Black Hat Review

I’ve been searching high and low for an automatic blog poster that will post from RSS feeds with a lot of options to customize and reduce the auto footprints. I started out learning Joomla CMS because there is a product called feed2post that does what I was looking for. Joomla got a bit frustrating and so did feed2post (elcansoftware). It wasn’t anything too bad, it just wasn’t working for me and I couldn’t get the cron job going. Not necessarily anything wrong with feed2post. Being a lot more familiar with wordpress and my Joomla frustrations growing, I kept searching for a tool to automatically post rss content to individual wordpress posts. Viola! WPFeeds!

I make it clear when I’m not happy with a product. I’ve used WPFeeds for a few days now and I’ve got to say it is everything I was looking for. I’ll start with the high-level of what it’s all about.

1. An app were you put in your rss feeds of choice and establish some variables such as how many min/max (it randomizes each pull) to pull and post.

2. An app to set up a directory of articles to be parsed and pulled into posts (note I dont use this function yet)

3. An app to randomize the timing of the cronjob and a special feature that will suggest the cron syntax since running php crons can be funky at best.

4. clear simple admin panels

5. Probably some other things I’m forgetting

OK, so lets get to the meat. The set of apps cost 57 clams and I am happy to have paid it. I put a folder on my server at the site’s root were WP is installed. I open one admin panel and fill in a bunch of feeds I searched for in google (keyword + rss) and told it which category to post that feed to and whether or not I wanted to use a nofollow tag on it. Then I told WPFeeds were my wp-config file was located, the min and max number of rss items per post (it will actually do something in between), whether I want comments on or not, and whether I want a ping sent after posting.

After this I go to the “cronwait” admin and tell it what script to include for execution:

note that it asks this because this “Cronwait” script is nicely integrated but also can run independent of the WPfeeds…you can use it to run other cron jobs at random intervals! Nice extra!

Then I tell it an execution interval which will tell it to actually run every time, every 2nd, 3rd, etc time the cronjob is set to run. After this there is an option for min/max delay in minutes…it again will choose actual delay.

On this admin panel there is a button to view the most likely cron command syntax. For example:

1. CRON Command with php -f:

php -f /home/directa/public_html/xxx.com/wp-poster/wpfpost/waitpost.php

2. CRON Command with server location of php:

/usr/bin/php -f /home/directa/public_html/xxx.com/wp-poster/wpfpost/waitpost.php

3. CRON Command with wget:

I went through the whole install in about 20 minute and it is working like a charm. My blog is getting posts with multiple feed summaries on each post.

You know what else? If you want to put it on another blog (refer to license), you simple copy over the single directory via cpanel and change the url in the cron job and the feeds if desired. I chose to change the intervals and number of feeds per post variables as well. Duplication took five minutes.

In order to set the tone here I need to explain my expectations first. I read the sales page and watched most of the videos before diving in and trying out the Content Solution 2. It seemed to fit what I needed to do. I wanted a combination content scraper and twister(”rewriter”) with plenty of automated options that I can tweak and set.

The ultimate goal was to have a solution for my parked domain portfolio. I know many marketers have struggled with the decision to do something better than the standard parking or just go with what is easy. When you have hundreds of domains going with what is easy is, well, just easier.

If you’ve read the reviews here you know I use SEC extensively for cloaking. The beauty of SEC is that it manipulates data to create pages very well. Your imagination and initial setup time is the only thing limiting how diverse, individual and dynamic (but static at the same time, haha) your search engine spider snacks of pages can be. What SEC does not give me is content generation (from scratch - it has markov that runs from seeds). I figured that given the fact the once set up the SEC sites are extremely “auto pilot” in nature, and I have a system there that allows me to quickly setup totally unique sites, the only thing missing was the actual content step. What I have been doing is manually collecting articles on a given topic and creating a Markov seed to use as the feeder for the various content blocks throughout the expansive Search Engine Cloaker sites.

Along comes Content Solution 2. My expectations were to choose a topic and input the keyword(s). The Content Solution would find the related content, be that articles, page scrapes, rss, etc. Then I would be able to spin it to pump out multiple versions.

