Yes - that is really me at 18 years old getting ready for a typical Halloween night. This was my favorite way to go. This was taken in 1980 in Victoria, British Columbia. Get "painted and polluted".

I’ve started a new category on my old Zulit blog (the one you are reading right now) called Blackhat Weekends. Why? Because during the week I work at home on numerous web sites, and blogs, and make a pretty darn good living doing it. My wife and I both work on the week days on our pure white hat projects and we take home an average of $6,000 a month. We have slowly moved up the income ladder over the past 5 years, and it’s been allot of fun to be free.

It’s also been allot of work. Why? Because creating domains that have longevity and make steady money takes a stupid amount of time. Like I always said about the old “Work at Home” programs, the key word is WORK – actually, to be successful, and quit your day job, it’s WORK, WORK, WORK and more WORK.

But like any online entrepreneur I’m fascinated by blackhat methods. I’ve dabbled in the blackhat world from time to time and I’ve played with many many different scripts in an attempt to create a constant stream of content to my blogs. I’ve tried re-writers, RSS feed aggregation, including WordPress plugins that do RSS feed aggregation (Wp-O-Matic and RSS to WordPress). Both do what they say, to some degree, but if you’re like me, and fussy about how your pages are displayed, you won’t be satisfied. There are some big problems with the use of these scripts – I go into some of these problems below.

Problem #1 – A Pain to Setup?

These RSS feed aggregate scripts are often a pain to setup properly, and can take many hours of frustrating labor to get them to function – all depends on the hosting account you have and the level of technical knowledge you have. One of the big problems with Wp-O-Matic is that it often double or triple posts, which makes for a stupid and ugly blog. RSS to WordPress has issues too and I’ve long forgotten what they were.  Keep in mind that I do have a fair amount of technical knowledge.

Problem #2 – Summarized RSS Feeds

Because of the Splog problem, almost all decent RSS feeds are set in summary mode. Many good RSS feeds these days only provide a link and no description whatsoever. You might find some bloggers who punt out full feeds, but they’re far and few between – AND you are robbing from the little people – the bloggers like you and me who have put allot of work into their content. I get into the moral issue next.

My point here is that the content you end up with on your sblogs is usually garbage. The smart RSS bandits create niche blogs with the WordPress platform, and then use the RSS feeds from bloggers who have full feeds. These guys will create their sblogs backwards. They’ll scour the Internet (manually) looking for some good blogs, with frequent posts, and that are all in a common niche. THEN they buy a domain name using the keyword of the said niche, install WordPress, install their favorite RSS aggregator, configure the good niche blog feeds, and walk away. Oh yes – they put on their advertising scripts such as Adsense and YPN before they leave (that is the whole point)

Problem #3 – Your Conscious Bubba

So after configuring a few splogs in the manner described directly above, I was actually getting good search engine results, and actually making some money. Then I got some frustrated emails from bloggers. They, for some strange reason had a problem with me robbing their hard work. Imagine that! How dare them accuse me of being an affiliate pirate with no conscious or scrap of decency. I mean the nerve of these folks.

After receiving 3 real emails from these real bloggers, I had to agree with them. I shut down the splogs, and moved on to my real online work. Some of you reading this may not care. The moral issue might not bother you like it bothered me. If you are one of those people, remember that you ARE actually hurting these bloggers and writers. It’s not fair, it’s not right, and it’s not good for any parties involved. That includes the advertising companies you sponsor on your splog.

Problem #4 – The Rewrite Issue

So with all of this said – me coming to my senses and being a good little boy again, I thought that maybe I could rewrite all of the RSS feeds coming so much so that it’s not plagiarism, and therefore not hurting anyone at all. This could be sort of grey hat (or gray hat if you prefer). Well this was a real pain technically. I even went to the effort and expense to Rent a Coder to rework the Wp O Matic plugin so it would rewrite the RSS feeds feeding splogs. I spent $300 getting the script re-worked, and configuring it in WordPress. However, the content sucked. I wanted to rewrite the content to pass the duplicate content filters of the searchies, AND read well. Good luck. Every tried to do a rewrite with software so that it still makes perfect grammatical sense, and be over 50% unique – it’s quicker to just write fresh articles. If you can type at good clip, then you should. This whole process didn’t work out. Maybe it would for you.

This whole process took up way more time than one weekend, but I learned allot about search engines in the process, learned allot about PHP scripts, aggregators, and the like. It was allot of fun too. However, I have recently been spending my weekends researching blackhat techniques in the hope that I can create some more good blog farms for monetizing and link feeding. I have a method now using specific software (mostly free) that works like gangbusters. Very excited about it and I will reveal the whole process top to bottom next week for another installement of BlackHat Weekends.

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Tags: aggregation, blackhat profits, blackhat techniques, Blackhat Weekends, blogs, scripts, Wordpress Plugins

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 11:01 am and is filed under Blackhat Weekends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.