If you’re an SEO and played around with Digg for any amount of time, you might be aware of the sheer amount of weight (trust) that site has with the search engines (especially with Google) – it really is phenomenal! For instance, set up a new WP blog, create one or two articles and submit them to Digg, and your site will be indexed pretty quick! And you don’t need any votes too!

Wouldn’t it be nice to abuse some of that trust to get a network of splogs indexed? But you can’t just submit your splogs individually otherwise the mods will catch them or Digg users will report them!

But there is another way…

Here’s a plug-in that cloaks sidebar links, so only the search engines see them. Download the plug-in here, and copy to your plug-in directory then activate it.

First I’ll explain the user interface (below) then how to use it.

Enter your splogs’ URLs in HTML link format with the appropriate anchor text in the edit box. Now, change the setting of ‘Sidebar Link Cloaker Active?’ to ‘Yes’, then click ‘Save Settings’.

Finally, add the line of code below to your theme’s sidebar, towards the end of the sidebar.php file.

<?php if (function_exists(’sblc’)) sblc (); ?>

That’s it, done! The Sidebar Link Cloaker plug-in simply displays your splogs’ links to the search engine spiders and not human visitors, so they get spidered without being visible to prying eyes.

To use this tactic, create a new WP blog on a different c-class IP to your existing splogs, and add some content. The content can be a simple post about current events, or even use a modified ezine-article. Install the plug-in and add your splog links. Then submit the post to Digg. You can use your current account, or better still, create a new one and use that. I’ve found it’s best to submit several articles to Digg from the same blog instead of just one. Inevitably, your new blog will get indexed and the sidebar splog links spidered.

If you want to see the cloaked sidebar links, install the Firefox User Agent Switcher, change the User Agent to either bot, crawler, or googlebot and view your blog. The links should be visible on the sidebar.

Don’t use this plug-in on your existing whitehat blogs! Create a new WP blog on a cheap domain! To use this tactic to its full, create a network of WP blogs with the plug-in installed.

You can, of course, submit links/posts to all other social bookmarking sites too.

Again, you can download the plug-in here.