This is my experience:

There are several “modules” to the Content Solution - and this review segment is focused on the rewriter - but being the first part of potentially a few reviews I’ll address some basics as well. The interface is pretty clear (see pic) - it becomes obvious what is going on fairly quickly. In the left are your projects. The first thing you want to do is scrape content by choosing a content source and then giving it a keyword to go after. Choices are as I expected/hoped for being SEs, popular article sites, RSS feeds, etc. I would like to be able to choose several sources for concentrated niches that may not have a lot of content. In the Content Solution 2, you can only choose one source at a time. If your topic is big, this won’t matter because you’ll have a lot to work with no matter what source you choose.

The scraping process works nice. In the center panel you are given the various results (a list of articles on your key phrase from ezinearticles, for example). You then need to check the ones you want to work with and move on to the type of work you’ll be doing. Your “work with” choices are Markov and Rewriter. Additionally you have various output sources at this point if you’re content with just scraping. These choices are an rss feed, txt file, html file (zipped or not).

I often get distracted while typing up reviews. The cause for this may be the large news screens surrounding me at my desk. Actually, yes, that is the reason. In any case the story of that pregnant marine who was killed by some superior of hers just flashed by. Can you believe this crap? The guy rapes her, then later on he kills her and her unborn baby so she can’t testify against him? She disappears days before her expected testimony. This freaking nut job burned and buried her? He is due for 500 lashes on the bean bag, and then death.

OK, sorry - back to The Content Solution. So I check off my articles and choose the rewrite function and here is where I get a little lost. I saw in the videos how you put the tags in that work as variables from a thesaurus for given words. This did not happen automatically and I was worried. I chose “Edit Article” from the upper right area above the article in the right column.

I then had a variety of choices that were just pretty confusing. Sometimes I’m in the mood to figure this stuff out, sometimes I’m not. I wasn’t. I’ll save you some time by saying this:

1. Get your content from the scrape,

2. Select it then hit rewrite at the bottom,

3. Choose Edit Article

4. Click on the Auto[…] looking button

At this point you have many “tags” ready to go in your article. Each tag is supposed to represent a word that will be replaced by a synonym to create various versions of the first article. Let’s visit my expectations again for a moment: I envisioning everything to work like this so far (minus the email to Omar in support to figure out the auto tag generator thing), so I’m happy. At this point, however, I’m realizing the 50 or 100 tag words (center column now in the Rewriter view)

are not populated with synonyms. I was expecting this to be the case. I see no reason why it can’t populate via the “auto tag” function all the common descriptive words found in a thesaurus. To keep moving I tried checking a word and choosing “Lookup” - figuring it would find synonyms…still wondering why I would have to do this step manually but anyway…I tried a few words and had no luck with it. It appears it must be populated manually. This was not what my expectations were.

I thought I may be missing something. Damn it would be sweet if that part was automated! I envisioned a newly spun version of each article with the click of a button. I wrote Omar at the Content Solution helpdesk again and his response was:

omar@halfagain.com to me

show details Jan 15 (3 days ago)

Reply

“You do not change it. You add more valus for each tag and the will be
automatically cycled when the content is generated and refreshed”

So that confirmed it. Each word has to be manually populated with synonyms. I realize this is not the end of the world, but just not the way I would have designed it.

So far I am overall happy with the function of the Content Solution 2. I will move on toe the Markov generator next. At a minimum I will be using the scraping system for it’s clean and easy to use interface. The output options are also nice. I’ll also start hounding Omar to automate the synonym/thesaurus part so I can use the rewriter as I intended too!

later

A recent comment reminded me that I was going to write a review on Pingslinger Gen II. I never got around to it but Im about to take a look at my notes and the app so I can do so. I know I ran into very similar problems I had with vSearchVoodoo….buggy and support denies its buggy. Back to that in a second. I am currently learning/trying to use theContentSolution2 and when I get it all figured out I’ll post about it. I’m hoping to use it in conjunction with SEC as an alternative to parking. I’m thinking along the lines of a dump keywords, click click click and go.

This brings me to an issue I discovered this weekend. It has been months since I uninstalled MarketerSOS software from my primary pc. I remember finding some parasite-ish app running in the backgroundlong after the uninstall - while checking out the task manager. I hunted it down in the registry and took care of it.

So I thought. Here it is months after I thought I fumigated my PC of MarketerSOS .net based parasites, it hung up while closing with a message that it can’t end MarketerSOS such and such application! Sheesh!

