Like most of my ideas for posts, this one came from a thread on Wickedfire. My response there was short, but don’t worry, I have reserved my unnecessarily detailed and long-winded response for my blog!

First off, I know there are still some of you that don’t understand the value of Wikipedia links. I’m not even going to try to convince you otherwise. You’re better off just changing your mind right now and going with it. Yes, they will bear the “nofollow” attribute. If you don’t believe in the power of nofollow links (especially from an authority page), then you may return to digital point and go about your business.

Also, let’s not forget that in many cases, a well-placed Wikipedia place will result in targeted referral traffic.

Okay, so here are the simplified steps:

1) Find a recent, relevant news publication. I prefer interviews, because you can include a quote from the interview in the Wikipedia page you’re targeting.

2) Post this story on your site. A re-written copy will have a better chance of success, but I’ve also had links to stories I just copy + pasted stick for months and months (with no end in sight).

3) Do not put any ads/affiliate links on this page.

4) Place your link using proper formatting as a reference. If you don’t know how to properly format a Wikipedia link, see their documentation on this subject.

5) Do not do this repeatedly from the same IP within a short period of time.

After the dust has settled (perhaps a month or so), you may want to get a little ballsy and put ads/affiliate links on the page. Or, if you want to be more conservative about it, just enjoy the visitors you receive and the SE credibility of having sticky inbound links from Wikipedia.

Yes, Wikipedia does have editors. Some of them take more pleasure than others in being hall monitors and looking for links to delete. Also, pages related to certain high-competition niches are monitored a bit closer than others, since they are frequent spam targets. Try to find creative ways to fly under the radar. There are currently nearly 76 million Wikipedia pages indexed on Google, so, they can’t find everything. And even if they do, if you have followed the steps above, your link has the best chance of not being cock-blocked.

Oh, and one more tip…internal linking on Wikipedia is obviously very important and powerful. It’s also a lot easier to get away with dropping a link to another Wikipedia page than it is to an external site. So, if you don’t have any luck getting a link to stick on the high-profile page you’re originally targeting, you might want to consider dropping the link on a related but less desirable/less monitored page. That should be easier to stick, and once it does, you can work on building backlinks to the page from other, more authoritative Wikipedia pages to enhance the power of your link.

Okay. That’s all. More beer now.

We may be well into November, but believe it or not, there is still time to take advantage of the huge surge of holiday spending online by establishing brand new sites and getting organic traffic.

Find the Golden Terms
Your first friend in this process is going to be Google Insights. Using this handy dandy tool, you’re going to want to search something general, such as “shoes” or “toys’ or whatever. Scroll down to the bottom of the results and you’ll see “Rising Searches”. Take a peek at them and see if anything looks interesting. You might want to avoid brand names…you might not. Depends how off-white your SEO hat is.

“Breakout” terms can be golden. They can also be crap. “Breakout” means that the term has recently experienced a surge in search volume of 5,000% or more. Of course, if it gets 2 searches a day, and then one day it got 100 for whatever reason, it will be labeled a “breakout” term.* Do a little research before you go domain crazy. Obviously some breakout keywords are next to worthless (especially with small search volume) while some may be worthwhile. Some breakout terms and the terms that show 200-500% increase (or more) are going to be the money makers.

Try to Snag Them
You might be surprised how easy it is to find available .coms for some of these terms since they may have only recently landed on the radar. Take your list of prospects to Namecheap (the promo code this month is FAMILYWARMTH) and see what you can find.

Build Links, Utilize the Boost before the Deadly Dance
If you’ve ever built/ranked a site in your life, you know that new sites are usually easy to quickly rank for their targeted term (assuming it’s not crazy competitive), at least in the short-term. It is very common for new sites to hang out on the 1st page for a few days or a few weeks before Google asks it to dance. The “dance”, of course, is the endearing term that has come to represent the seemingly random and chaotic position changes that can occur shortly after a new site gets indexed and ranked. Depending on your link building techniques and consistency, the site may settle back down on the 1st page (possibly in an even better position), or it may be cast out to page 24 where it will shrivel and die. In some rare cases, new sites like this actually hit the front page and stick for the long-term. But, that’s besides the point…

The idea is to build sites around these trending keywords, throw them together quickly, slap on some monetization such as Adsense/Amazon/EPN, whatever, and milk that honeymoon traffic you get. You want to try to time it so that your site attains that initial favorable position in the middle of the online shopping frenzy that happens at the end of this month well into the middle of December. So, the time to start building is NOW.

