Link Spam - What and Where to Drop your Links

So I get a lot of questions about link spam, not surprisingly. It does require you to be careful in several different respects, one of which, I will cover today. Today I will be telling you the pros and cons of the different places to drop link spam. That’s right. Today is a day with a shady ass entry. Maybe 2. I’m feeling zesty.


If you don’t know HOW to drop link spam, I reccomend you take a look at my article on XRumer; by far the most popular link spamming software out there. I will add in however, that rumor has it, the ruskies will be bringing us a new product in the next month, freshly translated into english, that may serve as some long overdue competition.



But without further ado, here’s the list.



Message Boards - I have a love-hate relationship with Message Boards

Pros:

They’re MUCH more quickly indexed than things like guestbooks, and you can frequently get a temporary(or occasionally permanent) link with a lot more juice than anything else.

There’s a lot more activity on these than blogs, so it’s harder for admins to control. Creating a topic that no one would possibly be interested in can help, as is trying to formulate a generic message that applies universally.

Cons

Forum admins are completely fucking insane. Many bans that occur are not the result of competitors, or of Google’s algorithm picking them out, but rather by really fucking pissed off forum admins. Chances are, if you’re hitting up a list of over 50k forums, at least one admin will get pissed off enough to try and hunt your site down.

Google frowns upon lots of temporary links. If they find all your links quickly, chances are they’ll be a bit pissy when half of those get deleted by zealous admins.

Spamming forums makes it impossible to guage how many links to drop, since you can never be sure how many will stick. Too many, and Google might spank your ass all over the place. Too few, and it wasnt worth the time and risk.

Forums that don’t allow BBCode dirty up the results for your keywords, making it hard to scrape again. There have been occasions where I end up scraping linkspam I let out in the past.

XRumer is slow as balls at posting in these. It has to register, verify accounts, login, and post. That’s a LOT of steps. In some cases, over 7-8 page loads, and at least 3 post requests. That takes time.

GuestBooks -Not good for ranking, good for indexing

Pros

Guestbooks have little, if any fallout from administrators.

Easy to mine, easy to spam, high-ish success rate.

Frequently allow HTML

Rarely rank high enough to dirty up serp results

Lightning fast to spam

There’s MILLIONS of them out there.

Cons

A lot of false positives

Serve as what is essentially a GLARING spam alert. Come on now, how many legitimate sites drop links in some guestbook from 1994?

If they can be spammed, they have been spammed. A lot. Theres been some I’ve tried to visit where any browser I use actually LOCKS UP from the sheer amount of data on the page.

Many cannot pass PR

Many require admin approval from admins that have not logged in in years

Too many damn types of software, none being overwhelmingly popular. Takes a long time to footprint

Blogs - Oh god, the no-follows.

Pros

So many, that a lot are not sarurated with spam

Have about a million different footprints

You do not need to drop a link in the content, since your “name” itself is linked. Makes creating inconspicuous links easier.

Dropping one proper, innocent link, makes it easy to drop links in the future if you use the same information. Once you get admin approval, you’re good to go.

Admins are not quite as contemptuous as a lot of forum admins, especially since many that would actually give a rip have anti-spam software, so they will hardly even see your link to track it down.

Easy to identify admins checking your link, so they can be redirected.

Cons

Anti-spam plugins. You need clean IP addresses, all the time, and that’s hard to achieve.

Admins are more tech saavy then guestbook/forum admins, so can frequently identify spam better.

The VAST majority of links are no-followed. Like 99%. They can help for anchor text, but very little for ranking. This does significant damage.

If you’re like me, and try to filter out your messageboard/guestbook/blog traffic, blogs are MUCH harder to footprint by referrer, so you can tell when/if to block them.

Shoutboxes, Galleries, and other Custom Rigs

Pros

You can sometimes find software with very little anti-spam protection, and bypass it.

Many are not saturated by link spam.

There’s a almost infinite number of pieces of software out there you can hit. If one tightens up, hey, you can just find another.

Really, this is the best way.

Cons

Harder to find the software, harder to footprint.

Other blackhats might see your tricks, and emulate it

Many of these require custom software to be written. It’s well worth it in most cases.

Hitting these too hard can lead the coders of the software to update it, making it harder to hit int he future.

Lower in quantity than almost any other link spam possibility.