From free for free

Every now and then I like throwing in a “sneaky” SEO post. So lets talk about blog farms. I’m not going to go in depth with this one, because it could get people in trouble. This is blackhat (or at least very gray). I know some people who are interested in stuff like this, so I thought I’d point people in a direction by sharing an idea I have. Warning: I haven’t tried this method. It isn’t full developed. It will require more than what I cover here. Google will slap you to death for doing this, if caught.

Theoretically this should work. I’d do it a little different than I describe here, but I this will show you the thought process involved.

Now consider you want to start a blog farm to provide you with low quality links. If you were to do link laundering on a large scale, you might want to lunch 50 to 100 blogs or maybe a few 1,000. So how can one generate all the content for this? Well many people use content generators and rewriters and markov engines. They scrap content from SERPS, wikipedia, and blog RSS feeds. They mash this content together and automate blogs. But, what if you’re just doing 20 sites. What if you want to pass a visual inspection? What if you want real content? Well, here is an idea I’ve been putting together for a while.

WP-O-Matic

Let me introduce you to WP-O-Matic, which is an autoblogging plugin for Wordpress. It basically checks a series of RSS feeds periodically, grabs their content, and posts it to your blog. A very simple way of automating blogging.

Its biggest flaws are that it leaves links intact and does not have an advanced rewriter. It is not the best option for those wanting to mass produce content sites. A little creativity and this plugin can go a long long way. The key to this is the rewrite function involved. The rewrite is very basic, but it can do 3 things: change some text to different text, change one link to another, change text and link at same time. This is how we’re going to do this, so let me explain.

Your Farm Blogs

One great way to run a blog farm is set up different personas for each site. One is a young girl in middle school, the other is a male school teacher, one is a football player in college, and one is a rich house wife. Each blog is a personal blog for each of these people where they talk about their day. They aren’t monetized. These types of sites appear 100% legit and would pass a visual inspection. This is what we’re going to do, we’re going to automate an entire series of blogs and each will have a different personality.

Personalities

You’ll need to sit down and come up with a small story for each person. Little things like: what kind of car, where are they from, where they work, favorite food, favorite movie, etc. Make a list of these types of things for each person. Now, we’re going to set up a blog for each of them.

Blog Set Up

There are going to be two types of blogs. The end blogs and the source blogs. The end blogs will be the ones devoted to each of these personalities. You’ll install each of these with WP-O-Matic. Now we’ll set up a source blog (or blogs). Tell each of the end blogs to pull the feed from the source blog (or blogs).

And this is what you’ll do. Write a post like this (on the source blog).

[time1] I went with [girlfriend-boyfriend] to [favorite-restaurant] and I ate [favorite-food]. It was a lot of fun, because I haven’t since them [day3]. I then went to see a movie in [part-of-town-3] and we watched the new Batman movie.

Catching on yet? For those who haven’t figured out what I’m doing: We’re writing a generalized post that will be pulled by each of the end blogs. Each end blog is set up to do a word replace based off that persona. You can easily replace all major nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs …. enough to pass duplicate content? You now have 30 blogs that automatically generate posts based off this template by replacing the tags with words you set up.

Real content. Real written blog posts. No mashed up scrapped content =P

Combat Duplicate Content

Now duplicate content is always a concern. There are a few things we can do to improve this.

The first is to set up multiple source blogs. And then mix up what sources each end blog pulls from. The result is that the end blogs won’t have ALL the same posts. If you have 3 source blogs, than 1/3 of your end blogs will have posts the other 2/3 don’t

I suggest installing a related post plugin and using snippets of text. This will help pull in different text blurbs on each post. This will increase the differences between the different blog posts.

Use comments for unique content. Consider being a dofollow blog to increase the number of comments you get. Or considering posting some comments of your own.

Consider going in to some of them and writing a full unique post or editing in some unique content into the automated posts. Do things like change the title and stuff.

Use different categories and url structures. Definatly change the URL structures and vary those when you set it up. Use different themes.

Add some unique content to each blog. Add an about page and other pages that will provide unique content for that blog.

Conclusion

Now, this isn’t a full how to, because I haven’t put this into practice. I’ve played around with it a little, so I thought I’d share the idea. This is dark gray / black hat SEO. It can and will get you in trouble. If you are an SEO newbie, learn more before you try stuff like this. I won’t provide complete support on doing this and I’m not trying to tell you to do this. I just know some people are interested in this, so here is one method I’ve been thinking about. Now you have you on little blog farm that can pass a visual inspection.

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