If you need link building ideas, they are all over this site. I know my navigation sort of sucks. Think of it as a barrier for entry.

And, of course, if the site you build is halfway decent, perhaps you can continue expanding it and by the time the next holiday season rolls around you can put it to even better use.

*I take no responsibility if I fucked up my math somehow

I like making websites. I really do. Creating content is a royal pain in the ass, but I like taking a WordPress theme, tweaking it, and using it to create a website that is actually somewhat useful and looks nice at the same time.

I noticed that one of my sites had a huge spike in traffic this morning, so I checked it out. Turns out a certain blogger had referenced my site and it was published on Yahoo! Finance. Pretty sweet. I then went and spent some time taking a close look at that site, pondering why it has done so much better than similar sites of mine in the same general niche. Especially since it is so clearly an affiliate site.

The main reason, I have deduced, is that it actually provides some goddamn value to the visitor. Yes, it took me like 3 days to build the whole thing and have all of the proper navigation in place (and I still add to it once a month or so). And come to think of it, I spent more time on that aspect of that particular site than I ever do on the rest of them that only earn a fraction of what this particular one earns. This is also reflected in the 25% average bounce rate (like 20% for its primary keyword).

The thing is, I can SEO shitty substance-free sites until I’m blue in the face, and I can profit from them to some degree, but ultimately they are going to hit a glass ceiling. Those sites are never going to be shared via email or referenced on prominent, authority websites. In the long-term, I’m better off having 10 of the sites like my precious little golden child site than 100 decent ones with limited potential.

I would say the three main things you need to keep in mind when building a new site are the following:

Design
Obviously. People (including you and I) often bounce right away if a site looks amateur. If you can’t make it look right, you might as well pay someone else to make it look right.

Navigation
They say your visitors should always have multiple routes in which they can get to your inner pages. I’ve found that big shiny logos really help, for instance, if you’re doing some sort of e-commerce site with products from different brands. Little text links in the sidebar won’t always cut it. Drop down menus are always good. A prominent SEARCH feature that WORKS is good. Don’t be afraid to create sub-directories and really refine what your visitor is looking for (if the niche permits it). Once people are a few clicks in, they are already invested in your site, and if you show them exactly what they’re looking for (instead of general results), conversion rates obviously go up.

Resources
Even if they don’t help sell anything or push traffic through your affiliate links, add some helpful shit. Whether it be how-to guides related to your niche, FAQ, or even just a collection of helpful related videos embedded from YouTube, it gives your site credibility that can pay off in the long-term. It also keeps people clicking around. Don’t even monetize these pages. Just put them there. You might also want to find a way to link to them from Wikipedia. These are the pages that are most likely to gain backlinks naturally.

A while back I talked about a super effective, white-hat method of gaining powerful backlinks. In a nutshell, it’s a crafty approach to getting other webmasters to link to your site. Obviously, the effectiveness of this method (or any link begging) is going to be drastically improved if your site actually looks like its contributing to the internet and isn’t just a spammy, dime-a-dozen, junk site.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got some pretty junky sites in my portfolio. I think I might lose my off-white card if I didn’t. All I’m saying here is that the extra work it takes to build something useful can pay off huge in the long-term, and long-term is what the SEO game is all about, as far as I’m concerned.

Maybe my next post won’t be so squeaky clean. I’d hate to have you guys think I went soft. I’ll cook something up.

I know, I know, you waited all this time for me to make a new post and here I am talking about the same crap I was talking about in the last post. Well, not really. The last post was to encourage you to subscribe to Drip Feed Blasts, which is by far the most powerful and easiest to use xrumer service available. Today I’m going to go over what I believe are the best ways to use DFB and get the most bang for your buck.

I would also like to point out that I am not being compensated for my constant plugging of this product, I really do just think its a fantastic service. In fact, I make my monthly investment in DFB back in the first calendar day of each month as a direct result from this service. Of course, your own results may vary (especially if you’re totally doing it wrong).

