The BH Chameleon Method

I mentioned this method on Jon’s affiliate forum around a year ago and some of the responses I got were fairly colourful:

“I disagree with blackhat SEO myself, in that you’re doing a bait and switch…”

“…switching the content of a site to get inbound links so that people are linking to something they didn’t want to link to.”

“…but BH techniques such as this are reasons why the internet is becoming more and more of a cesspool.”

However, this approach is more effective now than ever before because of the rise in popularity of social bookmarking sites, so I’ll discuss it again.

Let’s say you want to enter the very competitive pills market to promote Viagra and related drugs. For traffic, you’ll rely on SEO. But, as you can guess, almost no one is going to link to your pills’ site. So it’s unlikely you’ll get much organic traffic!

But try this method…

Register an ambiguous domain name including the desired keyword – something like viagraaletinfo.com. Create a blog about the adverse effects of Viagra (and related drugs). Include studies about the side effects from using the drugs. (Visit PubMed and search for Sildenafil – aka Viagra.)

Create/include videos, relevant podcasts, cartoons and any content that will get backlinks. After creating and populating the blog, promote as much as possible. Write interesting and witty Viagra-related articles and submit to Digg and the usual places. Commission a cheap artist to create funny cartoons, eg.:

Because of the blog’s non-commercial nature and content, it should be fairly easy to get backlinks.

Now, after getting the desired amount of links, transition the blog into a site that promotes Viagra and related drugs: modify and delete articles, remove the cartoons and videos, etc. Add filler articles that target long-tail drug keywords. With the trust from all the backlinks, the filler articles should rank reasonably well to bring in decent amounts of targeted traffic.

The above is an example of using the BH Chameleon Method. A future post, Get and Abuse Google’s Trust, takes the idea to an entirely new level. Perhaps one day I’ll do a  case study on one of my chameleon sites.