Scaling Splogging in 2017

SEOMadHatter

Elite Member
Joined
Aug 15, 2015
Messages
1,808
Reaction score
2,470
I put together a splogging project as a little proof of concept to see if it still works in 2017.

Currently:

This projects profit from the last 7 days: $260.02

I'm not retiring on that anytime soon but it's completely passive once setup and that was a fairly small scale proof of concept. This journey thread is to keep me accountable scaling it up.

Goals:

No arbitrary goal like "$100/day by XYZ" this is SEO. Fuck knows what is going to happen by whenever. My goal is to remove the bottlenecks as much as possible and scale it as much as I can over the next couple of months. The concept works and is currently running at 10x what it was (more on that in a moment) so in theory if nothing changes once those rankings pick up it could be $2600 in the last 7 days but I'm aiming more along the 100x lines to see what happens.

Couple of disclaimers before I start this thread:

1) I program a lot of this stuff myself. Don't automatically think you have to be a programmer to do this kind of thing. I know a lot of programmers who fail at this kind of thing and a lot of marketers who succeed with public tools or by hiring a programmer. Writing code is just part of a toolkit I think the main reason this is starting to work is creativity and a fuck ton of testing.

Get an idea and do it manually. If it makes money THEN look at automating and scaling. I see too many people waste their time trying to do things the other way around.

2) I don't know why but I see a lot of these splogging/spamming threads with people chiming in weird opinions like 'If you do this legit with just one site/account you'd be making $10,000 a day!"

If this is your opinion you're missing the point. I have other projects. I have other sites. I don't expect splogging to last 10 years but then I don't expect your "authority" website or IG account to last the next 5 either. But it's making money now so I'm going to do it.

3) This should be pretty obvious but I'm going to be purposefully vague about some of what I do. Feel free to ask questions or make suggestions. If you drop me a message I'll probably reply. But I'm not looking for direct competition in what I'm doing.

Let's get on with it already.

The proof of concept checks out. Splogging works. Now the goal is to remove as much of the bottlenecks as I can and see how I can scale it.

That $270 came from *roughly* 4-5,000 pages live. Currently scaled it to around 7,700 over the last couple of days and growing by the hour. That niche should get to around 15-20k and I'll probably leave it there for now at least.

For anyone newer to SEO this does not mean my earnings next week will be several times higher. It'll likely take a few weeks to see any change at all and a few months before there's a significant growth.

That hasn't been much work though. An hour or two to setup. The major chunk of work this week has been a massive overhaul to the way I'm able to produce content. This is 100% the key to splogging. Can't play the numbers game without the numbers.

I've spent a few days working on scaling this. It's still a little rough looking but it's getting there. The goal is to remove the current caps on content to be able to produce more pages per day. Testing on a small scale at the moment. Should hopefully see over the next week or so how it indexes and ranks for the obscure longtails. If it looks promising I'll scale from there otherwise it'll be back to the drawing board.
 
Nice, I'm working on something similar. Will follow your splogging journey.
 
Also I am on something very similar and will be also following your journey
 
Im in splogging too but my main issue is indexing links bulk. I wondee how you can index bulk links
 
Cool project, i like this stuff. Mind answering a few Q's?
  • Markov text or manual spintax?
  • How many domains?
  • Primary monetization method? Banners/CPA/affiliate?
  • Shared hosting, VPS or dedi?
Thanks!
 
If you could throw some knowledge on how are you monetizing this. I fail always there and I dont want to risk adsense in splog
 
Im new to splog. If i understand, it uses spintax ? So you have to make a good masterspin right ? or just Markov spin ?

thank you
 
Looks like some of the same questions popping up I think this one pretty much covers them so let me know if I've missed something.

Cool project, i like this stuff. Mind answering a few Q's?
Markov text or manual spintax?
How many domains?
Primary monetization method? Banners/CPA/affiliate?
Shared hosting, VPS or dedi?
Thanks!

Spinning

The first batch had little to no spinning. It didn't actually use a lot of content I have a theory on why it works but I can't really give that away without exposing my method entirely I'm afraid. I'd love to talk shop with guys who do this but I'm not giving everything away in public I'm sure you guys understand.

I've currently got other batches of tests running using variations on Markov and public spinner tools but based on my theory of the first set it's still doing things pretty differently to a lot of the usual autoblog methods.

I'm not saying these don't work. In fact I've been watching your Journal with interest Seyer (go on update us already!) but I'm yet to test it myself in the wild and I'm a cynic until I see it myself.

Whether or not it'll work properly or it's worth doing remains to be seen. The theory makes sense to me but I need to see the data - which means a lot of sitting around to begin with. One of the downsides to SEO projects.

Domains

Only a handful so far. I've a bad habit of working on too many projects at once (several of which could really do with scaling) and I like to see data and results on the concepts before I work on scaling them.

I'm entirely game to scale this within the month I'm just waiting to see how indexing and longtails do with the method before I go a little crazy with it. I'll also need a few days to automate setting the up the domains and things I want this to be scalable without the manual labour.

Still deciding between .coms and cheap $1 domains. They're all on decent TLDs for now com/net/org but I might split it half and half to split test the indexing/ranking. My gut says the .coms would perform better individually. But it's obviously cheaper to flood the SERPs with 10x the domains if I use the cheaper ones.

Monetization

Honestly I've never liked Adsense. I'm sure people make good money with it and in some niches I can see the advantage but if there's money in the advertising I figure I can probably make more with my own ad. Plus I don't like giving Google more information than I have to.

I don't think most methods (including splogging) are tied down to any type of monetization. If you have traffic which wants something match them up to an offer.

I'm currently running traffic towards Clickbank affiliate stuff, CPA offers, Amazon affiliate stuff and I'll be looking at throwing them into an auto responder email list and dropshipping. Testing this is a little clunky at the moment but I'm working on a way to swap ads in and out without creating too much of a footprint between the sites.

Hosting

Bit of a mix leaning towards shared hosting at the moment. It's all piggy backing on existing hosting for other projects at the moment so nothing purchased for it yet. This has been at the back of my head because it's a safe bet shared hosting isn't going to get me scale to four figure domains. I'm considering AWS boxes and splitting a few sites between each one so the niches don't overlap.

Indexing

Again nothing much to report here. I'm split testing a couple of different methods and I've a few more things to test. I think most will agree that content plays a role here because some will index easier than others.

I'm big on data and testing so once I've built up some actual numbers I'll share the stats. I'm testing everything from link building (different methods) and services to leaving them to (mostly) naturally index and I've seen people do the manual submission but that means coding Google shit and either making or buying phone verified accounts to keep them separate and... meh.

I'm hoping to get this as scalable as possible so I'll be avoiding anything requiring much manual work beyond the initial niche setup.

Updates

Nothing major to update yet. Daily conversions still happening I'll do a weekly thing.

Finished a rough version of a more scalable content method and set it live. Normally I try to avoid checking SERPS on a regular basis (baaaad habit in SEO) but I've been checking indexing rates on the hour before realising there was a problem with my indexing code. Oops. Fixed it up and starting to see some of these pages get picked up tonight. This bodes well.

I have other projects starting to pick up which I could really get scaling. Realistically I haven't seen this work well enough in the wild for me to spend more time on it at the moment so logic says I should leave this sitting for a few months just building up.

But I like the idea. I think it's worth chasing. And I have a few more tests I want to run both for content and conversions which I could get to work on this week.
 
Looks like some of the same questions popping up I think this one pretty much covers them so let me know if I've missed something.



Spinning

The first batch had little to no spinning. It didn't actually use a lot of content I have a theory on why it works but I can't really give that away without exposing my method entirely I'm afraid. I'd love to talk shop with guys who do this but I'm not giving everything away in public I'm sure you guys understand.

I've currently got other batches of tests running using variations on Markov and public spinner tools but based on my theory of the first set it's still doing things pretty differently to a lot of the usual autoblog methods.

I'm not saying these don't work. In fact I've been watching your Journal with interest Seyer (go on update us already!) but I'm yet to test it myself in the wild and I'm a cynic until I see it myself.

Whether or not it'll work properly or it's worth doing remains to be seen. The theory makes sense to me but I need to see the data - which means a lot of sitting around to begin with. One of the downsides to SEO projects.

Domains

Only a handful so far. I've a bad habit of working on too many projects at once (several of which could really do with scaling) and I like to see data and results on the concepts before I work on scaling them.

I'm entirely game to scale this within the month I'm just waiting to see how indexing and longtails do with the method before I go a little crazy with it. I'll also need a few days to automate setting the up the domains and things I want this to be scalable without the manual labour.

Still deciding between .coms and cheap $1 domains. They're all on decent TLDs for now com/net/org but I might split it half and half to split test the indexing/ranking. My gut says the .coms would perform better individually. But it's obviously cheaper to flood the SERPs with 10x the domains if I use the cheaper ones.

Monetization

Honestly I've never liked Adsense. I'm sure people make good money with it and in some niches I can see the advantage but if there's money in the advertising I figure I can probably make more with my own ad. Plus I don't like giving Google more information than I have to.

I don't think most methods (including splogging) are tied down to any type of monetization. If you have traffic which wants something match them up to an offer.

I'm currently running traffic towards Clickbank affiliate stuff, CPA offers, Amazon affiliate stuff and I'll be looking at throwing them into an auto responder email list and dropshipping. Testing this is a little clunky at the moment but I'm working on a way to swap ads in and out without creating too much of a footprint between the sites.

Hosting

Bit of a mix leaning towards shared hosting at the moment. It's all piggy backing on existing hosting for other projects at the moment so nothing purchased for it yet. This has been at the back of my head because it's a safe bet shared hosting isn't going to get me scale to four figure domains. I'm considering AWS boxes and splitting a few sites between each one so the niches don't overlap.

Indexing

Again nothing much to report here. I'm split testing a couple of different methods and I've a few more things to test. I think most will agree that content plays a role here because some will index easier than others.

I'm big on data and testing so once I've built up some actual numbers I'll share the stats. I'm testing everything from link building (different methods) and services to leaving them to (mostly) naturally index and I've seen people do the manual submission but that means coding Google shit and either making or buying phone verified accounts to keep them separate and... meh.

I'm hoping to get this as scalable as possible so I'll be avoiding anything requiring much manual work beyond the initial niche setup.

Updates

Nothing major to update yet. Daily conversions still happening I'll do a weekly thing.

Finished a rough version of a more scalable content method and set it live. Normally I try to avoid checking SERPS on a regular basis (baaaad habit in SEO) but I've been checking indexing rates on the hour before realising there was a problem with my indexing code. Oops. Fixed it up and starting to see some of these pages get picked up tonight. This bodes well.

I have other projects starting to pick up which I could really get scaling. Realistically I haven't seen this work well enough in the wild for me to spend more time on it at the moment so logic says I should leave this sitting for a few months just building up.

But I like the idea. I think it's worth chasing. And I have a few more tests I want to run both for content and conversions which I could get to work on this week.

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.
 
I just googled this word and it showed splogging=spam blog lol, nice invented word and interesting journey!
 
This is cool I didn't think there'd be so many doing this kind of thing any more. The BHW SEO journals are generally split between private PBNs and buying services from the marketplace.

I've potentially got another project I wanted to scale handled by a JV which just freed up some of my time for this week. Tempted to pick up more domains and start scaling this. Normally I'd wait until the proof of concept is doing better but I like this project.

Cheers for the suggestion I don't know why Cloudflare didn't occur to me I've used them for PBN stuff in the past seems like a perfect fit. Had a quick look at Serverpilot they use Digi Ocean but I'm not sure I see the value in paying them vs just making my own boxes at digi ocean or AWS etc...

