Spam: Scraping useful articles that Search Engines will love
- 22nd Aug 2006
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- SEO
Okay SPAMMERS, what can you learn from my previous posts about Viagra and this Viagra spam. In the last week someone rang and said “I want you to talk about SPAMMERS, and don’t give me any of that crap about good content.” I’m going to beg to differ. I wrote that post mainly because I’ve looked for this information a couple times and never found exactly what I was looking for quickly. That tells me that in this small niche, I could utterly rock the search engines. Plus once I figured out the info, it was only 10-20% more time to package it up nicely. Now this short content post can act as an evergreen draw for searchers.
Notice what I did with keywords. I carefully chose keywords for the title and the url (note that I used “BUY” in the url and “UK” in the title). The categories on my post (”where to” and “Viagra”) give me a subtle way to mention Viagra again, and include a couple of extra ways that someone might do a search–lots of user type “how to (do what they want to do).” I thought about the words that a user would type in when looking for an answer to their question, and tried to include those words in the article. I also tried to think of a few word variations and included them where they made sense (Viagra V Cialis, ED and Penis, etc.). I’m targetting a long-tail concept where someone will be typing several words, so I’m probably in a space where on-page keywords are enough to rank pretty well. I don’t need anchor-text for “Viagra UK” or similar phrases; in the on-page space, I’d recommend thinking more about words and variants (the “long-tail”) and thinking less about keyword density or repeating phrases.
The meta-issues I’d mention would be:
1) The utility of an article is paramount. If you write 2000 words about spam and never discuss the industry landscape or impart some useful, concrete knowledge to your reader, that should set off a warning flag in your head. So use this advice only for good (high-quality articles), not for evil. then use a Meta-redirect
2) Be sure to study your niche. I just spent 10-15 minutes to tackle the “Buying Viagra/Cialis/Levita” space. Is that niche worth writing an article about? Well, it was for me, because I was looking for this information for my friend. In general, any time you look for an answer or some information and can’t find it, that should strike you as an opportunity.
But the larger point is that if you put in time and research to produce or to synthesize original content, think hard about what niches to target. My advice is to start with an article about porn/pills/casinos/mortgages–it’s better to start with a smaller niche. If you become known as an expert on (say) Buying Viagra or Buying Cialis, you could build that out with things like spamming forums to create even more useful links. Look for a progression of niches so that you start out small or very specific, but you can build your way up to a big, important area over time.
There are a lot of niches that just take sweat equity. You could be the SPAMMER that does interviews. Or the SPAMMER that transcribes Viagra TV ads. Or the SPAMMER that makes funny lists. Or the SPAMMER company that provides webmaster radio. Or the SPAMMER that makes podcasting easy. Or the SPAMMER that specializes in a certain content management system or shopping cart. Or the SPAM company that specializes in Yahoo! stores. Or the SPAMMER that specializes in accessibility. Or the company that mocks Silicon Valley and its companies. Or the SPAMMER that specializes in AdWords API ROI tracking. Or you could be the SPAMMERs that write-up a summary of every panel at every search engine conference. Or the company that does cartoons. Or the SPAMMER who pays attention to Google Base, Google Co-op, Yahoo! Answers, or Facebook. Or the SPAMMER that provides Firefox plugins. Or the company that provides metrics and tracking for blogs. Or the SPAMMER that talks about patents. Or the SPAMMER that specializes in dynamic sites. Eye-tracking. Beginner SPAMMER tutorials. Making maps mash-ups. Ajax SPAMMER. SPAMMER for non-profits. SPAMMER for Second Life or MySpace. SPAMMER to repair a company’s reputation. SPAMMER for MySQL, Python, Ruby on Rails, WordPress blogs, or .NET sites. The SPAMMER that surfaces databases or Flash sites. SPAMMER for self-publishing authors. The SPAMMER that does radio ads.
An infinite number of Spamming niches are waiting for someone to claim them. I’d ask yourself what you want to scrape, and see if you can find a path from a tiny specific niche to a slightly bigger niche and so on, all the way to your desired goal. Sometimes it’s easier to take a series of smaller steps instead of jumping to your final goal in one leap.
13 Comments | Leave a comment »
Wow this one is even better then Matts spammy post!
hahaha, nice work Dave.
I was surprised at Matt’s keyword stuffing but he does hide a good point in there about mastering a small section of your chosen niche and then expanding.
Hi Dave,
this was a great post in about 15 Minutes.
I ‘m not sure, if Vanessa Cox will be happy,
if you tell her your ranking effects in sitemaps.
Very nice,
Pascal
BTW. It was very wise to choose Marcus, not me, for Sumoing ;-)
Was a nice Trip to SES SJ.
Football World Cup 2010 Finals Tip:
Germany 5 : UK 1
Remember Wembley
Best post…ever.
“it was for me, because I was looking for this information for my friend”
Sure you were ;)
Great!!!!! lol
@pascal:
Football World Cup 2010 Finals Tip:
Germany 5 : UK 0 :-)
Remember Wembley
The Spammer who does cartoons…….. hmm sounds like a plan to me ;)
Ahhh, British satire at it’s finest!
And the original was good too: Matt made a real actual honest SEO post rather than the usual “do as I say, not what works” drivel that’s normal. ;-)
And look how well you rank for ’spam scraping’ and ’scraping viagra’ and ’scraping useful articles’. Why, it’s almost as if this whole SEO linking and keyword stuffing thing actually works!
Must be a fluke. ;-)
#1 for Spammer in the Gogle UK SERPs. Interesting target to beat :)
Good luck mate,
Post appears vaguely familiar ;) this might be a good test to see which version Google throws out hehe :)
hi dave,
sure, it’s funny, what you have made out of cutts’ article. and a good testing for placing this site. - but also kind o’short-sighted. you imply that cutts does the keyword stuffing, and recommends to do the same to others. this cannot be true, ’cause he is not a seo and doesn’t need to be found on internet - he is an employee of google, i suppose this is a job that brings in enough, so there is no need for a sideline.
in my opinion he just made a picture of what kind o’web-documents googlebot understands the best. it’s just a snapshot of the current abilities of the search engines. there will be a day when bots understand better/everything - but not yet, so the webmasters are to help them with e.g. so called “keyw. stuffing”. - to me the article is talking more about the disabilities of the bots - not about how to seo or how to spam.
lol this is so great all you need now is a small dorky cartoon of you in the top right corner of the page. :) //g
Absolutely Brilliant.