Focus Your Efforts
When you first start building blasts, it can be easy to get carried away and enter 50 parasite host URLs and 100 anchors to spin. That is grossly overdoing it. Myself and others have had wild success focusing on only one DIRECT URL and keyword. This may make some of you a little nervous, but you already know how I feel about that.

If you’re really paranoid about diversity, set up a blast with two URLs, one being http://yoursite.com and the other being http://www.yoursite.com. If your .htaccess is set up properly, both URLs should point to the same place, and no precious link juice will be lost. You then can sleep easier knowing that your link-building looks that much more natural.

The reason you want to go direct is because you are spreading yourself way too thin otherwise. Most of us are looking for solid results as soon as possible, right? Attack one keyword at a time.

Get Mo’ Links
I’m not saying you can’t set and forget your DFB campaigns, but you will experience stronger and much more consistent results if you build other types of links to your URLs. The usual mix of article submission, blog comments, social bookmarking, directories, etc are fine. One blog commenting service in particular that kicks ass is Bulk Blog Comments by Mattseh (same guy that brought you MegaPinger). By far the best blog commenting service I’ve used in a long time. Combining this service with DFB has yielded excellent results for me.

DFL
In the never ending pursuit of the ultimate indexing solution, the guys at DFB and Mattseh (yes I have a boner for all of them) created a utility called Drip Feed Login, free for DFB subscribers. This thing is pretty f-ing genius. If you’re not familiar, I’ll briefly explain what it does…and why you should run it every day should become obvious…

Xrumer/DFB spams the shit out of forums, right? Right. Profile links are the bread and butter of DFB. As we all know, those profiles with your spammy ass links can be tough to get indexed after they’re created, since often times they are buried deep within the site. So, how do we make Google notice these new profiles?

Ever notice at the bottom of most online forums there is a little “Who’s Online” section? It shows the usernames of all the users currently logged in with links to their profiles. These links make it real easy for those Google spiderz to find those people’s profiles. But, are we expected to log in to hundreds, if not thousands of spammy forum accounts every day to get noticed down there? Of course not. DFL does it for you. You simply start it up and hit “Start”, and it will systematically log in to all of your profiles over time, making them look naturally logged in, and subsequently skyrocketing the chance of your links being discovered and indexed. Pretty freaking neat. Use it.

K, bye. I’ll be back when I have something new to talk about.

I came across a thread on Wickedfire recently where someone was asking about how to go about getting lots of images for a site without much of a budget. Of course you could just steal them, but then you risk the content owner finding out about it and hassling you. Another problem is that Google will see them as duplicate image content and won’t rank your images in their image search. Here is a simple workaround I’ve used plenty of times in the past.

TinEye – Reverse Image Search is a site you may be familiar with. It’s basically a site with a huge index of images that you can use to cross reference any particular image and find out if it exists anywhere else on the internet. Many stock photo owners and webmasters use it to see if and where their images are being used. However, most of us just use it to find additional pictures of those special hot chicks that captivate us on forums, 4chan, etc. Of course, it hasn’t come close to indexing the whole web, but as far as I know it has the largest index of image-searchable images around and it’s super easy to use. I don’t know how exactly their image detection algorithm works, but I know how it doesn’t work, and I’m pretty confident that Google uses something similar to identify duplicate images.

Let’s use this silly cat picture as an example:

If you look this image up on TinEye (url: http://offwhitehat.com/images/catteeth-original.jpg), there are a whole bunch of results, as it has been published all over the internet. In my initial testing, I tried converting images to black & white to see if that would make them appear unique, but as you can tell by running a search on this image: http://offwhitehat.com/images/catteeth_bw.jpg, it is too smart for that.

My next experiment was mirroring the image, and voila, it works. Check out this horizontally flipped version of the image: http://offwhitehat.com/images/catteeth-reverse.jpg. Do a search and this here website should be the only one in the index for that particular image. All I did was flip it in Photoshop. If you are a Photoshop noob, you just go to Image > Image Rotation > Flip Canvas Horizontally. I’m sure most photo programs have the same capability. Some are probably even easier than others. However, Photoshop has a sweet batch function that you can use to automate the flipping of your images.

Of course, for images with text and special circumstances like that, this technique may not be the greatest. But yawning cat pictures? The best!

Anyway, now you have a way to steal lots of images, make them look like unique image content, and make it super hard for the people you are robbing to find out. Neat!

