Cashing in on Prohibited Content

Posted on April 10th, 2008 in Cloaking, PPC Search a-little-bit-naughty, Cloaking, guest post, ppc

If you're tired of refreshing this page every day like a d-bag, you should probably subscribe to the RSS feed.

The following is a guest post by XMCP of SlightlyShadySEO - the debatably Blackhat SEO and marketing blog.

The PPC market is becoming saturated. There is little doubt of this. Where initially the promise of local search results and adwords gave us the promise of an expanded market, even that is slowly filling up with advertisers. So when it comes to marketing, how do we go about cashing in on previously untouched niches?

Simple. We break the rules.

Note: Be smart about which account you use, and where. And how they’re connected. What I talk about here may lead to an adwords/superpages/msn/yahoo/whatever ban. Don’t bitch at me about it. Get a fresh account before trying this.

There’s a few ways to go about this, largely dependent on the review process that the companies put our ads through, and their level of advancement. Some methods are only available to people with programming knowledge, some are easy.

The Artistry of the Ambiguous Ad
While we normally concentrate on trying to tell the user at least what our product IS in our 2 magical lines, this approach requires more tact. Trying to sell viagra(depending on local legalities)? It’s not viagra, it’s “Give Her A Night She’ll Never Forget” “Just because you’re not ‘gifted’ doesn’t mean you can WOW her”. Remember that if we do successfully get our ad listed in a vertical that is normally banned, there should be little competition, so the clicks are cheap, and we can afford to lose a few users that are not getting exactly what it is they’d look for.

Dealing with Banned Keywords
Outright banned keywords, not subject to manual review, are the greatest issue when trying to get these ads in. We’re forced to go for more “related” terms. Selling bongs? Try “munchies”,”dugout”, or “roller”. You can send them to the “rollers” page, just make the bong page evident. Will CTR blow? Yeah. But you’re reaching your target audience. Beyond that, go for brand names. While a lot of things are banned as a product name (bongs on adwords), you stand an infinitely higher chance of cashing in on words like “roor” (a brand name) or “green star” (another brand). Will your ad stand up to manual review? Nah. But really, that can be handled in…the NEXT section. Oh yeah, and I’m not sure if “roor” or “green star” are banned, but know this trick works in at least 3 other topics.

Now to get a little technical….

Dealing With Human Reviewers - No matter what Mahalo says, manual reviewers are SO much easier to fool than automatic reviewers. They generally will come from the same IPs, occasionally have referrers, and normally it’s a 1-time review. Better yet, the companies doing it normally have shiite practices to prevent you from coming back after an initial account ban. At most, a new credit card and a new IP, and you’re on your way.

1. Bait And Switch - Code up a quick, shitty lander for an alternate, more permissible option of your “ambiguous ad text”. “Give her a night she’ll Never Forget” could go to a site that shows how to plan the perfect date. A “bong” ad might go to something about the deep and sinister story of Mary Jane, and how she’ll make you drown your baby(aka anti-drug site). Then once it’s approved, just change it. Or if they also have bots coming in, combine it with the external JS trick in the next section to rewrite your page.
2. Cloaking vs. Humans - If the bait and switch seems to risky, submit a few normal ads to gather up the first IP or two that visits. Notice who owns the given IP block. Disallow the JS rewrite if it’s one you’ve seen before. If you’re especially paranoid, make it so any repeat IP sees your angelic alternate page. Works especially great if they’re behind a corporate proxy.

Dealing with Automatic Approvals - Gotta love these, don’t we

1. Cloaking - If there’s a keyword bot involved(or even if there’s only a “quality score” like bot involved), it’s time to go Harry Potter on their ass, and cloak like crazy. If you’re unfamiliar with cloaking, it’s just the process of showing search engine bots a different page than real people. It’s normally a bannable offense, but can be fantastic for income. User-agent cloaking(the old form of it) is out, but IP based is in, and couldn’t be easier.
   • Did you keep all your logs from previous projects? I hope so! Pull out all the records you have of computers that hit your ads multiple times, with no referrer.
   • To be sure, run them through some reverse DNS queries or whois queries to figure out the owner. An easy way to get the reverse DNS entry is to download a copy of the charon proxy checker, append a :80 onto all of your IPs in excel, then just paste em in. Charon can be set to reverse DNS all of the IPs in it. Remove the residential computers(IPs that contain the company name in the reverse dns, or don’t resolve to anything w/ reverse dns are likely bots), copy the remainder, then put them into your database or text file or whatever it is you’re using as your cloaking IP db.
   • If you’re good at coding, you can set something to reverse DNS all inbound IPs to check for new bots.
   • If you’re not confident, find an alternate program more in tune to what the company would want to be seeing based on your ad/keywords, and send the bots there. This way, you can also send anyone without a referrer to that aff program, and not lose the traffic, while remaining safe.
2. Breaking Up The Keywords - If the company happens to scan for naughty keywords in your landing page text, break it up with invisible elements. Yeah, cloaking year 2000 style. b<div id=”invisible”>woot!</div>ongs for example. Set anything to hide way off in an external CSS file, denied by robots.txt.
3. Who Loves Javascript? I don’t. But that doesn’t change the fact you can completely re-write a landing page with a layer created by external Javascript call. addChild(element); is an excellent command indeed. Also lookup createElement() and innerhtml. As always, deny via robots.txt

Cautions, Failures, and some Closing Notes
Some ads and keywords are not good for this. They simply cannot convert over because it’s too hard to demonstrate what it is they’re buying, without alerting the bot/reviewer as to what it is you’re selling. Experiment, separate out your subids, and do not hesitate to can an ad that isn’t performing. Ideally, you’ll be the only advertiser in a given niche (at least the only one using PPC) so the clicks will be cheap enough they don’t necessarily have to convert over fantastic.

And I will repeat: This will probably lead to an account ban if caught. If you have multiple accounts, for gods sakes keep them separated in as many respects as you can. IPs, Names, emails, you name it. Oh yeah, and comply with your local laws.

-XMCP