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/

Sure, you could try to make the spammers work for you. Maybe the spammers are humans. Maybe the spammers are robots. Maybe the spammers are search engine spiders. Try to make them visit the pages you want. Perhaps you want links added to a directory or link dump or something.

Yeah I had a forum where this happened as well. I built it and forgot about. I would go back from time to time and delete the spammers and every time I did the traffic dropped. Problem here is they were posting porn on a mainstream.

Nice work man, spam 4L.

Couldn't figure out what you were talking about until I reread it and finally clued in that you were allowing people to have their own free hosted blogs on the site.

Harvey!!!!!!!!!

Hey, do you happen to have a blog template laying around..that someone didn't pay you on???

happily, no! :1orglaugh

but if you need something fast, lmk and I can shoot something for you :)

btw, coming to BA anytime soon?

my Engrish PWNS you! :pimp

Superb answer and nice informative (but brain hurting initial post) :thumbsup

is really that difficult? I know that when I write in a hurry my Engrish goes bananas, but after re-reading it I see some changes to be made, but nothing that makes it non understandable . But well, I wrote it, so maybe that's why I understand it! :1orglaugh

Anyway, if someone wants to "translate" it, be my guest, the idea is to help anyone that needs it

good tip! :)

ok, I'll hit you up tomorrow.

I'm not going but Johnny is, he leaves on Fri..

"Brain hurting" doesn't mean (or is not intended to mean in my case) that something is badly written or is difficult to understand, merely that it requires and deserves more concentration and thought than a typical post (especially here).

There is nothing wrong with the English in the post, hence my "nice informative post" comment.

Harvey, what is your icq?

I hit you up. Hit me back @ 111-914

104870192 but it's better to contact me by mail webmaster + fdsign + com since many people has problems contacting me on ICQ, sometimes they don't see my posts, sometimes I don't see theirs :disgust

Sounds like your WPMU fell victim to LFE.

Nice read :thumbsup

No link in this bit
but I suppose if someone can't find out how to enable multisite then they are too stupid to do the rest.

When you go through all the LFE hosts, you see quite a few that are set up to let spammers take advantage of them (with tons of ads in the templates etc)

The only thing that disturbs me a little is that you seem to be placing adult related content on a page that the spammers are targeting mainstream traffic to?

ah, I copied it from the post on my site, it's at http://www.fdsign.com/evolution/main...-work-for-you/

in fact it's the exact opposite. It was an adult site and spammers used non-adult pages

no kidding :winkwink: anyway, they may feel free to do that, as you may read on this post, I don't care at all as long as they build my traffic for free :1orglaugh

I wouldn't know anything about that. :2 cents::winkwink:

Spammers also have feelings you know...

sooo get a wpmu and let spammers setup blogs...did i miss something but didnt twan already do that?

no idea who twan is, lol . But read carefully and you'll see that letting spammers setup blogs is just the tip of the iceberg :2 cents:

Yeah, so you're placing adult headers and footers on a site they're sending mainstream traffic to...? Or am I misunderstanding?

of thumblogger and sensualwriter fame...you lost me at read carefully getting me to read that much once is a chore

Great post but I would suggest there's a WIN WIN here. As long as they aren't promoting PHARMA or FLOGs, a win win can be arrived at. They provide link love and traffic, you provide the space they build one spoke of their link farms on. If anyone wants a CHEAP link farm built, hit me up :)

im still lost maybe i need some protein in my diet today...

Depending on the theme they chose, yes, although only text and in footer and sidebar (not headers). And even more the mos retarded surfer in history, it was pretty clear they were going to see adult content. And based on that, I can say they chose to as a vast majority. But anyway, it's not my fault if they chose to invade an adult site with mainstream content. After all, if I submit a picture or a video of Winnie the Pooh to an adult site and people visits it from Google, who is at fault? The idiot that uploaded the video or the site?

Now, I know you're trying to pick on something that really has no much discussion. You're free to use it or not, I just added this as help for anyone who wants to get some traffic and I'm not getting anything off this. Furthermore, out of the objective situation of traffic itself, I find more interesting the fact that a change of view on generally accepted paradigm sometimes helps you more than what it may hurt you. You can take from this whatever you want.

omg man plain engrish you should maybe condense things some but i follow i think

if my Engrish annoys you, please correct me so I learn :)