Posted on March 31st, 2008 in Link Building
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Nickycakes started using twitter like a week ago, and already, the potential for using it to automatically build links to a site has become pretty obvious.
A few things to note when trying to game twitter:
- Twitter has millions of indexed user feeds. A simple search for site:twitter.com on google shows over 3 million.
- Writing applications to automatically post to twitter is super-easy. They even suggest doing it with their twitter api, which is easily done up in curl.
- Twitter no-follows links posted on your feed. If they are over a certain length, they are shortened to tinyurls. Even though they no-follow, there are websites that scrape and post all the twitter feeds that may or may not be do-follow.
- There are tons of applications that allow you to easily post to twitter, and when you use them to post, a do-follow link is shown to that application:
So how can we game this functionality for tons of do-follow links? Slightly involved process, but really not that hard.
In order to have your application name and link posted when your app is used for posting, you have to first create an app, and then submit the webpage for approval with the twitter staff. Any old app will do. Just make some crappy php code that can be embedded on peoples webpages that lets them post to their twitter or something, throw it up on a webpage to let people download it, and then submit it to twitter for approval.
After it’s approved, it’s pretty easy to write up a program in curl to create accounts, follow random people, post whatever. Make a few hundred/thousand accounts, and automatically post some random messages on them.
When you feel comfortable with the number of messages posted, use a 301 redirect on the page that you originally submitted as your application’s url, which will now be indexed on thousands of pages, to the page of your choosing, and watch the link juice bombard your site to the top of ze serps.
There are dozens of other ways to game twitter, and this is probably one of the more complicated of them. So get to work before it’s too late!
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Today, Nickycakes is releasing Linky. Linky lets you input an unlimited number of anchor texts and urls, and generate random interlinking between all the urls. No links will be reciprocal, there are no self-links, and no links are displayed twice on the same page. There are an even number of incoming and outgoing links to each page.
Once the script has generated a database of the links, you put a simple code on each of your pages that will automatically detect what page it’s on and display the proper outgoing links.
Anyway, there’s a readme file in the zip. Hope someone finds it useful. Nickycakes sure did. If it doesn’t work properly, just shoot the Cakes an email.
Download: linky.zip
Published by nickycakes //
When you visit a website, several pieces of information are usually recorded by that site. Your IP, Browser, and Referer address are a few of them. The Referer address is the address of the page you just came from. Most webmasters, from time to time, check their Referer log to see where their traffic is coming from. When they see traffic coming from a website they haven’t heard of, they go to check it out to see why this website linked to them.Using this to your advantage to build a little extra traffic for your site is easy. If you use Firefox (and you should, because IE is for morons), you can go grab a plugin called RefControl. Refcontrol allows you to overwrite the referer url that your browser normally sends to webpages with whatever you want. So just put in your site address and browse the web normally. Keep in mind that this will, in some cases, annoy the crap out of people, but if you know anything about Nickycakes, annoying the crap out of people is a benefit and not a drawback.
If you were so inclined, you could also write a curl script to go to random pages all day spamming your referer url all over the place. This will actually serve 2 purposes. First, as already mentioned, webmasters will check you out to see why you’re linking to them. Second, some statistics packages keep a public log of traffic, indexed by google. By spamming your referer all over the place, you will end up on some of these lists and generate backlinks for yourself. This is sometimes referred to as “Referer Bombing”.
And for the ultimate Rickroll, use http://www.internetisseriousbusiness.com as your referer at all times.
Published by nickycakes //
Want hundreds of relevant site-wide backlinks on ranked blogs with a few minutes of work? Yeah, we all do. If you know much about wordpress, you know that when you post comments, they are generally no-followed to discourage spam (this doesn’t prevent bots from trying to spam this site, however). But comment spam can generate tons of backlinks if done correctly. How? That’s where the Top Commentators plugin comes in.
So first, what is Top Commentators plugin?
From the wordpress site:
The Top Commentators Widget a sidebar widget to show the top commentators
in your WP site. Adapted from Show Top Commentators plugin at Personal
Financial Advice, this widget is easier to manage via the control form
(no need to edit the PHP file); additional options are also available to
make it more flexible. Read the FAQ section on how to customize the widget,
and take a look at the screen shot to see the control form for customizing
the Top Commentators Widget.
Basically it puts a widget on the sidebar of the site (generally displayed on every page on the site) that shows the names and website link of the top 10 people who have commented on the site for that day/week/month/year/whatever. Unlike the links put in normal comments, however, these links are not marked with nofollow, so they’ll generate solid backlinks in google.
