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With some of the greatest software engineers and programmers working for Google, the programmers behind XRumer have cracked there captcha code. Yes I know that the captcha has been cracked before in the past, however not at a 100% success rate.  Xrumer has upped there game with a 100% google captcha crack. This is a great example that there is always someone in life that knows one trick you do not. In the evolving world of internet marketing, no matter who you are, no matter how long you have been doing it, you can always learn something new. Keep that in mind when talking to new people, yes you might know more then they do, but at the same time you could learn something new from them as well. Here are some new features that are being rolled on with Xrumer 5.

• Verification of successful registration 100% unfailing was achieved.
• Now works with gmail.com: auto-registering mailboxes, downloading emails.
• Implemented a correct processing forms “multipart/form-data”
• Created intellectual proxy/socks manager
• Worked out submitting on phpBB 3, BMForum, Web Wiz Forums, Ukoz, VBulletin 3;
• Added the ability to recognize the captcha type as “click on image with the cat”
• If the forum displays the error “Required field … is not filled,” and this field is unknown for program - it will be automatically recognized and filled by additional algorithm
• Macros is improved; in macros # file_links now is possible to use macros in the file name

The main reason why anyone would use Xrumer is to not only drive traffic to their doorway pages, but also get backlinks for those pages. Those doorway pages will then forward the visitor to your true site, but will not see any penalty from the search engines because you are using several doorway pages to simply push the visitor to your original site. Keep in mind, this the king of spam tools for search engine marketers and you do not want to use this on a domain name you actually care about. If you were to use this tool on one of your main domain names, it will get your site banned from the search engines in a hurry.

I know there are marketers out there who do like this type of marketing due to the nature behind it. I can understand where they are coming, however I will do whatever I can to educate you in any type of internet marketing regardless if it is considered spam, black hat, gray hat, or whatever else. This site is to inform you on tactics that work, regardless. You do not have to use the techniques that are discussed here, that option is up to you.

Yesterday I answered the question regarding what is fast flux hosting.  Today I would like to touch base on SEO hosting, how it works and as a marketer do you really need to use this type of service.  SEO hosting is not like your standard shared, reseller, vps or dedicated server hosting plans.  Most control panels are setup similar to that of a reseller/vps/dedicated server where you can add multiple domain names to have total control over.  Just by having SEO hosting, it will not help your site get ranked any better then standard hosting.  With any site, you plant the seeds and watch it grow, the hosting plays no part in it. The difference though comes in the form of the IP addresses you can set your domain names on.  A standard SEO hosting plan will give you 5 different C Class IP addresses to distribute your websites on.  An IP address looks like this.

111.222.333.444

The 333 is the C block of the IP address, 111 being the A block, 222 the B block and 444 being the D block. With that out of the way, you may ask what is the point of this.  In the past, web masters who owned several websites would have them all hosted on the same server.  Let’s say they owned 5 sites, each site was hosted on the same IP address or on the same C block of IP addresses if they had a dedicated server.  They would then interlink all 5 of these sites together in an effort to gain more relevant backlinks and help import there ranking.  In the past, this trick worked great, that is until the search engines got smart and were able to lookup the IP address of each site.  Attempting to do this now will only result in those sites being penalized or even banned from the SERP’s.

In steps this new and improved hosting plan for internet marketers to use as the latest and greatest tool…SEO Hosting.  You are now able to create your sites, assign them all a different C Class IP and start linking them together without any problems.  Well that is what most people think.  There is a catch though, anyone new to internet marketing will not understand.  Most people will register there domain names all with the same company and use the same contact information.  Let me share a few tips with you that can help reduce the risk of your sites being caught.

Domain Name Registration - Do not use the same domain registration company for all of your sites.  That is the first mistake you can make, even though as of this post Google (or any other engine) has not come out and said they compare whois info of each site that is linked to each other.  Instead, you will want to register your domain name’s with various registration companies and use there privacy service.  This way when a whois lookup is done, they will not only see different privacy labels, they will also see the domain names are registered with several different companies.  Another thing as of this post, there is no proof that Google or any other search engine will devalue a website that uses private registration.

