This post is going to be pretty unusual for me and may well annoy many people but its a lazy Sunday morning and following a few conversations I have had this week I thought I would explain the theory behind building a scalable and distributed link network.

Sound useful? OK well settle in this is going to be a long and rambling stream of thoughts

OK so before we start lets lay out why and what we are looking to achieve here. If you take a look at the link profiles of any competing set of sites its almost always obvious that if they compete on terms beyond the home page they will be doing this from some manipulation of the anchor text pointing at their internal pages.

To manipulate this internal anchor text you need to be able to control what text people use when linking into your site and this means we have to: -

A: Find places that allow us to control the anchor text
B: Buy links
C: Have lots of sites under our control

Now sites that allow us to control the anchor text are either hard to come by or easy for any search algo to discount.
Buying links is costly and frowned upon (Ohh grow up its Googles fault you have to do it so get on with it )
Having lots of sites under your control is obviously a better option (We will do the maths as we go to show you that)

So how would one go about building a network of sites that we can have under our control?

Funny you should ask, I will share how I would do it (Not that I do this sort of thing

GOLDEN RULE
We DO NOT want any of these sites to be traced back to us in any way either detectable by the search engines algo OR by the manual spam teams

We are going to be able to control everything about these sites from our central control panel.
We are going to utilise very cheap hosting
We are going to outsource the content creation

Lets get started
We will first need to create a database on our central server

We need this database as we are going to send all the content out to the remote sites in our network as each page is called on the remote server. This will allow us to have complete control over hundreds or thousands of sites without having to log in and out or maintain CMS’s across lots of remote hosting accounts.

Here are the fields youll need for each table
First the table that holds our content for the sites
content_tb
This is the table that will hold our content for each page on the site

SiteID
SiteURL
Pagename
Pagetitle
Pagemetadesc (optional)
Pageh1
PageHTML
Datecreated
Live (y/n)
RedirectionType
RedirectionDestination

site_db
This table holds our sites and allows us to know when each one is due for renewal and also what fake whois we used to reg them with (Come on grow up )

SiteID
SiteURL
RegDate
ExpDate
WhoisName
WhoisAd1
WhoisAd2
etc
HostingCo
Costpermonth
Paidby
ftphost
ftpuser
ftppass

links_db
SiteID
Textmatch
LinkReplace
Live (y/n)

templates_db
siteid
templateid
templatecontent

OK you get the idea here – we are creating a database that will hold all our remote site details and also act as a database of the content on these sites as well as the links we will insert into them.

So now what we need to do is to get some sites.
We can buy some if you like or we can register some. Bear in mind though that if we reg some then this will become a longer term plan than buying them.
If you are registering them then please also make sure you give fake info for the whois (ON EACH DOMAIN) we do not want all the network to be traced back to us via who owns the damn things. It is fine if you want to register using the same credit card as this isnt public information (Unless there is a court case one day but thats not going to happen again…)

We will also want to potentially vary the registrar we use but thats more for paranoia reasons than practicality.

So lets assume you now have a bunch of domains we can use and you have added their details to the database. NB The database will be held on our central control site (Dont make this the same as your main domain, some site that is anonymous is great – think of it like a fake shop front on a gang bosses hideout)

Now we need somewhere to host them. We are going to use very cheap hosting. This makes our cost base low but means we will have to be creative on how we serve the sites.

Heres a search for cheap hosting on G

Loads of companies with prices like £5 a year or £1 a month. Most of these will be fine for us.

The minimum requirement for us is that the hosting deal we buy for each must be capable of: -

PHP
.htaccess
FTP access
Ability to call a remote file by file_get_contents (we have other options but…)

Most hosts will allow that lot though.

Got that? OK we are ready to go!

On each remote site we will be uploading one index.php file and a .htaccess file.
The index.php file will be our ‘handler’ and will respond to and deal with every request the remote site gets. The .htaccess will give the index.php file the ability to do that.

The way the flow works is this: -
Visitor comes to someremotesite1234.com
They request someremotesite1234.com/about_our_company.html
The .htaccess steps in and tells the server that index.php handles all requests for pages on this site.
The index.php page takes the full url and passes the domain and page to the central content server on our secret domain.
It passes: -
someremotesite1234.com
about_our_company.html

Now the central site takes over and pulls from the central DB: -
The content for this page and passes it through the link functions on the central server that will parse the content and add any links we specify centrally for this page.
Its also checks and finds the template that we use for the someremotesite1234.com domain and puts the content into this template.

The central site then returns all this as a finished page to the remote site that serves the page to the user.