MarketerSOS has a lot of apps…although they all seem torevolve around the same auto-form-fill technology, so I can’t speak for much of them (tons…see www.seotrafficsuite.com) - I have used vSearchvoodoo and pingslinger Gen II and had many problems. If someone can convince me to give another one of their products a shot, I’ll do so….but not on my primary PC!

Yes, xRumer 4.0 is expensive ($450).

Yes, as I’ve stated before and you can figure out by reading the previous posts here that the software is very powerful. It’s smart, its very functional, overall it is a very impressive piece of programming.

I have been using xRumer4.0 for close to 6 months now. I had many hiccups along the way but I feel that I have mastered the functionality that this program has to offer.

At the end of the day, no matter how powerful, cool, smart, or impressive a piece of software is - it needs to get the job done. Speaking from my own experience and months of using xRumer4.0, testing and tweaking my techniques, and following the advice of botmaster support and others on the support forum…I have yet to see the results I expected.

Although I have made my money back and then some I was expecting much more. I was expecting decent rankings for targeted words and when it all comes down to it, traffic.

In my first few runs (after working out the various bugs mentioned in earlier posts) I would generate a list of 100,000+ links and get about 5-15% success rate which is a lot of links regardless. Later, at the advice of botmaster, I used one of their guestbook footprint wordlists. To be fare I used it only as a inurl: harvest so that probably dramatically reduced my results….in any case I harvested about 5,000 links from hrefer and and got about 200 successful links. Part of this is because the public proxies used with the xrumer setup/proxy search function become less effective the more people use xrumer.

For all of these cases I was using only 2 different promotions. Both of which featured a message with robust variation (using the variable list function in xrumer, you have great flexibility for posting a large number of messages w/ great variability) and focussed on a group of about ten keyword phrases for the primary link. I stuck with two so I can be sure that I tried many different harvests/wordlists/post runs to get them some traffic. They both ultimately pointed to a cloaked site which redirected human visitors to a profitable affiliate campaign.

So with thousands of successful links, I saw no noticeable uplift to longterm traffic. At best maybe a small (as in less than 100 visits) bump a day or two after a run, but that is it. Now here it is months after my first runs and still no noticeable traffic.

My guess is that the problem is not with xrumer, but with the search engines themselves (and technically, its only a problem for us trying to mass post links). The successful links are not alone int he world of forum/guestbook/comment spam. Here are some samples of the sites where successful links surfaced, and pretty much every spot check of the successful link file I did looked like this:

http://cgi.ogaki-tv.ne.jp/cgi-bin/user/joe/wwwboard.cgi

http://cgi.ipc-tokai.or.jp/%7Eseitaku/BBS/bbs200.cgi

In short, they are heavily polluted areas of the web.

I need to also consider that maybe, even after all the trial and error, advice from botmaster and other users, that I could still be doing something wrong. Maybe a few thousand links just isn’t enough. Maybe I should be running this continually, generating thousands of links every week. I don’t know.

Feel free to comment or point botmaster to this 3-part review as a pre-sales question if you’re still intersted in purchasing it. I can’t say the program sucks. It did what it says it would do. My experience has been, however, that what it did just didn’t generate a lot of traffic.

I am not giving up yet.  I will await additional feedback from botmaster - or other users.  For $450 Im not giving up that easy.  But I will at some point say xrumer simply does or does not generate traffic.

I’ve been using SEC for about a year and a half now and can safely say I am very comfortable with it. I use it with the templates and static page addons, multiple domains, as well as markov engine content generation. I’ll tell you up front that my number one complaint (and I haven’t checked if they changed this) is that the addons don’t come with the package. It’s not clear just how mandatory these things are…so if you are looking at SEC - just consider the price as the price with the addons.

For those not familiar with cloaking, the program simply delivers different content to different visitors - the goal is to create “bot/SE friendly” content for the search bots so that good SE indexing is achieved while delivering a quality sales page to the human user.

I’ll get into some details of my setup but here is a quick overview of some SEC features:

add unlimited, custom templates: SEC does this like a charm. I pull templates from standard template sites and they integrate perfectly.

auto-update ip and agents lists (to keep current with the latest search bots)

choose which method to use for cloaking (user agent only, ip only or both)

cache all cloaked pages so spiders see the same content when they check the same page instead of seeing different content each time

have complete control over how cloaked pages look including the ability to create unlimited numbers of pages that are readable and all unique
There are many ways to setup SEC (or any cloaking script) here are just a few I use:

1. Install Search Engine Cloaker on disposable domains that look something similar to an affiliate program domain:

You are an affiliate marketer for Super Booger Sugar (superboogersugar.com) [<example!] (the money site)

You register the domain superbooger-sugar.com and super-booger-sugar.com and install SEC on them.

