That’s right, I’m about to post something useful. Hold on to your off-white hat.

In our never ending quest to build links, posting comments on relevant (or even irrelevant) blogs with a link to your site is still a powerful tool. However, how many times have you stumbled upon a great post that is just BEGGING for your comment, only to discover that comments are strictly moderated? Or worse, they’re moderated AND the blog hasn’t been updated in forever, indicating that it may have been abandoned by the owner altogether?

Don’t give up. There is still hope.

When someone goes to leave a comment on a WordPress blog, they are presented with four fields:

• -Name (Required)
• -E-mail (Required, not visible to anyone other than site admin)
• -URL (Optional)
• -(Comment)

If the site owner has elected to hold comments in moderation (many do), your comment will not appear immediately after submitting it. It will be held in the moderation queue. Unless, of course, you have had a previously approved comment and you use the same email that you used the first time. Raise your hand if you see where I’m going with this.

The Strategy

…Is simple. Check out the existing comments on the article. Find one with a hyperlinked name. Follow that link to that person’s site, and look for a contact email. Once you’ve found it, return to the article and use the same info to leave another comment. You are now impersonating someone with a previously approved comment. The comment field should allow you to use html. Go ahead and leave your link with whatever dang anchor text you want in there.

As you might have guessed, this will not work 100% of the time. The main reason being you have no way of knowing what email was actually used to leave the comment. However, in all likelihood, the person that left that previously approved comment used the same email that they display on their website. This method also of course depends on the fact that the site owner has a publicly displayed email address.

And now the FAQ…

What if I Can’t Find Their Email?

Move on. Find another comment leaver. Depending on how much you want that link, you may or may not want to spend 20 minutes trying to find one that works.

Is This Unethical?

Sort of, but  it’s not that bad. Actually I think it perfectly reflects the theme and intent of this site.

Will it Work with Other CMS’s besides WordPress?

Do I look like an internet scientist to you?

Will this Post Upset the Natural Balance of the WordPress Universe and Destroy the Internet?

Yes.

Will this Shady Shit Work Even on This Site?

Probably, dick!

No, this is not a paid review. Yes, I will be dropping affiliate links. To quote NickyCakes (via Twitter), “I always chuckle when I get accused of using affiliate links on an affiliate marketing blog.” Nonetheless, this is my honest review. Like it or not.

I opened a VPS hosting account with Jaguar PC about six months ago. Although their dirt cheap prices had me skeptical about the quality of service, I decided to give it a shot anyway (yes I realize that sounds like a scammy review site review comment). I needed a home for some new phpbay sites.

I was referred to Jaguar by a friend who told me they were the best host I would find at such a cheap price, even though his account had been terminated for some shady shenanigans. Because of this, if you’re looking for a new host to facilitate your unethical ebony hat business practices, I regret to inform you that Jaguar PC may not be your best option.

Not for Noobs

Although the sign up/payment/setup process was relatively easy, they don’t hold your hand and walk you through it. No colorful advertisements, no hard upsells, no laymen step by step tutorials, no GoDaddy.

I purchased the cheapest Linux VPS package with Fantastico ($2/mo) plus 5 additional IPs which runs me about 28 bucks a month. Right now, if you sign up for the same fully managed package using coupon code VPS10YEARS, it includes the following:

• Root Access
• Unlimited Domains
• 320mb Guaranteed Ram
• 25gb Disk Space
• Choice of cPanel, Interworx, DirectAdmin, Plesk
• Some other crap I can’t remember

Extra IPs are $1 a piece (billed annually) and come in blocks of five. There are plenty of other add-ons available as well.

Support

I was expecting support to suck ass because of the affordability of this host. They do not offer phone support, but they are pretty freakin’ quick when it comes to responding to tickets, and they seem to know what they’re doing. Most issues are resolved in 1-2 tickets (in my experience).

Customer Service

Fine and dandy. When an attorney from a rather large company contacted my host about one of my infringing sites, Jaguar PC was kind enough to contact me and let me know about the situation FIRST, before going and deleting my shit. I’ve had experiences with other hosts where they will not only fold like little bitches and delete my entire site and its associated databases, but they will also delete every single other site on the account. Since Jaguar PC was courteous about it and disclosed everything to me without revealing any of my personal info to the attorney in question, I went ahead and moved the site to a different host (overseas) to alleviate them of any further headaches. This extension of courtesy is one of the main reasons I decided to write this review in the first place.

Why You Need a VPS

If you’re still using shared hosting, consider that a problem. If you don’t want to spend the money on a dedicated server, VPS is the way to go.

The problem with shared hosting is that you are sharing an IP address with a bunch of random sites. If there are a ton of shitty spammy sites on the same IP as yours (which is very likely since you’re on a shared host), it is my belief as well as that of several other SEOs (first and last time I ever refer to myself as one) that Google penalizes all the sites on the IP it knows is notorious for bullshit. I’ve had legitimate sites that just couldn’t rank no matter what I did on shared hosting accounts that leaped to the front of the SERPs after moving them to a dedicated IP (or at least an IP I controlled with few sites on it).

