I’ve just finished reading Eli’s last post, SEO Empire part 1. This was an very interesting post, but I see a few holes in the strategy.
Every Site Must Pay It’s Own Rent.
A quote repetated several times in the post, is that every site must pay it’s own rent. This means that the income from every site you make must be able to cover the cost of the domain and hosting, to be profitable. By adding, for example, adsense you your site, your leaving “footprints” on your site. These footprints makes it a hell lot easier to discover your little empire and makes it just as easy to close it down again.
There have been cases recently where Google banned entire networks of sites. Thousand of sites disappeared in just a blink, not just individual sites like Eli implys in his post. Hidding your WHOIS information and setting up your own server won’t do the trick, specially after Google became a registrar. They will still be able to find out who you are, and what your doing.
Following Eli’s strategy, you will probally not be making a long and stable income. You’ll have to always stay on step ahead of Google, something that gets harder every day. I’m not saying this stuff isn’t working, I’m pretty sure it works damn well. But I don’t think that a total noob, why have to learn programming and a lot of other basic stuff to get started with this, will be able to have an empire running before google launches some argo’s that screws this strategy from behind.
What would work then? Well, you could focus on working on a site that would last longer than a month or two. Find a niche you like and can talk alot about, and get started. If you still want to try some blue/black/grey-hat strategies, be sure do seperate your white and legit stuff from the grey. I can’t stress this enough. Never ever leave any footprints from your white stuff on your grey stuff. I might not get you punished there and then, but who knows what the future bares with it? My advice is to register a company on Seychellene (for europeans) and Bahamas (for americans), and work all your grey stuff from there. Register all domains, server and everything you’ll have to leave contact information from to the “grey company”.
Hidding from Google
Hidding from Google, and leaving footprints that might prove that you run some kind of dirty network, is a very clever thing if you want to make it. There are currently four things you have to be careful about when building a network you want to keep under the radar:
- Analytics
- Adsense
- Webmaster Tools
- Whois information
Once again, seperate your businesses.
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Agreed! As with you, Im sure it works, but jesus it seems like a pretty difficult way to get some crappy ROI. I think a newbie who wants to black hat it up would be better off starting with eli’s RSSGM post and maybe moving from there to the holy grail of cloaking.
Hi there,
You are right. For a total newbie, it would be to damn time consuming. This tricks wouldn’t work by the time the newbie is ready to launch.
I read Eli’s post. It was very interesting. Although I’m not a total newbie when it comes to php and mysql, it would take me ages to write all required scripts to put the empire at work. But who knows? I might try it some day
This is not something you can make in a day, so unless your a pro in this “game”, your allready to late!
There are ways to get around these problems.
You don’t have to use adsense, you could use other cpc networks for the “black”/”gray”-hat sites, or cpm, or cpa, or affiliates (cps)…
How could google see what sites you have if you hide your whois? If you’re really concerned, use uni.cc/afraid.org/us.tt -type domains or wordpress subdomains or free hosting accounts or etc. for your BH sites.
The strategy is mostly based on “upward linking”, so if one site type stops working, start making different kinds of sites and make them look GH/WH. Make something that looks like a wikipedia or an about.com.
I do agree that it’s a good idea to separate your blackhat sites from your whitehat sites. But if you put some work into templates and content, you can make GH sites look better than most stuff in the link exchange directories, and they don’t seem to have any trouble with getting banned by Google.
here’s how I make tons of money:
have a 4 pages landing site on a niche with cloaked affiliate links in it.
Spend $1 on adwords to get traffic to make $2. Turn traffic volume up.
Rinse and repeat.
I discover one of these every month by trying one of these each day. I average 29 failures per one victory.
I now own 2 dozens ‘victories’. I only need about 10 to make a confortable living, the others are for fun.
I ain’t stopping the search, nor am I going to learn how to code.