SEO From the Dark Side

A while ago a member of WPBlackhat posted a script to create virtual blogs (here: http://wpblackhat.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1327) on WP. The author of the script is Stephen Rider and is blog is here: http://striderweb.com/nerdaphernalia/features/virtual-multiblog/

I suspect, unconsciously, I’ve been thinking about a way to exploit this script for a while (although it’s obviously useful for simply maintaining a large network of blogs), because a few hours ago I had “Ah-Ha” moment!

Let me tell you more…

First, I’ll ask you a question: let’s say I have a general blog about technology and a niche blog about registry cleaners. Would you agree there is a significantly greater chance of making sales of a registry-cleaner product on the niche registry blog than the general technology blog (even if the general blog had numerous registry cleaner articles)? From my experience, it’s much, much, much easier to make specific product sales on a niche blog than a general blog.

Now, if you understand a little about TrustRank (not PageRank), you’ll know that articles (or posts) on sites with some trust, get indexed quicker (almost instantaneously sometimes) and can rank well - very well sometimes with few or no backlinks.

So, here’s the idea. Take a general blog with some trust (you can get them reasonably cheap from DigitalPoint or Flippa). Add some posts about kids’ toys, Wii games, video reviews, etc, etc, etc. These posts rank well because of the domain trust. Now, imagine if we used cloaking combined with virtual blogs…

We cloak the posts on the general blog so only the search engine spiders see them. Human visitors see something entirely different – they see a virtual blog. For instance, if the post they clicked in the SERPs is about toys they see something like: http://toptoyreview.com/, or, if the post they clicked in the SERPs is about Wii games they see something like: http://wiigame.deals-for-less.com/, or, if the post they clicked in the SERPs is about video reviews they see something like: http://videoultrareviews.com/

In other words, search engine spiders see the general blog but human visitors see a virtual niche blog related to what they are looking for. By showing humans a niche blog, there is significantly greater chance of making sales!

How difficult is it to turn this idea into reality? In fact, it’s fairly easy. Inside WPBlackhat, we already have the cloaking technology with several plugins using it very successfully, so it’s just a matter of creating a plugin to manage the virtual niche blogs. The niche blogs themselves can be created using http://reviewazon.com/ or a similar plugin.

Ok, time to get coding!

Update:

The author of the script is Stephen not Jason

There is some confusion. This concept has nothing to do with redirection - it’s all about db switching. As mentioned by Stephen, an entire WP blog is stored in an SQL db. So, switching a db is effectively switching a blog. The dash of blackhat is about switching to a relevant database based on a keyword. I’ll create an example that illustrates it.