 days, I started noticing most users were spammers creating non-adult pages selling any kind of mainstream product you could think of. At first, we deleted them at sight. Then, we simply killed them with an auto-ban script we wrote. But then I was checking stats and noticed many of those pages were having traffic. Nothing important, but anything from 10 to 50 unique visitors a day. So I took down the auto-ban script and analyzed the traffic, tendencies, results and everything I could measure. And then I noticed this: these spammers were helping this site ENORMOUSLY. We got loads of pages listed, we got a PR3 in 2 months and mainly we got traffic to our main page. 2, 3, 5, 10 unique hits a day, which multiplied by 1000s of pages added up to a pretty nifty amount of traffic.... FOR FREE!

Furthermore, these spammers were ranking high for long tail keywords, so I simply build a few special themes with nice headers/footers and auto-included the latest posts of the MAIN PAGE into their themes and the latest videos in the tube section were added in the footer. Ka-Boom! we went 0 to 20000 unique visitors a day without buying a single hit, 100% organic.

The best part is that those spammers work on a linkwheel scenario, so we had traffic and links coming from many sources and IPs. A win-win situation that only required a good server (which we had) and a simple straight-forward change of philosophy: instead of killing the spammers, let the spammers work for us.

Of course, I assume you can imagine further scenarios, like letting them build the traffic and then redirect everything to your main page, or even visiting their sponsors and change links to yours. As long as they are breaking your TOS, you can do whatever you want. But be careful: maybe being greedy will hurt you more than what it will help you, try to research the traffic and if they're providing you with good decent traffic, maybe you should let them do what they want. As I said, it's a change of philosophy and a win-win situation, so, why fix what is working?

Anyway, just try it and lmk how it worked for you!

btw, you can see more tutorials at http://www.fdsign.com/evolution and if you want only marketing tutorials you can go to http://www.fdsign.com/evolution/tag/marketing/
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