DNS Servers - With MOST of these SEO hosting companies they will only give two DNS servers to use with all of your sites.  Well if you think about it, what good does that really do you?  So you have your 5 sites, all on different C block IP’s and no matching registration information.  The problem still lies on all 5 sites pointing back to the same DNS servers. As of this posting there is no proof that Google or any other search engine will penalize sites that use the same DNS servers.  However, if you have the choice to have different ones, why not use it?

Dedicated IP Address - This one is not as important since the search engines will not penalize you for being on the same IP address as a “bad neighborhood” website.  You do not know the owner of that site and  you are not linking directly to that site on your IP.  It is nice though to have your own IP address that only your site resides on, this though is not an important factor to consider when choosing an SEO hosting company.

If you are serious about creating a large list of sites and linking them all together, then SEO hosting is what you need.  Trying to do this with a standard reseller hosting plan will only get those sites banned and you having to start all over again.  When searching for the right SEO hosting company, keep in mind the amount of DNS servers they will give you.  As of right now, GotWebHost will give you 5 different C class IP’s and 5 different name servers to use.  You do get what you pay for and they are more expensive then other companies.  However, with the cheaper companies you do not get different name servers to use with each IP.

The only thing I can really see SEO hosting being beneficial for is that of linking sites together. If you are into creating websites with massive loads of content just to link your sites up, then SEO hosting is a must.  This is also considered black hat marketing, but hey, marketing is marketing anyway you look at it.  Other then that I really do not see a use for SEO hosting and the benefit of having that many different C class IP’s to host your sites on.  If you own several sites, but they are not related or linked together, you can put them on a simple reseller package or at least a VPS.  I think SEO hosting was created by a black hatter who was looking for away around the search engine penalties and instead found a new audience to market the service to.  I could be wrong, so please do not quote me on that.  In the end SEO hosting will not help your site get ranked any better, it is nothing more then hosting for link farm sites.

Fast flux hosting has become very popular with online crooks in an effort to hide the true websites origin. Email spammers are not the only people utilizing this technology, stock sites offering tips (google adwords, wish I took a screenshot) adult sites as well as home based business websites. The methods used behind this type of hosting is much more complex then that of standard types. Fast flux actually uses infected computers to route it’s traffic through, acting like a proxy server so the end user does not know the origin of the original site. This is done by changing the A and or NS records of a domain name very quikly, normally 5-10 minutes is what the time to live (TTL) is set to. The amount of infected computer’s can be in the thousands, even hundreds of thousands, so you can imagine the endless IP combinations that can be used when routing to a website.

Flux hosting can be used in a positive way, take MSN for example.  With the amount of traffic they get, there site is hosted on various IP addresses using load balancing to ensure the quickest response time for the viewer.  In most cases though the average internet marketer does not have a need for flux hosting, let me break down the two types for you.

Single Flux Hosting - This is where the A records are changed for a given sub domain rapidly.  Once changed the site will then come up from a different IP address.  A twist to single flux hosting is where the NS records are changed in the zone file of the main domain name.  With these changes made, the sub domains are also effected thus giving you rotating IP addresses your site is found on.

Double Flux Hosting - With double flux hosting you are not only changing the A records, you are also changing the NS as well.  So the host and name servers are changing every few minutes, depending on the settings setup by the bot master.

By using round robin IP’s and TTL’s set to a few minutes, the sites are always changing there locations.  Load distribution is setup to make sure the infected computer is still online and can handle the bandwidth.  If the computer is offline or already busy, it is simply removed from the queue and that IP address will not be included in the record change.  By doing this, it ensures the site is online and functioning for the viewer. The downside though is the website has to on each infected computer for it to show up, as it is truly the host.

Going one step further and not relying on an infected computer to host your files, you simply use there IP addresses as a proxy that forwards the requests to your original host.  By using either single or double flux methods, you are ensuring your original site will not be found as easily.  Basically your browser requests to see the website, whatever IP address is currently setup in the domain records will make a connection to your computer.  After the connection is made, it will forward your request on to the actual host server.  Once forwarded the site will be displayed without you knowing where the site files were pulled from.

