I was recently asked by a friend of mine why I still bother with my nefarious black hat activities.
As he put it, I could spend the time I'm building throwaway sites to pump out some sites that get repeat visitors.
Of course, he's always harping on this particular subject but I decided to go into a bit more depth this time and play with the numbers a little bit...
Let's assume you can buy a domain for $1.50. Yes, you really can do that at the bulk registrars (and don't you dare use RegisterFly - they suck horribly) like DirectI. Before I digress into a rant, what other costs would you have?
Well, you can get a cheap hosting account for $8 bucks a month or you can go for a dedicated server. For the moment, let's say you got a cheap hosting account.
Your yearly costs at this point are going to mainly be your hosting ($96 per year). Traffic is negligible and even the hosting costs are negligible...why? Well, if you make $1 per year per site, you only need 96 sites to pay for your server...
So, for the purposes of my math here I'm going to ignore the cost of hosting. Yes, it can factor in if you get dedicated servers but I'd like to keep this simple.
Anyhow, if you paid $1.50 for the domain and you'd like to double your money then you need to make $1.50 over the course of a year. Assuming an average of 25 cents per click and a 10% click through rate (both of which are not hard to achieve) you'd only need 12 clicks or 120 impressions to double your money over the course of a year.
That's right. You just got a 50% return on your money by putting up a 500 page site full of spammy content and throwing some ads on it.
Ignoring the HYIP (High Yield Investment Programs - high risk high return and often illegal) stuff that's floating around out there on the internet, there aren't many other places you can go to get that type of return on your money.
Throw in $300 and at the end of the year (quite often sooner) you'll have $600.
Heck, back when I was doing this part time, I made a small change in my sites and overnight increased my income by 10%. That one change gave me a $7,000 raise over what my day job was paying me at the time.
Now, the question is does it scale? That is, can you put in $100,000 and pull in $200,000? Well, therein lies the problem. It seems that you can scale this up but there is a point where you'll run out of keywords and start competing with yourself.
In my network last year, about $35,000 was spent. That includes hosting and cost of domains. When it was all said and done, over $120,000 was made --- and that was in about 8 out of 12 months of the year.
So I know that it can scale but I don't know where the upper limits are yet.
The interesting thing to note is that people like to argue that search engine spam is going to go away. That's when I start laughing because I know the numbers behind this game and if you look at it with an objective eye you'll realize that even if the search engines filter out 90% of the spam there's still 10% that's slipping through. So you'll just have to crank out a bit more to get it to scale :)
G-Man
By: GeoffreyF67
It's all about scale...
Moz News
The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Godaddy's virtual dedicated servers allow unlimited domains for around $30 a month I think.
oh good god don't host with godaddy esp. if your doing anything less than white. They hold people hostage for unsubstantiated spam claims all the time.
If it's a dedicated server you can put as many sites on it as you want.
With regards to subdomains, you can certainly go that route. Just be prepared for woe and misery when your main subdomain gets banned and you lose all your sites overnite :P Been there done that - have the badge of honor for going from $1000 a day to $50 a day overnight :P
Great post. One question though... Why do you need a new domain for each BH site? You can create as many sites as you want using subdomains: sports.mydomain.com books.mydomain.com, etc etc...
So you could actually be scaling your network without investing so much money in domains... maybe having that many sites per domain decreases the amount of indexed pages, but will definitely increase the bang for your buck you paid for that domain+hosting.
GMan, first off it's so good to see you're well.
Question.. How do you put 100 sites up on one $96 account? I don't know of a host that would let you do that.
It is important to note that G-man gave a basic overview of one method blackhats us to make money; CPC opportunties aside, the methods in my opinion are probably more advanced than that of basic on-page SEO and solid content coupled with relevant links, requiring more technical knowledge -- although, I would say that whitehats tend to have better designs. :)
In the end, we aren't all that different from whitehats. In fact, most of us started out with something a little more eggshell colored, but after being splashed by the muddy waters of Google delisting a clean site, the shade darkens. After this happens a few times, the realization strikes that search engines really aren't your "friends", they are a medium, and mediums and marketers are always in a constant dance. Money can be made playing their game, or by simply playing them.
Also, a final note: blackhat DOES NOT MEAN FRAUD. We don't play by the guidelines, but we play within the laws established by our various governments.
Cygnus
Well said Cygnus! I couldn't agree more!
I've heard that adsense/etc wont pay out if they know you're 'spamming', how does one work around this?
I dunno. I know that a friend of mine has had his sites reviewed and accepted by Google Adsense. And they're nothing more than scraper sites :P
its so interesting to hear stuff from that part of the house im looking forward to seeing what else your posting. how do you generate templates for the sites to they all completely morph so you cant tell its all from the same generator?
