Scaling Splogging in 2017

[greenGabbard]

Interesting thread. I do quite a bit of similar stuff, so here are my thoughts on a couple of questions you raised:

1. Domains

A lot of people swear by .org/.com/.net for these types of projects and use them exclusively. My own testing suggests that they're multiples better than *any* cheap domain. For a lot of cheap domains this multiple is 10x or greater, though there are a couple of diamonds in the rough out there where the difference is maybe 3-4x instead. In the end I split my domains between .org/.com/.net and 2-3 good cheap extensions that I've found.

2. Hosting

Have you thought about using dedicated server(s) plus Cloudflare? If you're not cloaking and don't plan to I think this is your best bet for scaling. You also mentioned automating set up. If you're using Wordpress, Serverpilot is very automation friendly.

I would love to hear anything that you can share about indexing. Even if you get your content right it's still a big challenge indexing a lot of pages on a low / no authority, brand new domain.

Would you say Incapsula would be good for another portion of domains?

Also where do u begin to learn this stuff? this seems awesome i like setting up systems and building things. Thank you for your time, effort and consideration in this matter.

 

[redrays]

Would you say Incapsula would be good for another portion of domains?

Also where do u begin to learn this stuff? this seems awesome i like setting up systems and building things. Thank you for your time, effort and consideration in this matter.

I'm sure Incapsula would work, I use Cloudflare because I know how to use it and I find the API easy to work with.

I learned how to do this stuff through forums and then trial and error. There were some good threads on bhw a year or two ago about it.

 

[greenGabbard]

I'm sure Incapsula would work, I use Cloudflare because I know how to use it and I find the API easy to work with.

I learned how to do this stuff through forums and then trial and error. There were some good threads on bhw a year or two ago about it.

Well if you can find any that would be great. I have done searches and found nothing on this. Please and Thank you for your time, effort and consideration in this matter.

 

[redrays]

The perplexing traffic continues to rise. Ruled out theory number 1. 2 - maybe but I doubt it. I'm wondering if they're showing a page in the SERP but not in a site:domain.com search. Possible I guess. That or maybe something with the indexing service that site is using I'd have to compare with another to be sure.

Been plodding on with the scaling code. Not had a whole lot of time to work on it but it is slowly starting to take shape. I would have liked to see some indexing data on the more recent pages that went up but indexing is being so slow. I either have to pause the project for a few weeks and see how the indexing is doing or just start scaling and hope that the indexing is just slow.

It's been a while since I checked this thread and just saw this comment. The inconsistencies with site:domain.com that you're describing are something that sploggers have been complaining about for about 6 months now. I've stopped using it except to spot check on very rare occasions and simply judge indexing rates by search engine referrals. It's not perfect but it gives me a much better idea of what's working - correlation between indexed pages and traffic is very high.

Well if you can find any that would be great. I have done searches and found nothing on this. Please and Thank you for your time, effort and consideration in this matter.

Search this forum for "Serp Shaker", that will probably bring up the most useful information.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Last 7 days: $248

I'm not good at patience. SEO would really be the wrong game for me if it wasn't for my deep love of free traffic and interesting reverse engineering.

I had decided to sit and wait till I see something from the new test sites before doing anything. A doodle on a notepad escalated into a new theory on a way to generate content. Ploughing through the proof of concept code I'm a little strapped for time at the moment but I'm hoping to have a site live with it for Monday night. I've a chunk of code to get through but I like the idea of this design and it's very scalable.

The initial good news from the other day is now marred a bit. Some of that content is still in the index while other pages have dropped out. It's been a while since I've watched indexing behaviour properly so I don't know how much of a deal this really is. Not too concerned but it isn't ideal.

The inconsistencies with site:domain.com that you're describing are something that sploggers have been complaining about for about 6 months now. I've stopped using it except to spot check on very rare occasions and simply judge indexing rates by search engine referrals. It's not perfect but it gives me a much better idea of what's working - correlation between indexed pages and traffic is very high.

Great tip I appreciate it.

In this case I'm still not convinced this is actual search traffic. I know Google doesn't like to give out the search terms as freely any more but for none to show? And I know that niche it would of shown a conversion by now. My suspicion is it's something to do with the indexing service that site is using but I have a chunk of non search traffic going to that site so I can't fuck with it too much to really find out.

I have rank tracking in place for longtails if it's picking up search traffic it'll show up on page xxx for some of these at least. Still waiting to see something pop in there but I wasn't expecting quick results from this project.

Having to decide on a few things. And by decide on I mean test to death and then sit on my ass waiting for results.

1) Word count. The smaller the word count the more unique the content from the original source. But there's a definite correlation between rankings and word count. Need to try and find that middle ground.