So far I'm toying with a mix of Wordpress/Static builds. It isn't a fair split test because the static build needs some work and I haven't decided if it's worth it yet. My logic is firstly I can strip a lot of the server load by not using a CMS and secondly most (not all) autoblogs are using Wordpress because most (again - not all) public tools are Wordpress plugins or tools and anything which takes makes it look less like a standard autoblog can't hurt.

The downside is it makes monetising more of a pain to split test. I could iframe the ads and use a redirect page to point to whatever offer so I can swap that stuff around. But adding something new like an opt-in or a cloaked overlay becomes more of an issue.
 
Oops yeah I forgot we had our convo! Yeah I've been caught up with my offline business the past month so I haven't been able to organize my data. Planning to do one last update instead towards the end of the year and close that journey (since it's a "2017" journey anyway).

But so far here some highlights I can share:
  • 10 weeks ROI
  • 16 weeks in and still making money
  • Pure adsense
  • However, traffic downtrending the past month (just pure organic/search traffic) -- stabilizing at 2.5k PV's a day from 3-4k
  • Haven't done a study if this was due to deindexation/penalties, or competition, or just the trend for some KWs dropped
  • I have 3k sites on the backburner but couldn't focus on them yet, will use those to split test monetization. Envious seeing your autoblog + CPA/affiliate success! I suck with that, hope to exchange more ideas with you down the road.
Thanks for your share -- glad to see more action in this area! Can't wait to see your stats in the coming months.

Looks like some of the same questions popping up I think this one pretty much covers them so let me know if I've missed something.

Spinning

The first batch had little to no spinning. It didn't actually use a lot of content I have a theory on why it works but I can't really give that away without exposing my method entirely I'm afraid. I'd love to talk shop with guys who do this but I'm not giving everything away in public I'm sure you guys understand.

I've currently got other batches of tests running using variations on Markov and public spinner tools but based on my theory of the first set it's still doing things pretty differently to a lot of the usual autoblog methods.

I'm not saying these don't work. In fact I've been watching your Journal with interest Seyer (go on update us already!) but I'm yet to test it myself in the wild and I'm a cynic until I see it myself.

Whether or not it'll work properly or it's worth doing remains to be seen. The theory makes sense to me but I need to see the data - which means a lot of sitting around to begin with. One of the downsides to SEO projects.

Domains

Only a handful so far. I've a bad habit of working on too many projects at once (several of which could really do with scaling) and I like to see data and results on the concepts before I work on scaling them.

I'm entirely game to scale this within the month I'm just waiting to see how indexing and longtails do with the method before I go a little crazy with it. I'll also need a few days to automate setting the up the domains and things I want this to be scalable without the manual labour.

Still deciding between .coms and cheap $1 domains. They're all on decent TLDs for now com/net/org but I might split it half and half to split test the indexing/ranking. My gut says the .coms would perform better individually. But it's obviously cheaper to flood the SERPs with 10x the domains if I use the cheaper ones.

Monetization

Honestly I've never liked Adsense. I'm sure people make good money with it and in some niches I can see the advantage but if there's money in the advertising I figure I can probably make more with my own ad. Plus I don't like giving Google more information than I have to.

I don't think most methods (including splogging) are tied down to any type of monetization. If you have traffic which wants something match them up to an offer.

I'm currently running traffic towards Clickbank affiliate stuff, CPA offers, Amazon affiliate stuff and I'll be looking at throwing them into an auto responder email list and dropshipping. Testing this is a little clunky at the moment but I'm working on a way to swap ads in and out without creating too much of a footprint between the sites.

Hosting

Bit of a mix leaning towards shared hosting at the moment. It's all piggy backing on existing hosting for other projects at the moment so nothing purchased for it yet. This has been at the back of my head because it's a safe bet shared hosting isn't going to get me scale to four figure domains. I'm considering AWS boxes and splitting a few sites between each one so the niches don't overlap.

Indexing

Again nothing much to report here. I'm split testing a couple of different methods and I've a few more things to test. I think most will agree that content plays a role here because some will index easier than others.