PS This is probably illegal and I totally don’t think you should do it. This is all hypothetical.

Edit: I forgot to add that this method won’t work on images that are nearly symmetrical. There needs to be a significant degree of variation to the flipped version, like with the cat example above.

Okay, the title is a little dramatic. This new change at EPN hasn’t as adversely affected everyone else as it has me (as far as I know). But it did make my daily clicks drop by like 200%. I will now tell you why, on the off chance you have the same problem.

A while ago, I made a post containing some tips and tricks to customize PhpBay, which is a fantastic wordpress plugin used to display eBay results that you should already have. In that post, I mentioned editing templates.ebay.results.html to make your entire listing results clickable (not just the title or title/image, but the whole shabang). I am making this post on the outside chance that either you made/found a similar code, or by the grace of God you got the code from this very site, making me personally responsible for your misfortune.

I can’t even remember where I got that code. I think I may have stole it from Radio, creator of Auction2Post. If it wasn’t him, I have a feeling whoever it was is going to remind me soon! Anyway, it worked great for a long time.

Then one day I get an email from Wade over at PhpBay telling me that Ebay has decided they don’t want affiliates using 302 redirects on their sites anymore. PhpBay was using 302 redirects by default. Why did Ebay make this seemingly trivial request? Well, apparently some affiliates were having their 302 redirect links indexed with Ebay’s content on search engines. In other words, a user executes a search query on Google, sees a result they like with a URL that points to your site, but when they click it, they are just forwarding (through an aff link) to that result on Ebay. Ebay didn’t like this. And unless you own Google, you are basically dropping rover links on a 3rd party site, and that is a no-no.

Okay, so Ebay wants 301 redirects. This will tell the search engines that the content found on the other side of that affiliate link belongs to Ebay. Fine with me. Being the upstanding and incredibly quick working man that he is, Wade over at PhpBay quickly investigated what changes needed to be made to the plugin in order to adhere to these new terms.

It ended up being a very small change to one file, the file known as auction.php that sits in whatever directory you happened to install WordPress. I opened a beer and began updating every single one of my sites. I then played TF2 and fell asleep peacefully around 7am.

OMG Where Are My Clickz!?
The next few days my EPN dashboard graph thingy looked like the world’s tallest and simplest roller coaster. Needless to say, I was alarmed. I quickly began creating EPN conspiracy theories in my mind (and on message boards).

I feel like this story is getting long-winded and dramatic so I’m just gonna cut to the chase:

IE will NOT pass the referring URL to a new window with Javascript!

Freaking Internet Explorer. And as we all know, the masses still use the browser that was conveniently pre-loaded for them on their PC. If you navigated to my old post which contains the modified template.ebay.results.html code, you will see something like:

added in there. This was the culprit. Only non-IE visitors were managing to click from my site to eBay. People using IE would click a result, then be taken to a blank page on my site where they would scratch their heads and then immediately forget my site ever existed.

Solution
Since I’m just a retard that steals other people’s code and can barely make a blog post, I had no idea what the hell to do. Luckily, my coding wizard friend Ryan looked into it for me and found an extremely simple solution to fix this.

Follow these super duper easy steps:

1. Open up the new Auction.php file in your favorite text editor (Notepad2 is a good one)
2. Scroll down to line 35, and find the string: $referer_approved = false;
3. Simply change “false” to “true” (without the quotes, duh!)

And like magic, the javascript links will work again.

Will eBay Care?
How in the heck should I know? If anyone at the eBay Partner Network is reading this, please feel free to respond. Also, did I ever tell you how beautiful you are?

Hey Wait a Second, Why do you Need that Javascript Crappola Anyway?
Well, that’s a valid question. I guess I don’t, really. But I really like making the entire listing clickable. I also like the fact that when a user hovers over the link it doesn’t show the URL at the bottom of their browser. I’m not ready to part with those two things, as I feel they improve the performance of the majority of my sites. I am also fantastically stubborn and didn’t want to revert to “default”.

My birthday is tomorrow, so I’m gonna start drinking now. Bye!

This is pretty much as white hat as it gets. Or at least as white hat as I get, in any case. It is also incredibly effective. I’ve been implementing this technique for a few weeks now and the results have been phenomenal.