Phew – still here?
That may sound very confusing but it really isnt if you have been doing this type of thing for a while. Bear with me and we might have an opportunity later to learn in more detail, for now this is just an outline of the system anyway.

So you may have noticed that we passed the content for this page on the central server through some functions that added the links if we had any.

The way that works the total string of content we had for the page requested is passed to a function that looks in the links table and checks for any text that matches a record in there.

So on our example the about_our_company.html page may have a paragraph like: -

At Johnson Brothers we have been serving the Coventry area for nearly 30 years, providing excellent customer service for anyone looking for holiday insurance. Contact us today if you would like us to arrange a quote.

This gets passed to the links function and it looks to see if it has any matches
In the links table we have specified that if on this page we see “for holiday insurance. ” we replace it with

This allows us to control all the content AND all the links for these remote sites through one central site.

The template simply allows us to create the site templates and layouts on our central server and therefore always only upload one standard index.php file to any new sites we create.

All that happens with the templates is when the page is called it also calls the template which looks a little like: -

And then the template functions simply replace the tokens @@token@@ with the content from the DB (Sidebar is just a loop through all the pages we have for this domain)

This way we can have a unique template for every site (NOT JUST UNIQUE CSS FFS) and we can project all coding styles – so we can have sites that look like they are wordpress powered, sites that are table based, sites that are plain css.

OK so thats the real basics of how we serve the pages.

How do we get the content?
We outsource it of course, we pay for paraphrased content.
Its important to note that these sites arent intended to rank well on their own and we arent creating content for traffic reasons we are merely creating content for the purposes of having a real looking organic site that will get indexed and can provide us with a link.

So we might have sites that talk about hobbies, pets, holiday guides, fake engineering companies, fake organisations etc etc

We will link build to the network as well as we go from sites NOT in the network itself.

RULES
Do not create sites with the same whois
Do not create sites on the same host
Do not create sites too close to any other site
Unique template on each domain
Unique content on each page
Do not interlink (If you do know what you are doing)
Do NOT leave footprints

Footprints are any way in which the search teams or algo can tie your network together.
Don’t put the same analytics on each domain (If you add Google analytics to any of these I will personally come round and shake you)
Don’t re-use the same templates
Don’t add the same structure or footer info

Trust me once you have had several thousand sites burnt all at once by Googles spam team youll learn that lesson.

Don’t add lots of links to each site

Bear in mind that it probably costs you somewhere north of £40 to place a paid link with a site and often this level of links means you get something on a sidebar or footer or added in a way that is easy for the search engines to detect and kill.

If you control it all you get links in the BODY of the content on sites that arent likely to be found easily and shouldnt be able to be tied together easily by the search teams.

Its also worth noting that the cost of these links is approx: -
Hosting / Year = £7.50
Domain / Year = £7.00
Content / Site = £15.00
Updates and Mngmnt = £ 5.00

£34.50 ish total per site

I am thinking of arranging a chat session somewhere for this if anyone wants to learn it in more detail.

Happy spamming.

Well its that time of year again where we all plan what we are going to tackle this coming 12 months…. sigh…

For this blog however we are going to see a change in the content.

Most of my personal ramblings will head off onto Posterous
This blog will be far more focussed on the following subjects: -

Practical SEO
Guides, tips, advice

Experiments
Some fun, some serious

And above all…

The business of making your living online

Automation
Outsourcing
How to’s

Anyway.. Thats the road we are headed on this year

I am happy to announce the launch of a free tool from SEOidiot, Twitter Brand Builder.

Its a basic version of a tool I use for clients in house that allows them to build followers and manage their Twitter accounts quickly and easily.

I am today giving away the free version to anyone who wants to use it on the understanding that it will be used responsibly.

I like Twitter and I have no interest in allowing people to abuse them, this tool however allows you to get your clients a head start in learning and building up their Twitter account so they get some quick wins.

I am requiring people to give me their email and contact details before you will be sent the scripts but enough with the lecture and lets get started on showing you what she does!

Twitter Brand Builder

The tool was designed as a way for the busy marketing department at a client to grow a following quickly and easily without having to throw all their resource at it and is designed to get you started… Having said that they overdid it a little and grew from 200 to over 14,000 followers in 6 weeks.

I think thats a little extreme but shows what it can do.

The basic idea is to allow the system to add the followers of people who follow you and then remove anyone who doesnt follow back.

When you upload the script here is what you will see

You have options then to manage your settings, good place to start.