This is illegal as hell and I suggest you do not go near this type of network setup.  I have seen people advertising services regarding flux hosting and there really is only one use.  That being to hide your ass because you are doing something you are not suppose to be doing.  Grant it people that have these sophisticated networks setup and running do make a lot of money.  Then again is all that money really worth the risk involved if you get caught using a botnet?  I didn’t think so.

On Saturday I gave out tips on how to use PRStorm along with the positive and negative side effects of using the program. PRStorm does come with it’s own list of URL’s to use, however it would be better to build your own list of websites. With your own list, you ensure yourself on finding newer sites that are still in use today and have not been hammered to death by other people. Domain Grabber is a free piece of software you can use to harvest your own list of websites to use in PRStorm.

This software is pretty straight forward and very easy to figure out. It uses Yahoo to search for your keywords and saves them to a text file. You will notice at the bottom I have checked “Domains Only”, this will ensure that your list is saved as only the domain name and not with any sub-pages it has found. At the top you can enter in one keyword at a time to perform a search on. In this case we want to target websites that we can have our website showing as a referring site. Yahoo uses different search parameter’s then Google, so you are somewhat limited to your search. Either way though it will give you more sites to use in PRStorm. A few search example’s to use with Domain Grabber would be

• intext:”Created by awstats”
• “Generated by Webalizer Version 2.01″
• “Generated by Webalizer Version *”
• “Top * of * Total Referrers”
• “usage statistics” “Summary Period: August 2008″ (change the month to get more results)

Google SiteRipper gives you a lot more options when trying to find URL’s to use in PRStorm. It also has the ability to use a proxy server to get around reaching Google’s search limit and banning your IP for 24 hours. I also like the fact that you can enter in words to exclude from the results. Search examples to use with the Google Siteripper would be

• inurl:yourkeyword +usage_200804 (enter your keyword and change the date for more results)
• inurl:/webalizer/usage_200806.html (change the date for more results)
• inurl:.com/webalizer/usage_200806.html (change the date and .com for more results like)
• inurl:.edu/webalizer/usage_200805.html
  inurl:.net/webalizer/usage_200804.html
  inurl:.org/webalizer/usage_200803.html

You can be creative to narrow down your search results to find more targeted sites to use. The site list you use in PRStorm will play a big role in making this concept work for you. Stay away from buying list’s, as they probably have been sold over and over again and used by a lot of other people. The default list that comes with PRStorm, just delete it because those sites have been hit very hard already and some may no longer even exist. I do not condone referrer spamming, especially to use on a client’s website or your own website that you can not afford to possibly lose the ranking for. I just wanted to show you the potential of the program along with what it can do both good and bad for your website. I would say it is more on the bad side as you are essentially spamming these websites with your own link to gain backlinks via there published stat logs.

Now what can we do to prevent someone from spamming your stat logs with a referrer spamming tool like PRStorm? If you have your own methods, by all means post them here or email them to me. I will post them along with your name and or website giving you full credit.

This post was originally made on Internet Marketing Access

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

Let the bubbles rise to the surface so you can see what blackaht link building is about. Black hat marketing is frowned upon by many people in the internet marketing industry. What you are about to read are techniques used to try and game the system and get several hundred, if not thousand backlinks at a time. Using these methods to the extreme will most certainly get your website penalized or even worse, banned from the search engines. Using two of these methods you also run the risk of making a few web site owners extremely mad to the point where you can lose your web host and even your ISP.

Comment Spamming - This is where you take a list of “do follow” blogs and auto submit little comments with a keyword or keyword phrase as your name. Since the blog is allowing the search engines to crawl those links, your site will get picked up. Another form of comment spamming is just taking any list of blogs and submitting comments that include a link back to your website. This is one of the techniques that will surely piss off a few web masters as they will do whatever they can to eliminate spam on there site. As always there is automated software to make comment spamming easier and untraceable back to your ISP by the use of proxy servers. Look for future posts focussed around how to find do follow blogs and what proxy servers are used for.

Trackback Spamming - This is very similar to comment spamming, but instead of leaving a comment you are simply posting a link somewhere in your blog that points back to the site that allows track backs. Trackbacks will auto insert a link under the blog post’s comments section with a link right back to your website. This method is used a lot by scraper sites or spam blogs, in most cases they ripped your article word for word and they left a link to the original article. I will show you later this week how to try and fight these scraper sites and get there hosting shut down.

