Pyrogenic Media

I have previously entered Promojunkies competitions in the past and found them to be challenging, but not overly difficult to get atleast in the top 10. Well they have struck again and come out with yet another competition, this time with some serious prize money on the line.

You can check out the official page here since what I am about to say is going to come out verbatim : http://promojunkie.com/seo-contest/home/19

The competition is for the phrase “Newport Beach Houses”.

A bit different from the last competition I entered with them, they are offering prize money all the way down to 8th place. Although if you do end up all the way down there, you will only get $50 for your troubles, it is still nice to get some bragging rights.

1st Place: $1,000.00 Cash (Must rank 1st position to win)
2nd Place: $500.00 Cash (Must rank 2nd position to win)
3rd Place: $250.00 Cash (Must rank 3nd position to win)
4th Place: $125.00 Cash (Must rank 4th position to win)
5th Place: $100.00 Cash (Must rank 5th position to win)
6th Place: $100.00 Cash (Must rank 6th position to win)
7th Place: $75.00 Cash (Must rank 7th position to win)
8th Place: $50.00 Cash (Must rank 8th position to win)

What differs in this competition from others is that this keyword is already taken with local businesses. (I can only assume Newport is an actual place). I got the email about the competition opening and immediately went to namecheap to register a domain with the exact phrase. To my suprise, .com, .net and almost every other popular TLD was already taken. I had a pretty ugly feeling that the details of the competition were leaked, and all the good domains had been bought PRIOR to the competition opening (Honestly, I went to namecheap literally seconds after the competition opened). However as it turns out from looking a the whois records, there is already legitimate people owning those domains for several years now.

At the time of opening, there was still a few decent domains such as .biz, but I got side tracked investigating how people managed to snaffle up the .com’s. And in the end missed out.

I probably won’t end up entering this one. But with the amount of money up for grabs I really encourage anyone to give it a go. I have seen some pretty crazy stuff winning previously with nothing but simple “dumb” backlinks. By “dumb” I mean just basic stuff, forum posts, linkwheels, articles. It is not that hard to reach the money.

This year seems to be the year of the forum profile submitters. I already know of a couple of software releases coming up that involve forum account creation/posting/profile making. In my experiences, Forum profile making has always boosted me in the SERPS. For a while, I could rank pages with nothing but 100 profile links and sit quite comfortably in the top 3. And then it only required a few touch ups here and there to make it to the top. Times have changed and you are no longer able to use that one trick pony anymore, but profiles should still be in any SEO’s arsenal.

The first product that I have bought and tried (Over a couple of months now), is Sick Submitter. Sick Submitter is a full blown forum account/profile maker, that also has a few extra features like an RSS feed Creator/Submitter and a ping script written into the app. Overall my impression is that this is a very slick piece of software down below, but still feels a bit clunky on the outside. Anyway, let’s go through it bit by bit.

The forum account creation works on SMF, PHPBB and VBulletin. So far I have only really bothered with SMF as that seems to be the easiest to get working. PHPBB and Vbulletin always seem to hide their profiles behind login pages, or not allow anywhere for you to put your backlink. The profiles that Sick creates are of high quality, and include full information like Address, City, Zipcode, Birthdate, and Gender. It may not sound all too fancy, but most profile creators in the past have skipped all this info and gone straight to adding their link. Maybe not that important, but it is always nice to have a filled out profile.

These fields such as address can all be auto generated by Sick. So you don’t have to find an address with the right zipcode. Which is ultra handy for someone from New Zealand such as myself! All I can every remember is 90210!

Sick has captcha support for Decaptcher, Bypass Captcha, Beat Captchas, and Death By Captcha. I love it when software gives you the choice instead of forcing you to go with one company or another. Not that I care about the price of captchas, but usually these sites have minimum deposits and I end up with an account at each place with lots of wasted credits that never get used. Sick Submitter also allows you to solve captchas by hand with is nice if you are just starting out, and don’t have the money to deposit.

