SEM Punch

In a previous post I mentioned the launch of a black hat seo forum. Back then, I didn’t give away too much information about the forum itself, because it was new and there wasn’t much going on in it. Now that it had some time to attract not only links, but also registered users, I would like to quickly talk a bit about what you will get at $100/month.

The forum has 4 broad sections of which only 2 are worth mentioning:

Create sites

A lot of blackhat’s “SEO” efforts seems to evolve around pumping out tons of websites; the art appears to get them indexed by Google, keep them in the index for as long as possible and then start the whole process all over again. Of course, the traffic that is generated in this process is monetaized, presumably with Adsense.

When generating thousands of websites and filling them up with content, the blackhat community is looking for content sources and automated tools to produce the websites. Tools that are used range from simple screenscrapers, data dumps from wikipedia or language mutation software that makes use of Markov chains and Bayesain filters. I would have liked to find out a bit more about language mutation, but the posts in this particular section were rather thin. Discussions about site builders focused around content generators such as RSSGM (Realy Simple Site Generator Modified) or competing products.

Get Traffic

This section was a real disappointment. Discussions mainly focused around link bait strategies and sites that can be used for link dumping. Example sites, among others, include newsvine.com or slashdot.com - what a tip! The $100 were worth it just for these two tips alone…yaaaaaaawn.

Other strategies of traffic acquisition include hoax news stories - these are really just made up, sensational stories to get a lot of dig or reddit clicks. The effort put into thesde fake stories os quite extensive; it includes building a fake news site (with some scraped content from real news sites), writing press releases and building up MySpace profiles.

Conclusion

The forum is not particularly active - perhaps it is too early to judge and the community grows a bit. However, having people pay $100/month isn’t really a great growth driver. But that was probably the intention of the founder.

In any case, I find the forum rather boring and not very insightful. To be fair, the reason why I was so bored was because of personal preference - I just wouldn’t enjoy throwing out a gazillion junk sites, making a few pennies or dollars on each, shutting them down and starting all over. Sure, some people make a lot of money with this. I personally cannot think of many jobs that are more unfulfilling.

My recommendation is to save your dough and focus on more viable business ideas, unless you are deeply entrenched in the blackhat seo stuff already. However, if you are just hoping to find a few quick tips on how to rank #1 on Google for your widget site, this is clearly the wrong space.

Bookmark to: