SEO Shadiness - Blackhat Experimentation with Wordpress
March 4th, 2007 by bentley007
Working as an in-house SEO has it’s pro and cons. While it is great to dream stuff up and pass it off to IT or Development for creation and implementation, I often feel that I am missing out on learning how to do things myself. Until recently, my day-to-day SEO tasks were limited to on-page optimization, organic link development, and performing site audits. While working on any specific site, I would produce recommendation reports and pass them off to another department for implementation. So when it comes to performing certain technical tasks, I have limited practical experience.
That was my primary motivation for launching this blog; to force myself to learn how to do new and exciting things outside of my comfort zone. I also have certain reservations about doing anything beyond the basic whitehat stuff while working on somebody else’s sites. Now I have the opportunity to experiment with various shades of grey, without the fear of compromising or tainting sites belonging to somebody else. This is also my first foray into technical webmastery and working on the Wordpress CMS. I must say, I absolutely love working with Wordpress!
I was experimenting with a number of plug-ins before I pushed this site live, and I came across a dirty little plug-in called WP-Autoblog. Once it has been installed, it gives the user the ability to enter a list of RSS feed addresses. It will then go out and fetch all of the posts in the feed, republish them to your blog, and trackback each post in the process. I know, I know…it’s absolutely filthy. But it’s kinda cool, too. Obviously, I would never knowingly appropriate other people’s content. I know how challenging it can be to come up with quality, unique content on a regular basis. I also know how frustrating it can be to have somebody come along and dupe it.
But, my mind works in shady ways at times and I can see this as being very useful for doing trackback spam. So here’s what I have in mind… Like I said, this plug-in actually fetches and posts automatically once the feed address has been input. I would like to use this to post to a specific category that is not accessible to users or the bots. I would then like to be able to generate 301’s on the fly, based on the postings made with this plug-in. It should work something like this - fetch feed and post to /spam/, 301 all requests for /spam/ to $ page. Anyone out there willing to hack this plug-in for me? If I use .htaccess for my redirects, how do I get it to automatically update with each new post? Can I use wildcards? Hopefully, the .htaccess pimp can help! This is probably very simple to do, but I could use some direction. Any takers?
Hey interesting post! I think everyone has a part shady mind!
Jeff Jeff Jeff you naughty boy. Firstly I disagree - coming up with quality, unique content is as easy as… thinking and typing. If you’re going for massive quantity, then no your posts will not always be intricately researched essays. Writing something worth reading is a matter of pushing your mind in a direction you find inspiring, and getting it into words. It takes practice, of course. Some people are naturals, others really have to work on it.
Firstly, the plugin you imagine can’t just sit on the server, constantly listening and sucking in content. RSS is not a “push” medium. Something - a triggered event or a cronjob - has to trigger a script to request the RSS feed(s). This can be something like a user action like a page view, or a timed event on a schedule. Cronjobs are tricky, because they live outside the usual “user requests page, server creates page” chronology that we spent 99.9% of our time fulfilling.
Break down the ingredients: First you need a script that requests the RSS feed. You’ll end up using the CURL (Client URL) extension in PHP. CURL is uncomfortable at first, but you eventually get used to the syntax and it becomes another left hand.
Next, since you’ll be downloading the same feeds repetitively, you need to make sure you can distinguish dupes. Thankfully all RSS feeds come with a Permalink URL which is presumably unique. See an RSS channel, check if you alreay have it, if you don’t, do something with it.
Next, you need a place to save these RSS downloads - a MySQL database will do quite nicely. Jet them right in and put them directly into those WP tables - instant post! Make sure you cover all the dependencies in other tables too
The whole trackback thing is something I’m not too familiar with, but I’m pretty sure it’s a basic POST to the originating blog. You can do that with CURL, too.
The bit about the redirection is the easiest part. You don’t need the .htaccess pimp when you know the original regex pimp…
RedirectRule ^/spam/(.*) /your_money_page.php?rel=$1 [I,RP]
Dude, I’m not going to write a black hat blogsucker for you, and I wouldn’t admit it publicly if I was. But your idea has legs and it could run if you wanted to spend a few days/weeks/months at it. Don’t implicate me in your filthy cartel!
Hmmm it seems a little scrappy umph and some regex could prove to be a deadly combination.
I guess I’ll go check for any dupe content in the serps
Lynque, watch out for this guy. He’s trouble with a capital S. The sort of dude who would look over your shoulder and copy your exam answers.
Well,
You could always get your RSS input from a source that encourages copying like ezinearticles.com.
They even offer RSS feeds for a myriad of different topics and keywords and authors, etc.
What do you make of that?
-Brad