The application also has a proxy scraper/tester built in which is a really nice feature. I gave a small harvest and test and it seemed to work OK. But I never really bothered using the proxies too heavily as they usually bring down the overall success rate drastically. Proxy support is usually built into software just to quieten a few whiners here and there, and most people never bother with it.

Now, Onto the juicy bits…

A few of the settings you see here.

Thread Display. Now this is an interesting one. Sick can use 2 different ways to run. Hidden mode, and (You guessed it!) Visible mode. Honestly, I don’t think there is any difference in the way the application actually functions. From what I can see, and from my experience as a .net developer (Which these guys are programming in), they are using an IE window to do the account creation. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, infact, it is by far the easiest way to create a great product. But it is the slower way, and as such you won’t be seeing it overtaking xRumer just yet. The difference between Hidden and Visible is simply a cosmetic one. On Hidden, the IE windows are still there, but are just not shown. And visible is vice versa. It doesn’t make any difference on the speed or how it runs.

You can see the Threads setting, of which I run it on a modest 6 threads. This setting has alot more to do with your Internet connection than anything, but still there is some bottle necking in memory. I have a core i7 PC with 8gb ram, and I don’t really bother going any higher. The thread setting does go up to 30 however if you wanted to really push it, but I don’t see how when using the IE windowed system, you could realistically get it that high.

The success rate of the signups really depends on your URL list you are using. But I think it does a pretty decent job of signing up to some of the more difficult forums. It does fail on Anti Bot questions which I think shouldn’t really be happening at this level. The anti-bot questions are generally pretty easy to solve, and can either be done with programming logic, or by having a cloud based system. e.g. Maybe when you buy the product, you have to do 3 anti-bot questions (These are pulled from forums), and they are kept in a database to be pulled out when required. Basically solving every possibly combination. It isn’t that elegant, but it would work OK.

Once the profiles have been created, you can take all the URL’s and input them into an RSS feed (The software does this for you), and then submit that RSS feed to a huge list of aggregators. While I do do this, I have my doubts whether this actually does anything amazing. But I do know people that swear by this method for getting their backlinks indexed, so it doesn’t hurt to throw them out there (Only takes a few seconds of work).

Other things that I haven’t had a go of yet :

Sick Builder : Sick builder is a scripting language built specifically for Sick Marketing. It is (supposedly), what everything within the application relies on to submit to sites. So far I have not given it a try, but it looks like such a simply language to get going. I know people on the Sick Submitter forums have used it to create Pligg site submitters, and a huge plethora of scripts that don’t come with the standard version of the application. If you are smart about it, you can also sell your own Sick Builder scripts on the forum (They have a section for this), so not only can you use their framework to rank your sites, but you can make even more money selling the scripts you make to do it.

Directory Submitter : Sick also comes with a pretty nice directory submitter that I never really bothered to use. To me directories have been dead a long time, but I think with the Sick Builder included, it was just a nice little addition that they throw out there.

Overall, I feel Sick Submitter is heading in the right direction. What really stands it apart from the competition is the fact that I feel it was made for idiots to use. It isn’t difficult at all and follows a logical path to creating links. Along with the Sick Builder it really makes this a steal for $20 a month only, and you can easily make your money back alone for all the backlinks you will create within that first month, even if you are a complete noobie.

However, in my opinion it remains to be seen whether using the IE browser to submit forums will come out trumps. It is already slow and bloated, and I know of atleast a couple more similar products coming out in the next couple of months that don’t use a browser at all.

Click the banner below to go check out Sick Submitter.

Since running Wachahost.com, we have been trying to find a reliable website monitoring service that will send us SMS direct to my cell when our servers go down for whatever reason. So far it has been a mighty struggle to find a service that is both reliable, has the features we require (Not asking much here), and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

It may seem obvious in our case that when we are hosting sometimes 100+ websites on one server that we have monitors going around the clock making sure we are alerted whenever something goes wrong. But in many cases alerts can be used for just your everyday website when time is money. The biggest example would be if you were running a PPC/PPV campaign, and your website or host goes down. Often there is nothing you can do but ride out the downtime. But you can atleast pause your campaigns and not waste money pushing traffic to a downed websited.