EVERYTHING IS CLEAR ANDFINE .. BUT WHAT ARE THE WAYS TO GET BLACK HAT TRAFFIC -- FAST
There are 2 questions I'd like to raise (although only the 1st is particularly relevant).
- If you have thousands of spam sites on 1 server, won't google notice that they all have the same IP and delist all the sites with that IP?
- I'm interested in writing some of my own keyword targeted content with adsense on it on a large number of different topics. Should I have it all live on one domain, or should each topic have its own domain? I'm thinking that if it's just one domain, I have to worry about only 1 domain getting crawled and not 100.
Any thoughts?
I have multiple IPs. I haven't noticed much difference with themed sites vs non-themed sites.
Doh!
Curse my fat fingers, I double-posted.
What I found really interesting a few months ago was how Matt Cutts railed against Rand regarding the use of press releases...I mean, come on, the dude plays by the book and he rails against him?
If anyone has read the history of search, they'll see some disturbing things about the arrogance of Google right now and how dangerous a recipe that is.
Cygnus
LOL I didn't hear about that! I look forward to meeting Matt one day :)
Gotchya, Geoffrey. I just figured since there's the Sandbox in Google that you would use other means in order to get quick traffic, but then SEO will work much quicker on the other SE's, so I understand.
Also, do you give out an email address so we can contact you privately with a question? Thanks.
eKstreme - I'll use anything that makes me money except gambling porn and pharmaceuticals.
toddieg - That's what *I* enjoy talking about but I'm sure that the rest of the posts by others won't be driven by my posts! :)
Yeah - what he said :)
Ok, read it. Love it. Gonna try it. This weekend.
Thanks.
Oh, and I get my hosting for about half what you quoted so we'll see how that goes too...
Holy...!?
Kudos to Rand for picking up such a noted (notoius?) BH for this site. G-Man it's good to know you are still about and doing what you do best - spamming.
Geez Rand if you had asked if it was ok to have G-Man make some posts instead of some anonymous BH I think you would have picked up an overwhealming resonse.
So... I'm going to actually read the post now - but good job on both of you!
It's interesting to compare/contrast a successful BH's income to that of a comparably talented white hat. Not that anyone's as competent as you are but... :)
Yep. That's why I'm not sure how high it can scale.
I know for a fact that I'm not in the "big time" even tho I make ~$25,000 a month.
I have seen some instances where I compete with myself.
The trick is in finding the low hanging fruit and competing with THOSE keywords. Of course, as more and more people get into the biz, there is more competition and it becomes more difficult to get your pages ranked.
Having said all of that, however, I think it's EASILY possible to pull in $30,000 a year which is the median income here in the US.
G-Man
Edit: Another thing to point out is that you'll have pages coming and going through the index all the time so it's possible for you to get the traffic you want (even if it's very low) just by brute force :P
first of all, good to see you gman.
secondly (with all due respect) why do you even bother trying to teach the world blackhat seo? it will only bring more un-wanted/un-needed competition to the field and create less 'low-hanging fruit' for you to grab.
(just look at this guy above me for instance...he's obviously desperate for traffic and ready to start button pushing the first content generator he gets his hands on... in fact, it sounds like he worships you just for posting this) ;)
is there a purpose for all this? especially putting a dollar amount to everything?
:) tg
I come from a abundance mindset rather than a scarcity mindset. I truly believe there are plenty of opportunities out there for everyone to make money at this.
Besides, even if it *does* create competition it'll keep me on my toes to try out new techniques and stay current with the industry.
That was one of my primary reasons for starting to post here - I'd neglected research and my income has suffered because of it!
G-Man
is this the turning point where seomoz becomes a blackhat classroom?
No. SEOmoz is going to be about education for the SEO/M and search communities. We're not trying to teach people how to use black hat techniques - Geoff's post is really about how to understand why BH is successful and why it still works (and happens).
We don't want to train any little g-manletts :)
Welcome G-Man. Sure missed your posts on the forums!
As to making money: do you use just standard adverts or affiliate programs too?
And how ugly are your sites? :D
That's asking "how do you get traffic" which is a BIG topic. I'll cover that in later posts...
The short answer tho is I do the usual SEO to my pages to get them to rank and let the SE bring the traffic in.
To get the necessary number of impressions, what do you do? Adwords? Spam some message boards? Or perhaps subtly spam (links in signatures, etc)? Although 120 impressions isn't a lot, some would prefer more than that, so what methods do you use to get traffic?
Terrific stuff, G-man, and very eye-opening.
I wonder what your feeling is about spammers competing with each other - after all, if a scale of only $100K invested starts to overlap, wouldn't 10 or 12 moderate scale spammers be feeling diminishing returns over time?