Slightly Shady SEO | Blackhat is Back, Baby.

Ok. So some topics with this has been talked to death, and I’ve covered some elements of it before. But I wanted to cover it a bit more in depth. We’re not talking in terms of “how to frontpage” or any of that. This entry is about how to have the articles you submit to a social news site actually rank in the search engines. There is such a thing as a “power profile” that has nothing to do with frontpaging.

Link Juice Flows Internally Too
I hesitate to use the word “pagerank”, since it’s frequently something that’s misunderstood. For the sake of this, it’s important to realize that Pagerank really is just a numerical representation of the strength/quantity of inbound links into a page. Now, most people think of this in terms of links from outside sites into your own. This is partially true, but a lot of the link juice that hits a page is actually a result of other pages within the same site linking in.

So What Does this Mean for Social Media Sites?
Ok. So a truly powerful profile has to have as many internal links going to it as possible, since there’s realistically not going to be a lot of external links going to it.
So how is this achieved?

1. By Voting up the Front Page -  The articles and whatnot that reach the frontpage are the most successful articles at that time obviously. As such, they’re gaining link juice from first of all the frontpage. Second of all, they are the most likely to have people linking to them. Third, there’s a lot of RSS feeds that people put on their blogs of sites like Digg, so they’re gaining juice from that.
   By voting for these successful articles, you show up in the “Who Voted For This” section of the page. That drives an extraordinary amount of link juice to your profile.
   How much juice? Well, based primarily on internal link juice, take a look at the profile of MrBabyMan (a digg power user). While he’s gained a lot of external links lately due to digg drama, remember PR hasn’t been updated since all that started. So pre-drama, his profile was a PR 7. And while he submitted a lot of the articles as well, remember that everyone who voted for the articles got links back to their profiles as well, worth just as much as his. So such a result can be achieved by simply voting.
2. Intelligent Tagging
   I’ve covered this before, so I’ll just briefly re-hash it. Essentially, different tags on social media sites have different amounts of link juice based primarily on how many successful articles have used that tag as well. So by checking PR the popular tags when you submit articles, and using the most powerful, that article becomes more powerful(and with it your profile). Now, that said, the optimal tags are ones with successful articles, but without a huge amount being submitted on a daily basis. This keeps your article from getting bumped back to older pages on the tag article list.

Why The Hell Would I Care if my Profile has a lot of Link Power?
Think about it. If we’re trying to rank for a term and cannot(or it will take awhile), the best way to handle this is to have a standin page(like digg) ranking up and leading to your site. If you have a powerful profile in terms of links, you can pass a lot of that juice back to any article you submit since it shows up on your profile page. Nice, easy ranking.

A Bit of Blackhat Fun
So most blackhats(that I know) have at some point played with the idea of generating massive amounts of profiles on social sites to further their interests. Some places(like Digg) have cracked down pretty hard on this practice, but that’s not to say it’s impossible. If you get around certain issues like similar IPs and whatnot, it’s entirely possible to form miniature, 100% internal link farms by friending eachother.
Example:

• Let’s say we have 12 digg profiles. All of these are running an automatic script not to submit comments or stories, but just to vote. Each day for several months, each profile votes for 25% of the front page, and 25% of the “Most Popular in Upcoming” sections. So they all have a substantial number of internal links pointing to them.
• Not wanting to risk losing one of our powerful profiles, we then create a spammy profile, and add it as a friend to all or most of our other profiles. If we have more friends than just that spammy profile, we shouldn’t have to worry about them detecting it. The important part however, is that the spammy profile shows up under “Friends” on our digg profile without having to click any other links (Like “View all Friends”)
• As if by magic, that spammy profile suddenly has a LOT of link juice flowing into it. And with that, so do all articles submitted from it. And so they rank. Awesome, eh?

-XMCP

PS: As always with social articles, I will do my disclaimer. None of these tactics are ever used with anything relating to this blog. This blog is promoted entirely whitehat, even in regards to social media.

Posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 12:47 pm in the category:backlinks, seo. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment it , or trackback this post.