When we first started looking for monitor services, we knew of only 2 features we required. Our website should be pinged every minute (Not every 5, not every 30, but every single minute of every day), it should send us SMS alerts at a moderate price. Seems simple enough. A number of services have a low limit of pinging every 5 minutes, this really isn’t good enough for us. We want to know immediately when our site is down. Ontop of that, our original plan was to provide uptime reports to our customers every month. Being upfront about how our servers were performing was going to be a big selling point of the business. As it turned out, and as I will explain, it didn’t quite work out that way.

We finally found a company that ticked all the right boxes. Monitis.com.

The biggest bonus about Monitis.com, is that you pay as you go. You don’t get locked into plans or given more monitors then you need. You basically build your plan as you go which was great for us when we were just starting out. Obviously we only had the one server at the beginning, but quickly grew and needed to be able to increase our plan as time went on.

So far so good. We set up the monitors to our servers, set up the alerts to go straight to our cellphones, and for the first month everything seemed OK.

Then, the downtime.

And no, it wasn’t our server going down but theirs. They actually have 3 datacenters spread over the United States, but that doesn’t help our uptime reports. You see each day I get sent an email with our uptime stats for the day. Almost every single day, one of their datacenters had failed. For example look at this image below :

I have coded this a bit to make it easier to understand. Just note that there is two rows per location as this is monitoring for TWO servers. We are only focusing on the first server. The top row shows that I had downtime that day, it is the cumulative stats for all 3 datacenters (Which follow) combined. Inside the star is how many failed loads my website gave. Basically suggesting my server was down. However as we go down, we check the first datacenter (Green box), hmm, seems this datacenter doesn’t think my server went down at all. We check the second datacenter, this datacenter thinks I have been down. And the last datacenter (Red Box), doesn’t think I was down either.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that there was some issue in that middle datacenter today, and it is reporting that my server was down when infact it was not. It doesn’t worry me too much, but it goes back on one of our starting principles. How can I show the end of month uptime reports, when all the numbers are messed up and saying I had downtime when infact I had not? At one point we purchased a new shared server and it maybe sat with no more than a handful of customers on it, half of them not doing anything anyway. And it still said that server had gone down, despite the fact that the uptime on the server (Both with Apache and the server in general), said it had not gone down at all.

In anycase, there goes my idea to show uptime reports to our customers.

I didn’t want to cry over spilt milk, and other than cranky DC’s, the service was OK from Monitis. O wait, no it wasn’t.

It all started one night when I got a SMS at 3am that the server was down. I sleepwalked from my bed to my computer, and checked what was up. Nothing it seemed. The server had absolutely nothing wrong with it… When I checked Monitis, it said that my server was down for just one check, across all 3 datacenters. But it came up on the next check (1 minute later). Maybe the load had spiked on the server and it was unable to reach it at that exact point. Nope not that either. cPanel keeps load statistics for 15 minute and it was perfectly fine.

We had now moved on from just one Datacenter giving false downtime, to all 3 doing it. The SMS credits were only a few cents per text. So I didn’t worry about it too much. Other than having to get up at 3am and waking up my girlfriend in the process (There was rage, O the rage!), no harm done right? Well this started to get more and more frequent. It got to a point where I would get a text about the server being down, and there was a 50/50 chance it was a bogus report. Once again we are talking across all servers, even dormant ones so it was not like we were having random load spikes.

This all came to a head one night where I have never been so pissed off in my life.

There I am watching Mythbusters on a hot Thursday evening. And my phone goes off that a server is down. I check the server, seems OK. I go check the Monitis report, and for some reason the downtime is not even shown in the graph. It is showing 100% uptime. Even stranger, every time the server goes down I get a SMS ASWELL as an email. No email this time around. So I just got a SMS alert, with Monitis showing 100% uptime, the server showing 100% uptime, and no email to back it up.

Whatever. Mythbusters is calling.