Now that I think about it, this site (offwhitehat) is on an old shitty GoDaddy shared hosting account. There are probably tons of worthless sites on this IP. I just don’t really care all that much about it to bother moving it. Maybe one day.

Well, there you have it. That’s my review. I’m outta this nerd fest.


EDIT: I should also mention that in the six months I’ve been with Jaguar PC, I haven’t experienced any downtime whatsoever. Granted I don’t check my sites every 10 seconds, but there have been no major outages that I know of (or minor, for that matter).

***Admin Edit: Josh has re-posted this as well as added to it on his own blog over at Full Speed SEO. Check it out***

Jack has been kind enough to let me post this on his blog, and I thank him for being a gracious host for my obnoxious writing.

Yesterday, I found myself excited as I saw my EPN clicks shoot past 50, then past 100, then less excited after 200, and absolutely livid after 400. I was getting scraped and they were following all of my EPN links driving my once very respectable EPC right through the floor. I made a hearty $4.00US yesterday because some stupid idiot wanted to scrape my scraped content. Here is the solution I came up with if you use Auction2Post: Javascript. We’re going to use a sneaky little piece of script to keep bots from finding our EPN links.

Step 1: Log into your WordPress Admin, and go to your Auction2Post settings and hit “Templates”

Step 2: Make a copy of your A2PDefaultTemplate to edit.

Step 3: Go to your EPN panel and go to the link generator and make a link for a specific Item in your specific campaign. I like to break everything up into campaigns so I know when one of my sites is tanking.

You’ll end up with a link that looks like

Step 4: Now, back in your template you’re going to want to use the template tag to get the Item number. Throw in a little javascript magic and you have:

<script type="text/javascript">
var item = "[itemID]";
var first = "http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-xxxxx-xxxxx-0/1?icep_ff3=2&pub=xxxxxxxxxx&toolid=10001&campid=xxxxxxxxxxx&customid=&icep_item=";
var last = "&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=xxxxxxxx&kwid=xxxxxxx&mtid=824&kw=lg";
var url = first+item+last;
document.write("<a href=\"",decodeURI(url),"\">Click HERE TO BUY</a>");
</script>

Add this to your template where you’d otherwise have regular links.

So what kind of protection does this afford us? Let’s see.

• The url is never in complete form, so we don’t have to worry about regex matches.
• The URL doesn’t live in the <A> tag, so we don’t have to worry about scraping there.
• The url isn’t put together until the user clicks. Bonus.

Hopefully this will help against the most common bots running around ruining our days.

Joshua Ziering is owner of FullSpeedSEO and loves to talk about all kinds of nerdy stuff. You can see his personal blog @ myauntishot.com

EDIT (2/22/10): Instead of reading all that crap below, why not just watch this handy dandy video about creating white label sites with Dating Gold?:

Okay so I’ll try to make this brief. This is basically a very simple (and cheap) way to get a white label dating site up and running and earning you a few bucks on the side. I’ve got a couple set up that bring in about $50-$60 a month each that I’ve been meaning to promote off-line…just haven’t got around to it. Another $60 a month won’t make you rich, but it might cover your phone bill, you ungrateful bastard. And of course it’s very scalable. Check it out…

If you are unfamiliar with how white labels work, basically you set up a site that instead of directing to affiliate offers actually facilitates the sale of a product or service. It can help increase conversions dramatically since you aren’t bouncing your visitors all over the dang internet.

Dating Gold makes this process painless. If you’re not familiar with their network, they are the ones behind Amateur Match. Using their white label system, all you have to do is register a domain, point the nameservers to the ones Dating Gold provides you with, enter Title/Description/Keyword info, upload a logo, and boom, the site is live.

Once you’ve got it up and running, you will be paid based on a 50% rev share system. Every time someone new signs up, you get 50% (currently about $15). Even better, you get 50% for the lifetime of that new member. So each month that person renews their membership, you get another $15. Of course, some cancel in the first month, but then some stick around for a year or more.

Currently, there are two types of white labels available. The first is the standard geo-targeted local dating site, and the second is a cam site. There are a few theme options available and you can also customize the color scheme. Here is an example of one:

Getting Traffic
Originally, my plan with my sites were to do a bunch of off-line promotion and see how it does. The domains I used are somewhat “local” themselves. However, after being up for just a few months, they started getting traffic. The downside is, there is currently no way to track traffic stats. I can only assume the traffic is from organic search since I haven’t promoted the site anywhere and only dropped a handful of links to them. For whatever reason, some search engines seem to like these geo-targeted white label sites.

Obviously, the title and keywords you use will have a great impact on whether or not your white label sites pull any organic traffic. I’m not going to divulge what keywords I used, but they were somewhat broad dating terms that have a reasonable (but not super high) amount of competition.

Off-Line Promotion
Considering I haven’t even conducted this test yet, I can’t really encourage you to try it, but it’s something I’m definitely planning on getting around to. Flyer drops at sex shops/strip clubs, ads in the back of shady magazines, etc. Hopefully I’ll actually get to this in Jan/Feb when dating is hot and have some interesting data to share with all of you.

Goddammit, I was supposed to keep this brief!!!