You can’t beat relevant, authority links. You just can’t. Especially if they’re do-follow/one-way links. Of course, reciprocal ones aren’t so bad either. So, what’s the best way to get them? Well, you could of course simply email the webmasters of sites that you’d like to have a link on and ask. In some cases, this will work. It usually helps to be polite, throw in some flattery about their site, and maybe offer a link back in exchange. But, depending on the niche, you’re going to have varying degrees of success. Despite your advanced charm, some emails will still be dismissed. I’m going to teach you a simple method to drastically improve the success of good old fashion link-panhandling.

What You Need
Aside from a computer, the Internet, and your incredible powers of persuasion, you will need to install this Firefox plugin.

What You Do
Step A: Find a juicy site or blog in your niche with high PR and tons of inbound links. Ideally something ranking for a keyword you’re trying to dominate (or maintain). Do they have a links page? Perhaps a blogroll? If yes, proceed to step B.

Step B: Navigate that mouse of yours to your Tools menu in Firefox and select “Check Page Links”. This will activate that new plugin you installed. You will see the progress at the bottom. If there are lots of links on the page, it may take a couple minutes. Go roll a cigarette or perhaps get briefly involved in political debate on Wickedfire. When you come back, you will notice all the links on the page have been highlighted. Proceed to step C.

Step C: Look for red and yellow highlighted links. These links are the problematic ones. Most webmasters don’t have time to check their blogroll often and are usually linking to a few dead sites. Every now and then the plugin will mistakenly mark a working site as a problem site, so in the name of being thorough, we’re going to manually check these. Open up a notepad document so you can catalog the URLs that are broken. Make a list. Proceed to Step D.

Step D: Find the email contact for the site. Create a new email. Proceed to Step E.

Step E: Now it’s time to sweet talk the pants off these bitches. Let them know that you are so-and-so from yourspammyasssite.com. Tell them you were browsing their links and happened to notice the following links are bad: badlink1.com, badlink2.com, badlink3.com, etc. Casually mention that Google tends to frown upon dead or broken links, and it can often hurt your search engine rankings when you are linking to resources that don’t exist. After all of this, mention that if they feel that your site is relevant, you would appreciate it if they would consider linking to you.

I Dunno Dude, This Sounds Like Too Much Work
How dare you. First of all, Rome wasn’t built out of hay, okay? When you shoot out a handful of these emails, you’ll see how well it works. Every single person that has responded thus far has agreed to give me a link. One-way links. One site even gave me a paid spot for free, out of gratitude (for six months). Of course, not everyone has responded. In all likelihood, some emails are probably never even read. That’s just the nature of the game. But it is still very effective and very much worth it.

And if that doesn’t convince you, I’ll have you know that within the past couple weeks I have moved onto the first page (not quite #1, but getting there) for a keyword I had been targeting for a long time. A highly competitive keyword that gets 90,500 searches/mo, according to Google (yes, exact match). I attribute this sudden success to the links I’ve acquired in this short period of time.

You want that SEO money? Hmmm? Do you!? Wanna sit around all day playing video games and drinking Mtn Dew while your sites keep making you money? Well you gotta do the leg work first. Stop reading my whack ass blog and go try this. You may send me gift baskets later if you’d like.

A Dark Twist
Sorry. Thought I was done blabbing. Not the case. It just occurred to me that you might be able to dirty up this method. I don’t really like advocating squeaky clean white-hat SEO methods because they make me feel like a square. So I’m just going to throw this out there.

Let’s say you have a site outranking you for a particular keyword. One of the first things I do in this situation is figure out who is linking to them. You can do this easily by using Yahoo! Site Explorer. Now, for the sake of this example, let’s say you determine that ABCsite.com is linking to your competitor, XYZsite.com, in their blogroll. This would work best with a site with a lot of links. You would use the method detailed above, everything the same way. Find the broken links on ABCsite.com, and contact the webmaster with a humble request to have your site included. Only difference is, in this case you would casually interject your competitor site, XYZsite.com, into your list of broken sites, after listing 3 or four legitimately broken/dead sites.