30 minutes later. Same thing. And this goes on for several hours, me getting texts for a wide range of servers. None of which are showing any signs of downtime on monitis’s own reports, nor on mine. Monitis live support was non existant, they didn’t reply to our emails. I had to actually turn off all monitors so I could finally get some sleep. That is terrible. For a company to have to turn off their critical alert system, just to get some sleep. After waking in the morning, I turned on the monitors and everything was back to normal. However still showing zero downtime on the monitis backend, despite the inundation of sms messages on my phone.

Now we started to run into an issue. All these messages aren’t free. We had to pay every time something like this went on. And Monitis was never available on livechat for explanations. Admittedly I could have probably called them. And my Timezone probably wasn’t in check with theirs. But it was still frustrating as hell.

Things started to go really wrong. The usual, Get SMS but no email started to happen. Other times we got emails with no SMS. Sometimes the techs for Wachahost.com got texts but not me. Today my partner in the business said he got several emails about servers being down (I got none), and that every single downtime email was followed by a email stating that the server was back up… 1 minute later.

This has gone on long enough. Today we made the switch to Pingdom.com. They have a much smoother interface (Not Flash), an iPhone app, and so far, no false downtimes. I will write another post about my experiences with them at a later date, but for now, my advice is to stay away from Monitis.com

I started this post to try and explain how many products out there today, rely on people being too lazy to ask for a refund. It happens all the time, bold claims on products that are too good to be true, and when the results don’t come, people are too lazy to do anything about it.

One such product that relies on this is the “Water Car”. All the products are the same, they rely on splitting water (or h20) into it’s 2 hydrogen 1 oxygen form, and then injecting this as to add to the fuel mix. In theory, this actually would work. Infact it does. Hydrogen and Oxygen being added DOES create energy to power the car, but it is where these bold claims for fuel efficiency where things get murky.

You can check out some of these sites here :

http://www.hybridwaterpower.com

http://www.progassaver.com

http://www.simplehybridsystem.com

By the way, all of these are on clickbank.com. They used to pay upwards of $100 commission, but since it become so profitable, products have flooded the market.

First we have to go back to 3rd Form science. More importantly chemistry. And even more narrowing it down, the First Law of Thermodynamics. You can check out the wikipedia page, but really all you need to know is that energy/power is never created. It is converted from another form. If we think of modern day power, we take things such as hydrodams, and generate power. It is done by taking the kinetic energy of the water and then converting that into electricity. We probably shouldn’t go too deep into it, but if we know that energy cannot be created, it can only be converted, then how are we going to get energy out of water?

The answer is, you aren’t. How the water car actually works, is that it takes energy from your car battery, and in turn your alternator, and splits the water into Hydrogen and Oxygen. This process is fairly straight forward. But we would only be conserving fuel, if the energy it took to split the water is less than the energy that the Hydrogen + Oxygen would give us. This would be impossible because it would be like “Creating” energy which we already know as impossible. At best we are looking at an even amount of energy going in and coming out, but it would likely be worse than that because the process of splitting the water would likely give out heat aswell, which is a form of energy, and we would once again lose energy in the process.

This is a scam. Plain and simple.

So how do they get away with it? For starters you need to install the “Water Cell” on your car yourself. This process is likely beyond most people and so we already have people that won’t have the ability to refund as they can’t even get it going in the first place. Next we have the people that install it, realise it is crap, but cannot be bothered to return it. Often because they will have to pay shipping and handling to get it back, with a “chance” of a refund. We also have a small group of people (Trust me, with ANY product you get these people), that install it, and think it works. And lastly you will come across people that realise it doesn’t work, and ask for a refund. I would like to give you the overall refund rate, but recently Clickbank removed this statistic from the public view. I am really not sure why as it helps gauge how good or bad the product is, but alas, it is gone.

Why should you care? Other than tonnes of people being ripped off on a daily basis? Well it is just another part of the business world that doesn’t get talked about that often. The amount of businesses that sell shady products that don’t work (Think “As Seen On TV”), and yet get away with it due to people being too lazy to ask for a refund.