Gaming top commentators for backlinks is pretty easy if you think smart about it. Fire up google, type in the niche for your site followed by “top commentators” and you should get a good number of on-topic blogs with the plugin installed. Tons of these blogs will have very few top commentators, depending on when the last time they were reset was, or how many people actually leave comments, and you’ll be able to leave a few crappy comments in 5 minutes or so and you’ll have sitewide links to your site for free. If it’s a popular blog, you’ll get a good number of visits from people clicking your stuff too.
So, the idea is not THAT complicated. So what can we do to make it easier than manually checking each link in google and then going and commenting. One piece of software that can help with this is CommentHut. Go grab the free version to try it out. The site looks like a spammy sales page (probably because it is) but the program does what it says it will. Basically you enter the keywords you want to search for on google (discussed above) and it will check all the results to find wordpress blogs, check their google pagerank, export them to csv, whatever. This should save you quite a bit of time. Here’s a screenshot of commenthut in action:
When you leave comments on blogs, keep in mind if you’ve never posed comments there before, they will probably have to be approved, so try to make them seem a little relevant to the post you’re spamming.
Anyway, enjoy.
Published by nickycakes //
Wikipedia sucks. Well, for bringing relevant, mostly accurate content, it’s awesome, but who wants to compete with that? Search for nearly anything on google and you will find a wikipedia article at or near the top result. Wikipedia is the bane of many a webmaster’s existence, making it near impossible to rank at the #1 spot in many google searches. The crafty, however, can use wikipedia’s popularity to their advantage. People have been doing this almost as long as wikipedia has been around, and they’ve brought about numerous changes to the way wikipedia does things. Wikipedia has added rel:nofollow to their outbound links for a while now, meaning that websites don’t get direct credit in google for any links from the site. The moderators have been cracking down really hard on spam links as well, and you’ll often find a spammy link removed within an hour. So what can you do to get wikipedia to work to your advantage?
Link Spam
Ok, nobody hates getting spammed more than Nickycakes. However, Nickycakes also loves to be hated, and the bottom line is, a link from a popular wikipedia article can bring you a metric fuckton of traffic if it slips under the radar and doesn’t get edited out. Don’t be flagrant and deface 100 wikipedia pages in an hour or anything, or you’ll just get them all removed by some mod. If you have a blog or something, maybe find a related wikipedia article once a day or every couple of days, and add a link to one of your pages in the “External Links” section, make it inconspicuous and format it like the rest of the links on the page, and hope it sticks. It is more likely your link will be removed from popular articles, so you don’t want to put your stuff on the page for China or something. Alternatively, you can just make your own wikipedia article if you can’t find one related, and then add links to that article from other related articles. This is all a bit basic and spammy, but it WILL get you traffic if you do it right.
So should you post with your home IP? Should you make an account? Well, you can post anonymously, but if you keep using the same IP, you will get banned. Fire up a proxy, or switch wireless networks, or public computers at your college, or whatever, and you’ll have more chances to have your links stick without being edited out.
Generating Real Backlinks
Ok, so as was mentioned earlier, wikipedia automatically nofollows all outbound links, so you don’t get credit from google. Other search engines give credit for nofollowed links, so it will help your rankings on those, for what it’s worth. But you will get natural backlinks from spamming your site around wikipedia eventually if the links stay for long enough and are relevant. There are plenty of wikipedia scraper sites out there which will happily pull your link and drop it on their site, and generally, if enough people visit the wikipedia page, they will use your link on their website as an accepted related article.
Ruin Someone’s Google Rankings
Ok, so this is really cruddy, but works pretty well. Basically you find a google keyword that someone you hate is ranking well for, say at #1. You find the wikipedia page of the related topic, spiff it up, add links to that wikipedia page from other wikipedia pages, which will increase it’s pagerank, and with a little luck, it will rise to the #1 rank in google for that keyword. This idea was discussed a while back on seomoz, and the Cakes found it hilarious.
Be a Trusted Moderator
If you want to get serious about messing with wikipedia, you will have to get a trusted account. This means either scouring wikipedia looking for vandalism, and adding correct information to other articles with the hopes of getting noticed and being given one or more of wikipedia’s worthless “awards”. If you’re too lazy to do this the hard way, just spam wikipedia with a proxy and then come along with your normal account and edit out the spam until you build yourself some respect. Holding a trusted account will allow you to make edits in your favor and be much more likely to get away with it.
Be Careful
If you overuse this, you will get banned from wikipedia. They have a big list of banned sites, and aren’t afraid to add yours. It has been rumored that you can get penalized by google for being on wikipedia’s spam blacklist, but you should be ok if you don’t overuse it.
Published by nickycakes //
