Monthly Archives: May 2009

Interview with Sam The Link Spammer

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15

Here’s a really old article from The Register:

Interview with a Link Spammer

It’s from 2005 but it’s still really relevant. A few points of note:

  • ‘Sam’ is a link spammer. He spams websites and blogs with text to pump up the search engine rankings of sites pushing PPC.
  • He’s not some 16 year old kid. He’s 32. That makes him 36 now.
  • He writes automated scripts to comment spam en-mass.
  • He uses open proxies to avoid detection
  • Apparently results 8,9,10 have better conversion rates than 1,2,3
  • He earns a 7 figure salary doing this. That’s a MILLION up!
  • It’s completely legal. Link spam is different from email spam. It’s hard to argue the difference between a person using a computer to post a comment, and a person using a computer to use a computer to post a comment

Me and ‘Sam’ share some similarities. We’re both in the SEO business. We’re both hunting for links back to our sites to increase their SERP. We both comment on blog posts. Here’s where this guy and myself differ tho. Sure it is legal, but ethically what ‘Sam’ does sux. The fact that it is all automated means that he leaves the same or similar comments on all blog posts.

  • I take the time to read the posts
  • I manually make my comments and try to add value. The way the blogger actually wants by allowing comments in the post.

Sure you can make a million bucks doing what he does, but I think he crosses the line between good and evil. Don’t be a bloody spammer that everyone hates. Be a commentor that everyone loves to have on their blog.

Make Money Online

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5

There are so many ways to make money online, it’s like a bottomless pit. Every day millions of new people come online and the market just keeps growing. Whilst it isn’t for everybody, I recommend it to all my friends to give it a go and see if they like it. The best thing about making money online is that there is almost zero start up capital and more often than not, zero barriers to entry. Gone are the days where you need to spend thousands to get a shop front, physical inventory,.. and god forbid – staff! The only thing you spend is your time. If you fail at it, all you’ve lost is hours of sleep.

Do you fit the profile of a webpreneur?

  1. you hate working 9-5 in the ofice
  2. you’re bubbling with ideas
  3. you work well in isolation
  4. you always thought you were destined for better things

The blueprint for making money online

Whilst there are endless ways to do it, it all boils down to variation of this

  1. have a product or service you want to promote
  2. have a medium to promote your chosen product/service
  3. have customers to promote to

Yep, it’s as simple as that. You might be saying ‘derr’? Tell me something I don’t already know. Well it’s the intricacies and understanding each of these three areas that set the newbies from the pros. How do you pick a winning product? What kind of a site should you build? How do you start an email list? How do you attract visitors? The best thing about making money online is that you don’t need to be a pro to start. The best advice I can give is simply just to dive straight in a start. You will probably fail a few times as I have but the key is that you will have learnt a whole heap and, like I said at the start, you will have lost nothing but sleep.

The reward for such little ‘capital’ investment is HUGE.

  • You get to work for yourself
  • You get passive income. Websites are 24/7 so your money should be rolling in when you sleep.
  • You grow a network of friends online
  • You actually achieve something. And in some cases, its something you can show off to friends :)
  • You will actually want to wake up and go to work

So how much can you actually make?

I’m not one to divulge on my own earning (there’s enough of those on the net already) but I will say that I make enough to pay my bills and more. To be honest, though, when I first started I was making less than $5 a week. But you know what, those were the best five bucks I have ever earned in my ‘real’ offline jobs.

Just to do it!

DoFollow Search Engine

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20

Content may be the king, but links are the currency of the web. Over the years, I’ve made some good money by building up links to my websites. The easiest way to do this was with blog commenting. Blogs are naturally content rich and google loves content rich sites, especially ones with continually fresh updates. Following this strategy easily put my sites on the top of the SERPs. When google brought in the nofollow tag, my blog commenting strategy had to be tuned to only comment on those blogs that did not use this tag. This is about the time when I thought it would be neat to have a dedicated dofollow search engine. DoFollow blogs are rare (in comparison with the billions are total blogs in the bloggersphere) but they exist.

What is the dofollow search engine?
Basically, it is just like any other search engine except it only brings back results from a special index of sites I’ve deemed as dofollow. Using the search engine saves time by only bringing back blogs posts related to your specialty. So say you have a site about iPhone apps, you can do a search on ‘iPhone’ and read up on what other bloggers are saying. This will mean that you will have more to comment on since it is an area you know well and it will also add relevancy to your links as the content of the post will be related to your site’s niche.

My comment policy
People naturally think that I’m a comment spammer. Whilst I may have strayed from time to time, I try to add value to the post by voicing my opinion. If I do not have anything of value to say, I simply move on to the next article or blog. This is also what I encourage other people to do. Comment spamming will only push bloggers to rethink their dofollow policy. If you are able to add useful comments though, you will not only be rewarded with some link juice, you will have helped out a fellow webpreneur feel good about themselves – well I certainly do when I receive a comment :)

Why do people have a dofollow blog
Having a dofollow blog can be a good strategy for fresh blogs. I for one, only have dofollow blogs on my rss. Unless you’re techcrunch or gizmodo, I don’t bother keeping up to date with your blog unless you give me some link juice for my time :P .

Your search engine is crap. It’s littered with nofollow blogs!
Unfortunately, there are bloggers out there who opt out of the dofollow program and change their blog back to nofollow. Checking blogs is currently a labourious manual task and I have no doubt that their are blogs in my list need to be weeded out. Please take a moment of your time to help out and contact me about these nofollow blogs that should be removed from the index.

I have a dofollow blog, can you add me in?
Sure thing! Just use my contact me page and buzz me with your sites details and I’ll drop by to verify your blog before I update my index.

Okay, enough argy bargy, where is your search engine?
I’ve made a special page to house the search engine. It is powered by google and only brings back blogs from my specifically constructed dofollow blog index :)