(For the record, I currently register about 10-20 domains for each project - all pointing to the money site)

2. Do standard keyword research and dump your keyword list into SEC

3. d/l about a dozen or more articles about super booger sugar, combine them into a single text file and use this as your markov engine seed for content generation

4. customize the template as much as possible, roting variables wherever possible to get very unique pages.

(all the links generated on these pages will be to a /keyword.htm within the site, and as the spiders visit that page, a new page is generated….ah, beautiful!

5. Set the redirect link to the affiliate www.superbugersugar.com/affil-1234

6. do a minimal amount of offsite SEO to get the spiders in the door: usafreeads, a couple articles, a few directory submits…etc…just something to bring in the little monsters.

When spiders visit, they will be caught up in a mess of keyword and content optimized pages. When a visitor sees the link in the search results and clicks on it, they will be taken to your affiliate. That is why I feel it is important to use similar domains so that the user doesn’t get spooked.

My cloaked pages are so tweaked I even rotate html code in the header (not just tag content but the other non display code items), names of all photos, words in the alt tags, of course the “meat” content, link lists at random sizes, menus at random sizes, random number of sub menus and sub menu entries, random photos from predefined lists, all the way to various compyright and dating formations, naturally all the head tags are random and all of this complete control randomness is sourced from a well researched key list (actually a few of them but I keep that technique to myself).

Its so automated but disguised from spiders I just pop in my keywords and thats it. One page will never look anything like the others.

I have 65 cloaked sites w/ 500-2000 pages each spread over 5 different hosting accounts. It takes me 10 minutes to setup a completely customized, totally unique (average 11% unique factor against the others) site.

I can look at the list of static pages in SEC, see the performance based on spider hits and remove poor performers with one click…constantly keeping the cream at the top.

I get perfect keyword and keywork link density in the “meat” content. All automatically by pluging links into my markov seeds.
I pull up charts that show me the performance of each page by the typical log info all within the integrated cloaking package.

There is an instant “one click” install for getting all the installs done on new domains and subs.

I dont even use the page extraction/scraping features…but they are there.

In a nutshell I think search engine cloaker is pretty badass - but a lot of that was through smart thinking - as with any complicated tool, you need to spend some time digging under the hood.

note: this post is titled “high level” because I will take it down into the weeds a level on the next post to help folks get some good results from SEC - which can be a bit of a learning curve to battle.

I have been focusing my business model on a different area the past two month but I am now back to catch up on some items for my more traditional marketing projects.  I’m about to submit my initial high-level review of search engine cloaker and later today will give the final conclusions and results from xRumer 4.0.

I just realized that the MarketerSOS software (vSearchVoodoo) I reviewed earlier also left some parasite on my PC. Who knows what it was doing but it launched when the PC booted and I had to locate and delete the registry entry and the .exe hidden in the windows folder in order for it to go away. Like I said, I dont know what it was doing but I just don’t care for that crap - particularly if it hangs around using up resources (shows up in the task manager as MarketerSOS and toward the top of resource usage but not quite an IE or Office app) AFTER I’ve uninstalled it.

On the xRumer 4.0 front - I have finally resolved the two big issues that were holding me up: the PR sort in Hrefer and the eMail setup in xRumer. I am now running again and will be reporting results very soon. For those that may run into the same issue with the hrefer PR sort, here is the deal:

Hrefer has this neat little option to sort your harvested links by PR. There are various options (single file output would give you one text file with each link line appended with a “0″ thru “10″ or different files for each PR.

When it comes time to use the PR sort, there is a box that asks to use the current link file and a text field showing the location ie. C:\herefer\links\list 1.txt.

If you’ve got the file you want sorted all ready to go then you would hit run and get an error. See, the issue is the location info is there by default, so you assume it’s correct (the actual location is correct). The problem is that field only wants the file name, not the path location. Change it to list 1.txt and your on your way to PR sorting happiness!

meegwell