Forum Spamming - When using this method, it does not matter what type of forum you target, you can just find any VBulletin or PHPBB powered forum. The basic idea behind this is using software which will auto create accounts on almost any list of forums you give it. After the account has been verified via email, it will then login and make whatever post you tell it to. That post will of course have a link back to your website, which is what you were aiming for in the first place. Next thing is creating another account (2, 3, 4 more accounts even) to log back into that same forum and make follow up posts to your original post to make it look even more real. This is done to try and fool moderators from deleting your post from the forum. So imagine finding a list of 10,000 forums and letting a program run for days on end doing this non stop. It means a ton of potential backlinks for very little effort on your part.

Social Media Auto Submission - This is the same idea as forum spamming, instead you are auto generating accounts on popular social media websites. Once you have a bunch of accounts created on whichever social media website you are trying to target, you simply start bookmarking/stumbling/sphinning or whatever on your own article. With enough votes in a short amount of time, you are trying to make your story go HOT and get noticed by other users of that social media website. Once your article gets noticed by other users, you now have the chance to get backlinks from the people that liked your article so much they linked back to it. (Like this one, just link back to it…ok shameless plug, )

Link Buying - So this method is a little bit on the touchy side, some people say it is blackhat, some say it is grey, some say it is whitehat. I personally do not see anything wrong with buying links, that is depending on what type of website and where on the site the link will be going. What it boils down to is how much money do you have to spend on your link buying campaign. Buying links allows you to pick and choose what sites your link will go on. There are services like Text Link Ads (who have now been banned by google) where you can buy up links on almost any type of website. If you have deep pockets and pick the right sites to advertise on then it can go a long way.

Refer Spam - This method has been around for years and works quite well if used in moderation. There are websites out there who make there stats public, so we can see who has been visiting there website, the amount of traffic etc. The key thing here is not only can we see there stat logs, the search engines can see them and spider them as well. The main goal with referring spam is to have your website show up in there stat logs as a refer so the search engines will see that backlink and then come spider your site. Before you ask, of course there is software out there to automate this process. Running it for days on end hitting thousands of websites will most definitely get your website banned because you will be gaining backlinks to quickly. You need to make it look as natural as possible, so this is another method that if used in moderation can have a significant gain for you.

One thing to consider is if you hit the same website enough time, you are bound to run into a webmaster who reads there stat logs religiously. They will go to your website, see that there is no link anywhere pointing back to there website and some will know right away what you are doing. Get enough webmasters to complain and you run the risk of losing your hosting account. If you did not use proxies while running the software, then you run the risk of losing your ISP as well. Then again when using black hat marketing methods you should already be aware of these risks.

Link Farms - Link farms are nothing more then a large group of websites that are all interlinked to each other. It is a form of reciprocal link exchange, just on a much larger scale. Instead of your site being linked on just one site, it can be linked on hundreds or thousands. In return your website will be linking back to them as well. Most link farms are built and used by one person or a small group of people in an effort to gain there backlinks. The problem most people face is they do not understand that shared hosting or even a dedicated server with just a few different IP’s is doing them no good. The search engines can see what IP address all of those websites are hosted on, once they see the same group of IP’s all linking with each other the ban bat comes out a flying.

RSS Spamming - Splogs are the main reason for using RSS Spamming as a backlink technique. For those of you who do not know what a splog is, it is basically a generated blog where the content was scraped (stolen) from some where else. These types of sites are filled with ad sense and or affiliate offers along with links to there other websites at times. When a new post is made, they have Wordpress set up to automatically ping certain RSS sites in an effort to get them to there site faster and index the content on there network. Splogs use anywhere from 1 post to 15+ posts per day and after each one, the post is then pinged. There are automated scripts that will auto install and setup wordpress blogs on as many domain names as you need to. So when one of the splogs gets shut down or banned for spamming, they just install another and move on.

Now if you have read this far in the article, then I hope you understand that I do not endorse using these methods unless you either do not care or you are looking to learn about them. That is what this blog is for, giving you access to all types of internet marketing technique’s and breaking them down for you.

This post was originally made on Internet Marketing Access