2) Domains. New .coms? Cheap $1 TLDs? Pick up old expired ones with links? The last means a bottleneck with the availability in the drop or an increased investment if I have to buy them.

3) Content build. A few variations in testing now.

 

[Mr.Boss]

such a great journey. Got couple of questions though if you don't mind.

1. do you transfer you splog traffic direct to sales page(such as clickbank vendor sales page) or real money site. I think sales page will convert better but I was wondering whether you do differently.
2. how do you select your splog keywords ? do you go for any type (long, short, high search) in your niche or select something specific.
3. what is rank tracking/traffic measurement system you have in place is it google analytics or something else?

following your journey.

 

[CuriousMe :)]

What do you use for indexing?
GL for the journey!

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Interesting thing. Could just be wild coincidence but I took a site which has sat stagnant for ages picking up the odd sale and had a beta version of the script add a few hundred pages. Bing suddenly has a massive hard on for the site which it hasn't had before and ranked the existing pages for a bunch of big keywords. That site has literally not changed in well over a year and within a week this happens. 1 domain is not a sample size but that suggests to me Bing has a thing for freshness on domains. Certainly not complaining about that one. That site converts and that traffic is absolutely spiking. Not directly from the splog pages but an interesting bonus. I know that niche well enough to know that extra traffic is going to pay an extra few hundred $ if it sticks around.

And this other domain is definitely reporting visits from Google and splog pages are getting hits. Is this design actually working?

Certainly enough motivation to get a bunch of this code done and launch a few more domains I think. Think I've decided on a build I like that will work in theory. Working on the code it should be finished by tomorrow night and I'll a couple of sites up this week. Worst case they flop and I burn a dozen domains. Best case they start pulling in traffic, I have my real proof of concept and I start scaling before the end of the year.

What do you use for indexing?
GL for the journey!

Already covered this. Basically a mix of everything until I know what works.

such a great journey. Got couple of questions though if you don't mind.

1. do you transfer you splog traffic direct to sales page(such as clickbank vendor sales page) or real money site. I think sales page will convert better but I was wondering whether you do differently.
2. how do you select your splog keywords ? do you go for any type (long, short, high search) in your niche or select something specific.
3. what is rank tracking/traffic measurement system you have in place is it google analytics or something else?

following your journey.

1) I'll be honest I don't fully understand what you mean. By "real money site" do you mean a pre-sell funnel or something? I honestly use these in pretty much the same way I'd build a normal site. If I'm lazy with a niche I'll pop them through to an affiliate link if I know the niche a little better and have the time I'll build out a bit of a pre-sell before sending them through. I don't capture emails or anything at the moment.

Once I (hopefully) nail the design and start scaling the traffic this journal will turn focus towards conversions. I'm a big fan of building funnels and split testing traffic but for now I need to try and get worthwhile traffic.

2) When I first started this I was manually trawling through keywords manually looking for longtails with high traffic and low competition. Sure this meant a better success rate but it was a massive bottleneck and I realised this way later than I should have done. I have a few variations on how I do this now but it's all automated and all about quantity over quantity.

3) I'm half looking at this at the moment. I have Awstats or whatever it's called running on the server end and a WP plugin running on some of my Wordpress blogs. Really not the ideal but I haven't put the time into looking for the best option yet.

 

[Unavailable]

what's the progress ?
how much traffic do you get per site ?

 

[Mr.Boss]

thank you for your answers mate and it cleared some of the doubts.

"I honestly use these in pretty much the same way I'd build a normal site" so you create a normal informational wordpress blogs and promote stuffs through sidebar and ad positions I assume.

"quantity over quantity" i think you meant to say quantity over quality but I understood what you're were saying.

really awesome journey and from last year I am also building some quality small scale auto blogs to rank long tails and also serve as quality niche backlink sources. So willing be keeping a eye on journey so good luck.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

what's the progress ?
how much traffic do you get per site ?

There's a spam of updates over the last few days even and an earnings update for each week although most of my work just now is focused on scaling up what I've been doing and improving the system so I suspect it'll be a while before there's any noticeable change to the earnings.

Hopefully I'll get some test results in over the next few weeks and once I'm confident I have it right I'll really start scaling and then it's still sitting around a few months. Yay SEO journals. Exciting stuff.

Also I honestly don't know. My tracking isn't really in place at the moment but I've never found UVs to be a useful indicator of a site outside of conversion metrics. You could get 100k people looking for free shit or a few dozen people looking to buy shit. I know which I'd rather have. Once I have the traffic method more nailed down I'll start to track the metrics more and work on conversions.

thank you for your answers mate and it cleared some of the doubts.

"I honestly use these in pretty much the same way I'd build a normal site" so you create a normal informational wordpress blogs and promote stuffs through sidebar and ad positions I assume.

