This trend has been around for a few years now but in the post-Panda days it has gone rampant. It has never been that easy to create a page on an authority domain and make it rank.
I am not talking about the classic parasite hosting where a spammer creates a profile page on an authority forum and put viagra links on it. I guess Google has improved a lot on these. I am talking about all the big marketplaces, notably Amazon and eBay, who will gladly publish your product page for a fee. A different kind of parasite hosting, with the difference that your parasite page is welcomed, and you can proudly show it to your customers without being embarrassed.
And you can still rank it #1 easily, if you follow the spam ranking guide below. The spam ranking "guide" is more of a rant, than a guide. But it exemplifies the problem well, and most important and disgusting is that it works like a charm.
It is written with AMZN in mind, but a similar version for eBay (and others) can easily be crafted. Trivial steps are omitted.
1. Sign up for an Amazon Merchant account
2. Pick up a product/category you want to sell. This one demands a thought. While you can rank high with any product, if you want to be #1 you need to pick a product that will be linked closer to the root node in the internal Amazon's link graph. The problem (or a good thing, depends on your perspective) is that it is not too difficult to accomplish and many spammers have figured that out. To get an idea look at the list of categories, brands, and all the navigational menus. That's where you want to be. Some ideas out of many
-- Define a new category (if you can justify it and get AMZN approval, great)
-- Define a new "brand" of a product, e.g "My Spammy Brand"
-- Pick a product of the brands that sells well (so that AMZN will list it above other brands), but has a few products listed
-- Get out of the typical price range for this kind of products, or position yourself in the price range with the least supply
-- ETC, ETC, ETC
3. Now when you picked the Product you go and find 3 suckers
-- Sucker A: the one who has the best description of the Product and the best related content. Steal his content and use it as a product description. Do not bother with something unique. This sucker with all his unique content will be very soon outranked by you and gone into oblivion.
-- Sucker B: the one who has the best images of the Product. Yeah, you got my point.
-- Sucker C: the one who is selling the Product and offers the best customer experience. More about using Sucker C later.
4. Find a supplier of the Product who can dropship for you. At this point any supplier will do. Any chinese supplier with zero customer support will do for now.
5. Publish the product.
6. Buy your own Product few times, go to ****.com and buy a few fake amazon customer reviews. Do it once in a while.
7. Get few links. Forget about quality, you are wasting your time. Spam few forums, spam few guestbooks. Mega spam software like xrumer may be useful (not sure) but is an overkill. Many examples that I see just do some minimal forum spamming and that's enough.
8. After your rankings soar within a few weeks, you go to Sucker C and show him that your Amazon page outranks him in Google and getting a lot of traffic. Tell him if he is willing to dropship for you and discount xx%, you will let your lousy supplier go, and use him, the Sucker C, to fulfill your orders.
9. After Sucker C starts fulfilling your orders you'll need less fake reviews and will get more real reviews. Reduce your fake reviews buying over time.
10. The cash starts flowing in. Relax and have a good laugh at Suckers A, B and C.
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Obviously, this is written out of frustration, as I have been watching my pages being displaced one-by-one by Amazon pages artificially promoted by spammers. Not that Amazon pages need much promotion, they can outrank you even without any! But spammers exploiting amazon are the reason my fall will continue. I am very pessimistic at this point. More and more of my products will lose rankings to be replaced by amazon pages SEO'ed by a few spammy forum signatures.