By now, there isn’t many internet marketers or SEO’s out there that don’t know about Scrapebox. Even if you don’t own it, you have likely heard about it before. Scrapebox started out as a WordPress commenter and Google Scraper. But eventually evolved into all kinds of SEO tools and all round usefulness. It’s ability to scrape Google alone makes it worth purchasing as no matter whether you are a Whitehat or Blackhat SEO, you will eventually need a scrape of some kind.

A feature that is quite useful, but often never used is the Pingmode. What this does is sends a web request to the page, and well… that’s about it. People often use this for boosting views or pageloads for particular websites. For example needing views on a Youtube video, you can ping it using hundreds of proxies, thus bolstering your views. Note, I don’t actually know if this will work since Youtube has smartened up to these tactics a long time ago, but you get the general idea. You can do it for other things like Ezinearticles which has a “Most Viewed Article” section that then gets crawled quite frequently for Google.

However I am not going to cover any of that. What I will cover is how to use the pingmode to get backlinks. These backlinks are dofollow, but they don’t have anchor text. Are they useful? Will they get you rankings? Honestly, I have no idea. The only way you will ever know is if you try it out yourself.

This method is the same thing that the old tool “PR Storm” used to use (Find it in google, Old old product). What it does is send a web request to the server several hundred times. In those requests, it sets your website as the referrer. From there you make it onto the “top referrers” list of most web statistics software. Such as AWStats. On some webhosts, these stats are available to the public, and are crawled by google.

For example, Check out this page : http://www.bornsworld.com/logs/usage_201003.html

Scroll down to the referrers list and you will see that there are backlinks to people who sent them visits. Generally these are other people like you using the same tactics. And often the websites are actually dead anyway so the owner doesn’t even realise what is happening (If he even checks his AWStats at all).

I hope you are following me up to this point. Basically we already know that we have to ping these websites over and over to get some easy backlinks, but how do we find them all? Well that is where a little bit of smart thinking, and the scrapebox harvester comes in.

The first thing to do is to type this : “inurl:usage_200803+html” into Google. What this does is it says, give me all the pages that have usage_200803.html in the URL. My page shows around 29k results which isn’t bad.

However we need to disect this query. The usage_200803 part is the most important. What this actually stands for is “usage for March 2008″. And it brings back all the stat pages that are for that month. This is actually fine, if the results are returned it means the website is still up, and chances are they still have the stats program running for this month. But there is a chance that they have turned off the stats generation in the time between, and so we could be pinging a site that no longer even shows the referrers. Another problem is that we want to see the average amount of pings we require to make it onto the stats page, more on that later.

So let’s try this query : “inurl:usage_201012+html”. Awesome, now we have a list of websites that are running the webstats program right now. But hold, on! There is a problem, some of these websites don’t link out. For example check out this : http://cafe.hhrf.org/webalizer/usage_201012.html

Scroll down to the referrer list and you will see it is just text not a link. Hmm…

This is actually easy to solve. Here, let me show you.We know that this page that we looked at earlier : http://www.bornsworld.com/logs/usage_201003.html does link out, and that this one http://cafe.hhrf.org/webalizer/usage_201012.html doesn’t. So how can we differentiate the two? Well the first thing I notice is that on the one that does link out, it has the words “Explain Statistic Terms” written along the top :

Ok so let’s try this again. Let’s use this query into Google instead of our other one. It is kinda the same, but adds in a small piece of text that we know is going to be on that page.

“Explain Statistic Terms” inurl:usage_201012+html

Woops. We only have 30 results, but hold on, if we roll this back a month to say, 201011, we get 50 results, and the domains don’t look that identical, there is probably a few duplicates but Scrapebox can sort that out.Now it may not sound like alot (Psh free backlinks), and to be fair, I have avoided letting loose my cash cow. But there is literally hundreds of web stats software, and hundreds of footprints you can use to find them, I have taken the step to explain my method of finding them, rather than just giving you the results.

Now one more thing before I let you go out there spamming, check how many pings you actually need to do. Usually I go for the average right in the middle (Usually a couple of hundred), and make sure you have about the same amount of proxies to go through (Scrapebox has a proxy harvester built in aswell).