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To help achieve higher rankings within the search engines, the number of backlinks pointing to a specific page of your site is important. In a perfect world, you would gain your backlinks by having great content that readers find useful, funny video or picture, or talking about a breaking news story that is in the headlines. Their are other ways to getting backlinks, but for now I will leave you with those. Some of you are looking for an easy, quick fix to getting more backlinks. You want the silver spoon in your mouth and your hand held through each baby step you take. Some people are lazy, other’s just do not care about following any guidelines and want to rank regardless of how they get the results. I personally like to learn new methods and teach other’s about some of them. So with today’s post I am going to show you an easy way to get unlimited backlinks using RSS feeds. This of course is not an ethical way of getting those backlinks, the search engines can easily detect and discount them if they made one slight change in their algo.

What Are RSS Feeds?

If you do not know what an RSS feed is that is fine, you are here to learn so I will explain the abridged version. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication which are nothing more then live feeds of the latest post or article you have made on your website. As soon as your post is live, it is fed straight to your subscribers RSS reader. The RSS program is used to parse and display your post, just like your email client pulls down your emails and displays them in an easier format to read. People can subscribe to your feed, so as soon as your post is live, they can either be notified via email or see the update in their feed reader.

Using RSS Feeds To Gain Unlimited Backlinks

I want you to head over to RSSMix.com and you will see how their system works. You basically enter in your XML RSS feed URL along with up to three other feeds. Those 3 other feeds can be any feed from any site in XML format, it truly does not matter what site feed you use because RSSMix will simply take those 4 feeds and combine them into one feed.

Here is a screen shot of RSSMix, you simply put in your URL’s into the box and hit create. It will then display a your new RSS feed link from RSSMix.com. Remember you can mix and match as many feeds from other sites as you want.

Utilizing Your New RSSMix Feed

So now you might be asking what do you do next. As an example let’s say you created 10 new feeds with RSSMix, all with different feeds except for your own. You now have 10 feeds with different content all mixed in with yours. From their you can simply take your 10 new RSSMix feed URL’s and start putting them into RSS aggregators and RSS directories. These links will not be of high value, however you can easily gain a lot of them in a short amount of time if that is the route you are looking to take.

Is Their A Program That Will Do This For Me?

Everyone wants a program that will do the work for them, push the magic “Start” button and watch the site sour in the SERP’s. Sorry to burst your bubble, but their is no public program that will auto generate hundreds of these RSSMix feeds for you automatically.

Can I Get Banned?

I do not see how your site could get banned from the search engines for utilizing this technique. Reason being it would be way to easy to use this method to ban your competition. What I do see happening is the engines will simply devalue any link from RSSMix.com, making all of those feeds you created useless or RSSMix.com banning your IP address from making so many. They should be using a captcha system on their site coupled with an email verification sign up process. Doing this would eliminate the potential spam that this type of service can produce. Captcha to try and stop the automated process of signing up and requiring an email address to receive your feed. One feed per email address would work and making it a requirement to click a validation link in the email they send to you.

Summary

As you can see from the title of this post, using this RSSMix trick is not ethical or white hat by any means. So why bother talking about it then? Simple, I want to educate you the reader on other methods of internet marketing. You can find 100 other sites that talk about white hat methods you should be using, but not many of them talk about anything else. As a marketer I feel it is important to not only read about these marketing methods, but to also understand them. It is one thing to know that search engine spam is bad, but do you truly know examples of what is bad and what is not? This post is a good example of search engine spam and how it actually functions. Once again this is not the ethical way to building backlinks, but it can be effective regardless.

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

Building one way backlinks is crucial for any search engine optimization campaign. Some things listed here are commonly known, while others are over looked for some reason. I know people have their opinions on what works and what is a waste of time, but I see it as a link is a link and will do you no wrong. It all comes down to time management and some sort of a budget. If you do not have the time to implement some of these techniques, then I suggest you outsource them. Of course there are other methods on building ethical backlinks, by all means list them here to let others know what is working for you. Here I have only listed 6 methods with a little explanation of each.

Article Submissions - The power of a good article is often over looked by many because of the time involved in writing the content as well as submitting your article to different directories. By writing a good article and submitting it to the directories you get the chance at something more then just a link. You could see your article published in a newspaper or magazine, a well known website might see it and publish it (along with a link back to you), you could be asked to do an interview in regards to what you wrote or it could lead to some guest articles or blog posts being written by you. There are a lot of article directories you can submit to, I will just give you a short list along with there PR.

• www.ezinearticles.com (PR 6)
• www.goarticles.com (PR 6)
• www.articlesfactory.com (PR 5)
• www.articledashboard.com (PR 6)
• www.articlesbase.com (PR 5)

To me these are some of the best directories to submit your article to, I know there are hundreds more so if you feel another deserves to be in this list then please let me know. Now when submitting your articles to these sites, you will want to keep the article between 500-1000 words depending on the rules of the directory. By all means make sure your spelling and grammar are at it’s best (yes I know mine is not the greatest). If you write an article and want to submit it to hundreds of different directories, then I suggest you take one version of it and post it only to these 5 sites listed above. Take your second version and submit it to the rest of the article directories as you see fit. Another thing to keep in mind is linking to your site in the article itself, for some directories it is not allowed. The only link that is allowed is in your author biography which will be put at the bottom of every article you submit. That is where you can put a link or two using whatever keywords in your anchor text to point back to your site.

