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Yikes! Learning from spammers? Am I nuts? Nope (at least I don’t think so…). Read on, and you’ll see why I feel we can learn a lesson from spammers. Spammers operate on the idea of quantity over quality. They produce huge numbers of auto generated pages filled with ads. Each page contains specific niche keywords and is blasted out on blogs, websites, comments, etc. A spammer’s goal is to get as many pages out there as possible and promote them, so enough people happen to visit and click on ads, generating revenue for the spammer or their client. They play the numbers: more pages = more keywords = more visitors; someone will click the ads and make them money. They’re all about bottom feeding.

So what can you take away from this?

That a substantial amount of traffic can be generated from playing the numbers. What I mean by this is creating large numbers of content targeting specific keywords and getting this content out through every channel you can (e.g., search engines, blog search engines, directories, vertical search engines).

Spammers use bad content, but the same techniques would work without any ethical violations if you used real content. The question would then become how the hell do you generate so much original content? Make it short. Create a blog, post a lot on every possible niche keyword combination in your industry, make sure the content is legitimate, and promote this content everywhere. Pick up a bunch of traffic on very niche searches and generate good information at the same time.

This isn’t for everyone, but will work as long as you can produce enough usable content.

Technorati Tags: seo advice, spamming, spammers, seo, seo consultant, traffic, content, specific keywords

4 Responses to “SEO Advice | Learning From Spammers: How To Play The Numbers”

1. Lost in SPAM at Technical Disaster Says:
   May 4th, 2007 at 10:10 am

   [...] I am not really lost in SPAM, unless you count the fact that on an average daily basis I receive about 125 SPAM comments on this blog. Lucky for me, I know how to defend myself automatically by using scripts and little elves who closely monitor the validity of commentary here. (I do fear that the spammers know something I do not, because I keep getting comments for a new job or for personal “growth” products.) One of my technology co-workers actually wrote a blip about SPAM a day or so ago SEO Advice - Learning from SPAMMERS. [...]

2. rob Says:
   June 8th, 2007 at 3:51 am

   I don’t think quality can be mass produced. Quality gets the links in, not quantity. Auto gen content can be rehashed and rejigged to ones heart is content, yet if its adding nothing to the mix then eventually it ‘ll either wither and die or be manually removed.

   I just dont think its possible to auto-gen quality original content. Sure, you could write a lot of short posts of dubious use but why should that sort of stuff rank for anything? If I were a SE, I’d be looking to discount that sort of stuff, hell they even have a word already, dont they? Isn’t that a splog?

3. Solomon Rothman Says:
   June 8th, 2007 at 10:27 am

   Rob, first off I don’t necessarily condone generating large amounts of content or playing the numbers, the article explored an idea that will work in SEO, the key (which maybe I should have emphasized) would be to write (not auto gen) very quickly as many posts as possible on a said topic. For the strategy to work, the topic has to be one that is not overly written about online (there are many boring topics like this say watch batteries, hospital gowns, mold removal and the list goes on and on).

   If the topic you’re writing on is under saturated - the pages will rank and the traffic will flow in. For example how many blogs are writing daily or weekly quality posts on capacitor parts or watch batteries? With a subject like that, mass quantities of even basic posts (not spam) will rank very well for individual keyword searches and may win out over a quality approach. These subjects are unlikely to gain large amounts of links or repeat traffic, so by having short posts targeting different combinations of words you’ll build up large organic traffic from long tail searches (longer searches like 4 words that get a lot of traffic all put together).

   The stuff will rank because unique, fresh content targeting those words is in short supply online and unlikely to become saturated anytime soon. People don’t continuously write long quality posts and articles on minute, boring and low traffic terms, but those terms can be extremely profitable if you can crank out enough posts to mass target individual long tail searches with real content (just very quickly produced content). Spammers auto gen content for that very purpose. You can use this mass targeting approach without auto generating content (writing tons of short blog posts is one way) and still reap the benefit of a massive long tail reach. I would mention this approach to a client wanting to rank for tons of minute boring terms, that no one wanted to write long quality blog posts about. Maybe I’d produce one high quality link bait item for there website (to gain links and build core domain trust) and then supplement that with tons of short posts targeting long tail words.

   Does that make more sense?

4. rob Says:
   June 9th, 2007 at 5:20 am

   Solomon, thanks for that comprehensive considered response.

   Yes put like that it makes a whole lot of sense and is a gem of a piece of great advice and strategy for anyone looking to build a little traffic - I hate to be the one writing those posts though, actually i have a cool little script which might just be ideal fro such a project j/k

   I’ll probably be blogging about this in the very near future, thanks again.

   Rob

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