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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.

4/21/2008 Update:  Right now, the site is redirecting to lifehack.org.  Either the site has closed down, or the website was temporarily hacked.  Try visiting listible.com and if it redirects you, then you can save your time by skipping this post, as it would be no longer valid.

For those of you who love building thousands of links from my different methods, you are in for another treat. While normally I blog about secret techniques that nobody else is talking about, this one has been a bit popular on Digitalpoint. I cannot take credit for this one (21/22 is a pretty good record I would say), I still want to tell you about it. Every single link counts and so I wanted to let those who haven’t heard about Listible join the fun.

A lot of my readers have been giving me excellent feedback stating that they love my link building strategies that I give away in the link building cookbook. Link building is important because nearly every blog wants additional search engine traffic, and building links is the best way to get it. I thought I would feed everyone’s link building appetite by releasing yet another tip that you won’t see anyone else telling you.

Introduction to Flickr

Flickr is a free image hosting site that is now owned by Yahoo. It stores thousands of images and serves millions of visitors every month. Flickr allows users to make comments on the pictures that are uploaded by other users.

If you are like me, you have the hardest times finding great names for your new blog or startup. It seems like every single good .com domain name has already been registered and is not for sale. The reason is because there are tons of companies who register literally millions of domain names and stick Google advertisements all over them, hoping people will accidentally visit them. For every accidental type-in visitor that clicks an ad, it helps pay for the domain name. Domain Tasting is a concept that allows people to register a domain for 5 days, and if they do not see any traffic or clicks, they can return the domain and get their full money back. So on a bulk scale, people register 1,000,000 domains and only 10,000 make $1/day. They return the rest and now they have 10,000 domains earning them ~$300,000/m. This also would get rid of nearly all of the risk because they could sell back the domains they didn’t want after 5 days of “tasting” them.

Well it looks like the Technorati favorites spammers that Darren and I posted about earlier have developed new ways to compete with the likes of Akismet…

Blog spammers have now made thousands of fake “proxy blogs” to be able to mass-friend one main blog to rank it in the most popular section on the Technorati homepage, ultimately sending the blogs lots of traffic and a few strong backlinks.

One very large problem that a lot of blogs have (or will soon have) to deal with automated blogs that steal your blog posts and post them on their blog. The process is entirely automated and a great post that takes you three hours to write, they duplicate in 5 seconds. If Google would then view their blog before yours, they would rank higher in Google and your blog would get penalized for duplicate content!

Spammers are and will always exist. I have received over 900 comment spams, generally from casinos and pharmaceutical companies looking to sell their [(via)gra and other p(ills)] (I’m not spelling the words so that I don’t rank in Google for any related long tail keywords and get millions more spam comments) .

Akismet does a great job at weeding out spam blog comments, and to keep up with the evolving antispam techniques, the spammers have started joining Technorati and adding top blogs as favorites. This allows them to show up on high traffic blog pages without having to be approved by the blogger.