"quantity over quantity" i think you meant to say quantity over quality but I understood what you're were saying.

really awesome journey and from last year I am also building some quality small scale auto blogs to rank long tails and also serve as quality niche backlink sources. So willing be keeping a eye on journey so good luck.

Yeah so take a digital clickbank affiliate site for example. It might have banners or videos as widgets and the code also places a call to action snippet inside the text itself. I like the idea of iframing an opt in or ad and lead a two least a small percentage away from seeing the generated content at all.

Got more done yesterday than I'd expected. I'm really enjoying the project. The new content design is taking shape I've some work to do on the interlinking and footprint but if I'm not back too late tonight I might get this online tonight I could have a dozen domains live by the morning.

Toying around with submitting sites to Google more. I've been working on integrating Recaptcha2 solving into some code which is almost there. If I'm submitting the sites to Google I suspect I'll have to phone verify the Google accounts. I might shop around for some PVA accounts and do it that way but if G spots a footprint with the vendor and flag the account as spam that could potentially have a knock on effect on the sites submitted - if they take if that far.

 

[Mr.Boss]

thanks for clearing it up.

 

[Nikereven780]

Very interesting thread. Never heard of splogging until you hooked me with your eloquently written posts. Following your journey, good luck!

 

[redrays]

Great tip I appreciate it.

In this case I'm still not convinced this is actual search traffic. I know Google doesn't like to give out the search terms as freely any more but for none to show? And I know that niche it would of shown a conversion by now. My suspicion is it's something to do with the indexing service that site is using but I have a chunk of non search traffic going to that site so I can't fuck with it too much to really find out.

I have rank tracking in place for longtails if it's picking up search traffic it'll show up on page xxx for some of these at least. Still waiting to see something pop in there but I wasn't expecting quick results from this project.

Having to decide on a few things. And by decide on I mean test to death and then sit on my ass waiting for results.

1) Word count. The smaller the word count the more unique the content from the original source. But there's a definite correlation between rankings and word count. Need to try and find that middle ground.

2) Domains. New .coms? Cheap $1 TLDs? Pick up old expired ones with links? The last means a bottleneck with the availability in the drop or an increased investment if I have to buy them.

3) Content build. A few variations in testing now.

Nah, it's perfectly normal to get almost no search term data from Google, and what you get is constantly decreasing. If your analytics say that you're getting referrals from Google (or Yahoo), it's legit search traffic. Bing is less reliable because some analytics providers seem to misattribute bots as Bing referrals.

As for your question about domains, I would just do all three. That said, I don't have a good feel for how much time your workflow requires.

 

[globalweb]

Great journey!! best of luck

 

[mountndew1]

If this is the wrong place to ask this (which it probably is) I

am sorry. Can you tell me where to go with this kind of question.
I have been really studying these journys.
I just love how you guys share what you do.
Anyway, I have the basic idea to :
purchase hundreds even thousands of splog sites
set them up to auto post spun material keyword relevant to the blog
put some adsense ads on them
cha ching!
I am so lost on the most critical part here.
How do you get the traffic to these blogs to get the traffic to
get the uv back to your money site?
Is it longtail keywords?

And how in this world do you see the stats on each and
every site? I know you are not entering in the site name for every one?

What is the best way to keep track of split testing and record keeping? Excel?
Any way anyone can take the time to explain, because I am
in. I am going to do this I just need to get down to the nitty
gritty of it. I spend so much money on junk that I think this
would be an awesome way to invest small sums of money
at a time to build a huge empire. I just need to understand
the outlay of this concept a bit more to proceed with my
adventure.

I will put it on here too. Since I am a real newbie at this it
should be really interesting to watch someone learn who
knows little to nothing about coding. I have very little funds to
spend at a time. I do know how to set up a basic wordpress
site, throwing in some copied code for getresponse or
aweber or something that has directions for it. I can add
some plugins :O)
So you will all get to lyao watching a newbie get this
done.

Hope you're interested enough to answer a question
or so here and there.
Let me know what you guys think, I don't have to put it on
here if no one is interested in seeing such.

Again thanks for any of your thoughts.
Off I go to studyup more. There is just so much to do...I'll be back.
Later!

 

[SEOMadHatter]

thanks for clearing it up.

Not a problem.

Very interesting thread. Never heard of splogging until you hooked me with your eloquently written posts. Following your journey, good luck!

You might be confusing eloquence with sleep deprived rambling - but I appreciate it.

Nah, it's perfectly normal to get almost no search term data from Google, and what you get is constantly decreasing. If your analytics say that you're getting referrals from Google (or Yahoo), it's legit search traffic. Bing is less reliable because some analytics providers seem to misattribute bots as Bing referrals.

As for your question about domains, I would just do all three. That said, I don't have a good feel for how much time your workflow requires.

