SEO From the Dark Side

Inside WPBlackhat, we have been scraping the pharma SERPS for over four months now. Specifically, we have scraped the first pages for ‘Buy Viagra’, ‘Buy Cialis’, ‘Buy Phentermine’, ‘Buy Levitra’ daily. In our database we have many thousands of URLs used by the pharma spammers. Before we discuss this any more, I’ll explain what pharma spam is just in case you’re a bit confused. If you search Google for ‘buy viagra’

You’ll see something similar to (screenshot taken a few days ago):

That search page contains 3 parasites pages. A parasite-page is a page on a trusted site inserted with a link (or more) and usually some text and sometimes images and even a redirect. The links/redirects lead to sites selling pharma products. After a pharma spammer has inserted the link(s)/text/image(s)/redirect, he spams links to the page so it ranks well for the desired search term, in this case buy Viagra.

In the last few days, I’ve been analyzing our pharma database, and the results are quite startling. We started our database in March, so here’s some observations since then.

Kaboodle.com was in the pharma SERPs when we started our database. It stayed in the SERPs until late May, then re-appeared in July probably following a temporary ban.

Viddler.com is such an amazing parasite! Again in the SERPs in March all the way through to late May and gets blacklisted for just over a month, back in July.

Treemo.com was heavily in the SERPs for March and April then totally disappeared. I suspect it’s ripe now!

Quizilla.com, another amazing parasite, has consistently been in the SERPs since we started our databse.

Here’s my conclusions:

• Contrary to popular belief, Google is only blacklisting parasites on a temporary basis. Sometimes for as little as a month! Also, I doubt Google has a consistent policy – or any policy for that matter - for temporary blacklisting parasites. The blacklisting period seems to vary wildly.
• Google is slow to act. Realistically, you’d expect Google to blacklist a parasite as soon as it hits the first page for the most popular pharma terms, but they don’t! Sometimes, they take months to act! I suspect they have become over-reliant on their algo, which is obviously flawed.
• Some parasites do consistently well in the SERPs. You could call them hot parasites. If they rank consistently well for pharma, they could rank well for many other terms too!
• Overall, Google seem to be struggling to cope with pharma and related parasite link-spamming. They have no obvious or effective way to deal with it. So exploit it as much as possible

Here’s some parasites doing well in the SERPs at the moment:

http://www.kaboodle.com/
http://vbulletin.thesite.org/member.php
http://www.1up.com/
http://www.healthcentral.com/
http://www.gamingtarget.com/forums/member.php
http://www.slim-fast.com/

And some hot parasites that do consistently well:

http://www.viddler.com
http://community.icontact.com
http://www.treemo.com/
http://www.realtown.com
http://www.quizilla.com
http://www.kaboodle.com/

Interestingly, we had a detailed chat about pharma marketing last night in the WPBlackhat chat room. We covered the basics and the importance using the pharma DB as competitive intelligence to give members the edge over other pharma spammers. It was a fun chat.