I'm big on data and testing so once I've built up some actual numbers I'll share the stats. I'm testing everything from link building (different methods) and services to leaving them to (mostly) naturally index and I've seen people do the manual submission but that means coding Google shit and either making or buying phone verified accounts to keep them separate and... meh.

I'm hoping to get this as scalable as possible so I'll be avoiding anything requiring much manual work beyond the initial niche setup.

Updates

Nothing major to update yet. Daily conversions still happening I'll do a weekly thing.

Finished a rough version of a more scalable content method and set it live. Normally I try to avoid checking SERPS on a regular basis (baaaad habit in SEO) but I've been checking indexing rates on the hour before realising there was a problem with my indexing code. Oops. Fixed it up and starting to see some of these pages get picked up tonight. This bodes well.

I have other projects starting to pick up which I could really get scaling. Realistically I haven't seen this work well enough in the wild for me to spend more time on it at the moment so logic says I should leave this sitting for a few months just building up.

But I like the idea. I think it's worth chasing. And I have a few more tests I want to run both for content and conversions which I could get to work on this week.
 
This is cool I didn't think there'd be so many doing this kind of thing any more. The BHW SEO journals are generally split between private PBNs and buying services from the marketplace.

I've potentially got another project I wanted to scale handled by a JV which just freed up some of my time for this week. Tempted to pick up more domains and start scaling this. Normally I'd wait until the proof of concept is doing better but I like this project.

Cheers for the suggestion I don't know why Cloudflare didn't occur to me I've used them for PBN stuff in the past seems like a perfect fit. Had a quick look at Serverpilot they use Digi Ocean but I'm not sure I see the value in paying them vs just making my own boxes at digi ocean or AWS etc...

So far I'm toying with a mix of Wordpress/Static builds. It isn't a fair split test because the static build needs some work and I haven't decided if it's worth it yet. My logic is firstly I can strip a lot of the server load by not using a CMS and secondly most (not all) autoblogs are using Wordpress because most (again - not all) public tools are Wordpress plugins or tools and anything which takes makes it look less like a standard autoblog can't hurt.

The downside is it makes monetising more of a pain to split test. I could iframe the ads and use a redirect page to point to whatever offer so I can swap that stuff around. But adding something new like an opt-in or a cloaked overlay becomes more of an issue.

Serverpilot is just an alternative to cPanel that's much better at handling the load created by having a large number of large websites on a server. I rent servers with it already installed then leverage its API to automate Wordpress installs (I automate cleanup with WP-CLI). I'm not especially knowledgeable about servers though, so I can't tell you it's better what you're proposing, just that it's better than cPanel and useful if you're building a ton of sites in Wordpress :) I have friends that use Digital Ocean droplets and stack about 10 splogs on each instance, and that's certainly viable if a bit more expensive and difficult to keep organized.

I build exclusively in Wordpress for a few reasons, and you're spot on about the tradeoffs. That said, most people using any Wordpress plugin / tool are lazy and won't change any of the default options / add customizations. If you take the time to change things up a bit you're probably just as far ahead of the game as if you built static sites.
 
I've been working on my content generation strategy. Wondering whether I can scale the way I've been doing it or if I'm better to spin content. Some of the test pages I had it build are getting indexed but I can literally copy and paste an article word for word and it'll index - at least for a while. Doesn't mean it'll actually rank.

I have a site for an unrelated project which is just a spam of embedded videos. It didn't exist for search engine traffic so it doesn't set descriptions or anything useless from an SEO standpoint but out of the 50,000 posts it has a few hundred indexed pages and really the only search traffic is allinurl searches to page 100. So bots.

That said I like the idea of video sites because they'd be less spammy looking to the user and might make conversion better. I was doing some work with ripping and watermarking code maybe that would help. But without placing a lot more strain on the hosting that means upload accounts which would have to be automated or bought.

Development is a little slow on this project for this week. Travelling a bit last minute and managed to hit a whitelisting issue with some of my hosting I think I've screwed up a DNS setting. Back in a few days and hopefully will have decided on a strategy for the first batch of sites to start next week.
 
Back
Top