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PRStorm has been around for years, however it is no longer being sold and has no updates. There is only one use for this program and that is to spam refer URL’s to websites that publish there stats to the public. AWStats and Webalizer are good examples, because the stat logs can be spidered by the search engines. If your website shows up as a referring site, then you will gain an additional backlink through that stats page. Now if you have thousands of websites that use AWStats, you can potentially have thousands of backlinks pointing to your website as a referring site. This is blatant spam and can piss off some web masters who check there log files frequently. Here are some things that can go wrong if you choose to use this program.

1. Web Hosting Shutdown - If enough webmasters complain about your site referrer spamming to your hosting provider, there is a chance they will terminate your account and you will have to find a new place to host your website.
2. ISP Being Shutdown - This one can be debated, but people have claimed it has happened to them. If you use PRStorm without proxies then your IP address will show up for ever referral. Enough complaints to your ISP for referrer spamming and you could lose it.
3. Google Penalty - If you have a brand new site and run this program at max (a lot of threads, hundreds of thousands of sites to hit, hundreds of hits per url) you run the chance of being penalized or even banned by Google for to many backlinks in such a short time frame.

So with these potential negative side effects, why talk about this program? To this day I still see forum posts regarding this program and how to use it. Either people have no idea, some have a clue and say load and go with proxies and the select few just claim how well they program has been working for them, yet never touch base on how to really use it. There was no real manual that came with this that I know of, if there was detailed instructions I would have think someone would have posted it. The main focus of this post is to educate people on this program, how to use it (if you choose to) and the potential risk’s involved.

This is what the program looks like when you first open it up. The referring URL is going to be the website you are trying to gain backlinks for. You can enter more then 1 domain and can even specify a specific page to show up as the referrer. This information will then be stored in the Referrers.txt file located in the same directory as the program. When using the software you can mix up the referring sites from your site so it looks like different pages are bringing in the traffic.  Examples could be:

• http://www.website.com
• http://www.website.com/page_name.html (or .php, .asp, whatever you use)

The next tab in PRStorm is the URL list. This is where you would put in all of the websites that want to show up as a referrer. There are programs out there that will pull from the SERP’s of any keyword you put into it, you then can load the results into PRStorm. I will show you an example of this program on Monday. The quickest way to load your URL list is to just open up the URLS.txt file located in the program’s folder and just paste them in. With some copies of this program it would come pre loaded with thousands of sites already in it. I would suggest building your own list of sites as that list has been hammered to death in the past and will probably generate a lot more complaints for you.  If you have a list of 5,000 URL’s, I would break that list down in smaller lists of 800-1000 and run the program over the spam of a week to go through your entire list.  You could even break it down into smaller lists of say 500 and take an entire month to go through your list.  This will slow down the backlink building process greatly and help to avoid a penalty by Google for to many backlinks in a short amount of time.

The next tab in PRStorm is that of the user agent list. Here you will want to add in your own, as by just looking at this screenshot you will see Windows 98, NT 4.0. Further on down there are even references to Windows 95, AOL 4.0, AOL 5.0 etc. Who in there right mind even uses Windows 95 or even 98 for that matter? So there might be a select few people using Windows 98, but they are far and few I am sure. Instead just open up the User_Agents.txt file in the program folder and delete all that are there to create your own custom list. You can take out certain ones you want to use, there are several cell phone user agent’s listed there as well as Mac and Linux. Here is a common list of user agents that is more up to date to use in this part of the program. Just copy and paste them into the text file, save and reload the program.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Opera/9.20 (Windows NT 6.0; U; en)
Opera/9.00 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; en) Opera 8.50
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; en) Opera 8.0
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.02 [en]
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20060127 Netscape/8.1
Safari - Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/522.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/3.0.2

The next tab in line is that of the Proxy list. Once again just go to the program folder and locate the proxies.txt file. Paste in your working HTTP proxies, save the file and reload the program. If you have a large list of sites to hit, then you will need a good size list of proxies. Using 30 or 40 will just not cut it, use as many as you can get and you also want them to be anonymous as so they will not show the originating IP address. This is a downside to this program, if a proxy all of a sudden is no longer working, the program will not just skip down and use another. Instead it will just use a direct connection to the website and your original IP address will then show up in the referral log.

The next tab in line is the URL harvester, however that tools sucks and we will not be using it in this demonstration. On Monday I will go over a different program you can use to harvest your own sites to build a list with.

The last tab in PRStorm is the settings. This is where a lot of people get confused as to what to do in setting this up. Now I am sure there are better settings from other people out there who actually use this program a lot. However I do not use this program on a regular basis and used it on my own site referring itself to get these settings. That was the safest way to test this program out, referrer spam my own site showing the same site as the referring URL.

1. Hits Per URL - This is how many hits you want to send to each website, the more hits you send the longer the program will take. Some sites that are large will require thousands of hits to show up in there top 10/20 referring sites list. In all seriousness though I would not set this to a thousand, because in the site owners log file it is going to show 1000 hits from your website all in the same time frame. That is one hell of a red flag to throw on yourself. Then again, using this program in general is a red flag to begin with.
2. Number Of Threads - In short, threads are connections that your computer will make at the same time in an attempt to contact each website in your list. The higher the threads, the faster the program will run. The faster you go, the faster you run the chance of burning out your proxies. If you are not using any proxies then for you it will not matter.
3. Socket Timeouts - Each thread will use a socket (someone else can leave a more technical explanation I am sure) when connecting to a website. The program default was set at 2, which if you are using proxies that is way to short. You need to increase the time the program gives each proxy when connecting to it. If your timeouts are set to low and you have slower proxies then the program will not be able to use that proxy and will just use your IP address instead to make that connection.

So in a nutshell you should now understand how to use this tool, either to educate yourself or to try and gain more backlinks for your website or sites. As stated before I do not recommend using this program as you do run the risk of getting penalized. If you use it in moderation by only hitting a few hundred sites a week then it has the potential to work in your benefit. If you are into blackhat marketing techniques then this program is right up your alley. If you have a site that you cannot afford to lose or get penalized then I suggest you not use PRStorm.

This post was originally made on Internet Marketing Access

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