It's been a while since I've looked at the actual search phrase referrals. Holy crap you're not kidding I knew Google had cut back but there's next to nothing now. Oh well I guess for this it doesn't really matter.

If this is the wrong place to ask this (which it probably is) I

am sorry. Can you tell me where to go with this kind of question.
I have been really studying these journys.
I just love how you guys share what you do.
Anyway, I have the basic idea to :
purchase hundreds even thousands of splog sites
set them up to auto post spun material keyword relevant to the blog
put some adsense ads on them
cha ching!
I am so lost on the most critical part here.
How do you get the traffic to these blogs to get the traffic to
get the uv back to your money site?
Is it longtail keywords?

And how in this world do you see the stats on each and
every site? I know you are not entering in the site name for every one?

What is the best way to keep track of split testing and record keeping? Excel?
Any way anyone can take the time to explain, because I am
in. I am going to do this I just need to get down to the nitty
gritty of it. I spend so much money on junk that I think this
would be an awesome way to invest small sums of money
at a time to build a huge empire. I just need to understand
the outlay of this concept a bit more to proceed with my
adventure.

I will put it on here too. Since I am a real newbie at this it
should be really interesting to watch someone learn who
knows little to nothing about coding. I have very little funds to
spend at a time. I do know how to set up a basic wordpress
site, throwing in some copied code for getresponse or
aweber or something that has directions for it. I can add
some plugins :O)
So you will all get to lyao watching a newbie get this
done.

Hope you're interested enough to answer a question
or so here and there.
Let me know what you guys think, I don't have to put it on
here if no one is interested in seeing such.

Again thanks for any of your thoughts.
Off I go to studyup more. There is just so much to do...I'll be back.
Later!

The traffic comes from the search engines. Largely longtails although I have auto generated content ranking #1 for some surprising keywords. For stats I'm honestly not looking that hard at the moment. I can see a rising amount of affiliate clicks from the original stuff and I'm looking st the server stats for the new one. Once I scale it enough I'll have to buy something or at least have a script pull all the stats into one place.

So updates.

I didn't make my goal of having he code done over the weekend. I was more tired than I realised and must of slept a good 15 hours between Sunday and Monday. Not ideal but I guess I needed it. So I got the meat of it done last night. A few smaller bits to add today and no doubt there'll be things to fix but I'm feeling pretty happy with it just now. I think this test site looks better than some of my "white hat" ones I'm actually pretty happy with how it's looking so far. It might completely flop. Google might see straight through what I've done but I'm going to put a dozen or so sites together with this build and hopefully that'll give me enough information over the next few weeks so here's hoping. Worst case I burn a few domains. I'm not one to sit on my hands though. Once I nail down the last of this I'll get working on something else. Potentially an extension to the splogging thing but I'll get to that in a few days once I finish the main stuff up.

I've been a little stuck deciding on how to set the keywords and sources. If they're too close knit it'll make a bunch of pages far too related to each other which is pretty obvious SEO spam but if I manually go through them then that sets a very obvious bottleneck and my whole goal here is to produce sites on scale. This goes against everything I would normally do on a site but I don't really see an alternative unless I hire someone just for this. I'd like to split test this at least partially so I'm going to *try* and moderate the content that goes on some of the sites. If a 500 page site gets better rankings than a 40,000 one it might get better traffic. I know what conventional SEO says and I know conventional splogging will disagree but there's only one way to see for sure.

I don't do well with patience and uncertainty. So I better get cracking and get these sites setup.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Right. So I finished the code I wanted last night and started working on better scaling. Left two sites to build overnight while I got a few hours sleep and when I woke up in the morning I properly stumbled into a splog working in the wild. With a crap ton of traffic. I wasn't looking, I wasn't even working. I wasn't even fully awake I almost didn't realise what I was looking at.

And once I found it I was able to find a few others working the same way. Different method to what I've been doing but it won't take a huge amount of modifying to get my system building sites like these. And now I know for a fact this design will work it'll be time to start getting domains together.

Still building some with he design I just finished but probably a lot more with this other one. Should be easy enough to produce a crap ton of them.

Just when I thought I was done with most of the coding. I've a busy Saturday but cleared up a few days next week to put into scaling this properly now. If I can shake this headache I should be able to get the code done tonight and start getting a dozen sites live tonight.

 

[living2xl]

splog working in the wild

In the wild, we see nature truly work, monstrosities reign and eat as they please. Here we learn how to hunt.

 

[Unavailable]

And once I found it I was able to find a few others working the same way. Different method to what I've been doing but it won't take a huge amount of modifying to get my system building sites like these. And now I know for a fact this design will work it'll be time to start getting domains together.

Do you care to share some examples you found in the serps ?