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This post is a little satirical, please do not use it as solid advice. It is more of an accidental case study that happened to me and I wanted to share it with my readers.
Back on March 15th, I made a simple one paragraph post mentioning that I bought an iPhone. For those of you who didn’t know, the iPhone was one of 2007’s most hyped online product launches, and nearly every technology blog in the world was keeping tabs on iPhone news. This also means that since it was being searched for a lot, there were a lot of blackhat search engine spammers trying to steal their piece of the pie by their use of content theft. They scrape blogs around the world that mention the word iPhone and then post a piece of that blog post on their blog hoping it will rank for long-tail keywords.
Well, it turns out a lot of those blackhat blogs that steal the content off other blogs are still focusing on the iPhone niche, because even though that post was one of my shortest “blurbs”, it has received far more spammy backlinks than any other post. In a sad piece of advice, if you mention the word “iphone” in one of your blog posts, you just might end up getting a TON of low-quality backlinks. — While these backlinks won’t help a lot in raising your rank on Google, you can still ping them with Technorati to improve your rank.
Here is a screen-capture of all the trackbacks of blogs that linked to my post about the iPhone. If history is doomed to repeat itself, this post will also receive a ton of these blog mentions.
This sounds like a brillant plan, will have to investigate. The key question to me is, whether this will produce back links with some real value.
Haha… this is hilarious, but still a valuable insight into the reality of scraping, and how to use it to your advantage. Obviously the iphone spam trick will build a lot of low quality links, but if you know people are scraping your normal content, don’t get frustrated… just use it to your advantage and build internal links to “compensate” yourself for their scraping efforts.
Happened to me as well. I wrote a post about long tail keywords and decided to stuff it with random keywords. Got plenty of backlinks from credit card and refinancing scraper sites
I’ve seen this before on certain other words too. You mentioned pinging for technorati authority. How exactly do you recommend doing this?
javascript:(function(){var%20r=escape(window.location);document.location=’http://technorati.com/ping/?url=’+r;})();
Add that as a bookmark and then hit the button when you are viewing the page you want pinged.
Nice, that’s definitely a must know tip. Thanks for sharing!
lol… blackhat seo methods always surprise me… but it is a somewhat smart idea… but on a sidenote, i think iphones are really overated!
But I did buy an iphone!
I have a 2G, and the iPhone 3G just came out in the Philippines 2 days ago.
These blackhat guys never seize to amaze me.
Roby