There is semi-automated software out there to help you in the submission of your articles, however setting it up takes a good amount of time. There is a good article submitter at SubmitSuite that you can use if you like. You will have to visit each article directory listed in the program, it will auto fill out your pre determined information. All you need to do is enter the captcha code and verify a link that will be emailed to you. Then in the program you are able to keep track of the sites you have signed up for and verified. This is what takes the most amount of time due to the fact there are so many directories listed.

For a complete automated process, then outsourcing is the way to go. Head over to Digital Point Forums and in the Buy/Sell/Trade section you will find people who will submit your article to hundreds of directories for as little as $8 per article. It will be cheaper if you decide to order in bulk and have several articles submitted. I suggest that you write your own articles and have two variations of it, one to submit yourself to the 5 sites listed above and the other article to give to whomever will be submitting it for you. Make sure you tell them that you have already submitted to these sites so they do not submit to them as well.

Web Directories – Some people may think that submitting your website to most web directories is a waste of time. However, the way I see it a link is a link regardless of how established the directory may be. We all know not to expect much traffic from most of the directories on the internet. Since when was the last time you went to a directory to search for something? Exactly, you use a search engine to find what it is you are looking for. When you submit your website to the directories you will want to rotate what you post so you are not submitting the same thing to every directory.

• Title – Change your title up and use different keywords, this will give you several different backlinks to support the key phrases you are trying to rank for.
• Description – Whatever keywords you use in your title, make sure to match the up with your website description.

Never submit the same information to the directories, by doing so you are limiting yourself to the one keyword or phrase that you used to title your link. If you are submitting to 1000 different directories, then try and use at least 10 different titles and descriptions. Now you are probably thinking how can you submit to all of those directories without killing yourself in the process. Two main ways are using some type of semi-auto mated software or just out source it. There is no full automated submission software due to the captcha code, email confirmations, and not all directory sites use the same set of categories.

If you choose to submit them yourself, you could look into software such as Directory Submitter Gold. Another choice would be to install Robo Form into your browser and use the custom fields to auto fill in the information for you. When submitting your site, you will not want to try and hit a hundred submission’s a day. Getting to many backlinks in a short amount of time can actually penalize your website.

I suggest out sourcing your web directories submission process. You can go to Digital Point Forums and find some really good deals on getting the work done for you. Make sure they allow you to submit multiple titles and descriptions for your submissions. There are a few people on there who will actually space out the submission process and not get all 1000-15000 done in a day or two. You can spend anywhere between $10-$150 to get your website submitted to a large list of directories.

Guest Blogging - Contact blog owners that you know you can write good content for and see if they will allow a guest post. Some might invite you to do a guest post each week, which is even better for you because you will get a backlink each week. If you write good, informative posts then the readers might link to your website as well. Another good thing about guest blogging is it gives you the chance to pick up more daily traffic to your site from there readers.

Blog Comments - In order for this to work you will either need to find a “do-follow” blog or a blog that will allow you to keep a link of some kind in your comment. It is hard to keep your link in a comment because the link to your site would have to be in reference to something in the post you commented on. Most blog owners will consider the link spam and either delete the link or delete your comment all together. With tomorrow’s post I will go into greater detail in finding these types of blogs, since to some it is not considered “white hat”.

Forum Signatures - Forum signatures do not hold a lot of weight when it comes to backlinks since there are so many other links on the post that shares the link juice with your own. Just like web directory submissions, a link is a link so take it any way you can. The key here is finding forums in your niche that allow signatures to contain links. You can spend the time and contribute to a few forums that you feel is the best fit for not only your niche but yourself as well. Why participate at a website where you do not like the bad atmosphere? Forums can be a great way to build character for your name as well as your brand, but it can take a long time while making several helpful posts. Participating in forum discussions is also a great way to meet other people in your niche to network with. You can meet some really helpful people on forums who can help you later on down the road. If you do not have the time to participate in forum discussions, but still would like to utilize backlinks from signatures then out source it. Once again head over to Digital Point Forum and in the Buy/Sell/Trade section you will find people selling there signatures for a few dollars a month. Spend $20 and you could get 8-10 people who will all use your website link in there signature. Make sure to use keywords as your anchor text and not just your website name.

Social Media Sites - Using social media sites can give you a significant backlink boost if your story makes the front page or a well known user submits your story for you. By having a high profile user submit your story, you will see a better chance of it becoming more popular then if you had submitted it yourself. In some cases it is like follow the leader, if other users see “User-X” has posted/voted for your article then they will tag along and do the same thing. There are so many different social media websites out there, some are even tailored to a certain niche. Take Sphinn for example, that is a great choice for me to use to try and promote my blog posts because the site is for search marketers. Do a search for different types of social media websites that you could use for your website. Since this topic covers so many different aspects, I will have to elaborate on it more in a different post.

Tomorrow’s post will cover the unethical, at times blackhat ways on link building. So stay tuned and be prepared to take some notes.

This post was originally made on Internet Marketing Access