Put in your Username and password (Dont panic they only get stored in an xml file on your server they arent sent to me)

You can also change the number of times the script queries the Twitter API if you need to (Twitter often lower this when they have peaks of traffic and we want to play nice)

Now each time you run Add more followers it will magically add around 100 people to your account.

After a week or so you may want to unfollow some of the people who dont follow back so we have an option for that too.

“But what if I have people I want to follow even if they dont follow me back?”

We thought of that too

By choosing the Manage Whitelist option from the homepage you can simply and easily maintain a list of people that you will continue to follow no matter what: -

Sound good?

All you have to do to get this FREE version of our tool is give me your email and I will send it over as quickly as I can.

Tool Withdrawn now sorry

Once you sign up I will send the tool with full and easy instructions on how to get started (Dont worry it takes about 2 minutes to get started!)

Please do not abuse this tool or I will withdraw it. We also have a more powerful tool in house for building and managing multiple accounts across defined interest areas and offer advice and training to clients and agencies wishing to use Twitter as part of your marketing mix or community strategy.

Thanks

Paul

Twitter really seems to be gathering pace lately and if your new to it or if you just want to increase your influence heres a few tips I have picked up: -

1. Use it
There is little point in expecting people to follow your tweets if you only log in once a week. It has to be part of your day to day.
“But I am too busy”
Stop whining its less time consuming that IM and forums and to be honest youll get more from it.

2. Dont be a robot
Whilst I do agree that using some automation is ok you need to make sure you keep it personal. Don’t set autoreplies, new follows shouldnt get a link promoting something.
Try not to announce a stream of crap that people arent interested in, new post announcements? fine but in moderation please.

3. Help people when they ask
If someone tweets a request for advice help them, they are far more likely to reach out to you with help or a follow if you do.

4. Be happy not aggressive
Personally I prefer to read people who post witty remarks and point to cool stuff rather than look at a torrent of tweets from someone with a grudge against the world.
“Found a great post on how to use Tweetdeck here”
Is better than: -
“On roof now with rifle, soon revenge will be mine”
“Voices in head telling me to shoot”

5. Use the tools to make life easier
Twitter via the web is pretty crappy, Tweetdeck is a far better tool that allows you to have a dedicated application running. I also suggest adding the people you really want to follow in a group in tweetdeck then just watching that group. Saves you from the chatter and therefore from the temptation to stop following people who tweet too much!

6. Follow those that use twitter well
Dont blindly follow someone who has 20,000 followers, youll be lost in the crowd. Follow those people who are in your industry and who retweet good things from their friends. They will hopefully do that for you one day too.

7. Be genuine and pay attention
If you really want to be followed make sure you pay attention to what those people say, participate in their sites, it has to be a two way thing.

8. Extend
Make sure you update your Facebook status from Twitter automatically, add your twitter profile link wherever you can. Make sure people know your on there, dont rely on them stumbling across you from a friend you follow.

9. Retweet
If someone tweets something great help them out and retweet it for them, its hardly effort is it? And its the nice helpful thing to do

10. Ask for help
Got a question – ask people. As long as its genuine people will help you and the more you connect the more you will benefit too.

Thats my 10 – have any more – add them in comments!

I miss the old days of creating made for Adsense sites then sitting back and watching the free money roll in. The reason most of us had to slow down from doing that was that Google started banning accounts for very soft reasons and taking all the money back.

But today they opened up a new way for us to get free cash…

Google have announced that they have opened up their Adsense for Domains to normal publishers

And now ill show you what I will be testing so you too can have some free Google cash…

One of the reasons why Google may have banned accounts in the past was that the traffic didnt have any referrer (so Google didnt know where it came from) or it took a spammy path to get to the ad page.

Now Google lets us chumps in their Adsense for domains programme we have some advantages again: -

They expect ‘undeveloped’ sites so we dont have to have anything other than a crappy holding page with reference to the domains subject
We dont have to create crappy MFA style content anymore
Many people reach parked domains through a simple type in method – thats where people type in something like “cheapcarinsurance.com” in the address bar rather than searching for it.
So we can ‘gather’ our traffic from any crappy source (spam spam spam) and then as long as we clean off the referrer we make it look like type in traffic

So heres the plan
Have a look through your domains or buy a new domain like iwantacheapmortgage.com
Put a parking message on the page that includes the line “i want a cheap mortgage”
Add Googles Adsense for Domains code.
Hope their targetting doesnt blow as much as it did
Send traffic from any spam you can through a page that ‘cleans’ it

I would also keep your CTR down to something low for a while as Parked domains will have a really low CTR – we will have to find the level that gets us in trouble..

Let me know how you get on but thanks to Google we are back in the Adsense easy money game..