The idea is to trick the webmaster at ABCsite.com to not only add a link to your site, but remove the link to your competitor’s site, after you’ve convinced them that it’s a dead link. Perhaps after the webmaster sees that the first two or three links in your list are in fact dead, they will assume the rest of your list is accurate. How devious. What’s the worst that could happen? If the webmaster notices the link is in fact still good, he/she will most likely just assume it was a temporary outage or a simple error.

There. Now I feel off-white again.

First of all, if you haven’t already, you need to read this post, which was the inspiration and the foundation for this method I still currently use to build links. And I’m not the only one doing it.

Trouble was, after I read that article, I was left feeling sort of confused still. How do I take a womens shoes site (or something like that!) and turn it into a piece of useful software? Well, one answer is in the title of this post, now isn’t it!?

Screensavers are usually in either one of two formats: .exe or .src. If you don’t already have the software to compile screensavers, you might want to “buy” some. I’m currently using a program called “Screensaver Factory 5 Enterprise”. If you already have some images, you can literally build and compile a simple slideshow screensaver in about 30 seconds. In the womens shoe site scenario, I would probably put together a nice little slideshow featuring the most sought after womens shoes. By default, the program adds little fancy transitions and what not. Not that they really matter too much. If you really want to get maximum benefit, you might want to watermark your images with your URL (yes, people actually download these things).

Distribution
Now, you’ve got your screensaver. It is time to distribute it. Just about every software download site has a submission area. At this point, if you’ve never authored/distributed software before, you might be thinking about outsourcing this part. Well, that’s not entirely necessary, thanks to a little something called a PAD file.

What the Shit is a PAD File?
I’m glad you asked! PAD stands for “portable application description”. Basically, a PAD file is an xml file that exists on your server (or wherever) that contains all the necessary information about your software such as size, version, links to download and more. The idea is that instead of having to manually make updates all the time when things change with software (like updates), you simply update one PAD file and the sites offering the software usually poll their PAD files regularly for changes. Now, the beauty of using the PAD file is that most of these software sites that accept submissions will ONLY ask for a link to your PAD file because it already contains all the information they need. This means your time spent on each site is quite minimal.

I Can Haz PAD File?
Yes, you can. I use a simple utility called PadGen that you can download here to create my PAD files. Keep in mind that not all fields are necessary so don’t spend all afternoon on it. Just get the important ones covered. Some sites do have requirements about what information needs to be contained in a PAD file before it is accepted for inclusion or review.

Hopefully I don’t need to tell you that you need to include your URL to the site/page you’re promoting in your PAD file.

How ‘Bout Some Sites?
Of course. I live to please you. I’m going to give you some master list of software sites that will accept your useless ladies shoe screensavers, but I will give you a few. They really aren’t hard to find, and there are tons of them. And of course many of them just scrape data from the other ones so there are plenty of links to be had, here. There are also distribution services in the business of charging you for distributing your software, but I don’t think they’re necessary for this sort of task. Now, about them sites…

1. Softpedia.com
2. Windows7Download.com
3. FreeDownloadManager.org
4. DailySofts.com
5. PCWin.com
6. FileBoost.net
7. FreeWareTown.com
8. Files54.com
9. A ton more…get your Google on

Alrighty. Have fun. Please don’t take my method (which is obviously just an interpretation of Eli’s Method) and run it into the ground. Thank you.

Whether you’ve got a real-live e-commerce site packed with products that you sell or you just have a bunch of shady affiliate sites selling other people’s crap, read on for info on a little known place to get a bit of extra traffic.

I’m not going to put the name of the site in the body of this post because I fear they will discover my ramblings and then perhaps get a little stricter on the site approval process. In any event, the site + submission page in question can be found here (yes I have it redirecting twice including a double-meta refresh because I’m that excessively paranoid and ridiculous).

It clearly states that they don’t accept affiliate sites…but guess what? Every affiliate site I have submitted has been accepted. Every site gets a trickle of traffic from that site daily from shop-happy visitors. If you know anything about me, you know the vast majority of my shopping sites are built with phpbay. The only sites I’ve submitted have been phpbay stores (and they’ve all been approved).

Once your site is approved, your listings are automatically scraped from your site and included in the index of the shopping site in question (that which we do not speak of). Phpbay listings seem to work fantastically.

If you don’t already own a copy of phpbay, buy it here through my link because you love me.

You do love me, don’t you? Or was that all just sweet talk?

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!