Hello again! I’ve been restless and wanting to write this post for a very long time and I’m not going to be happy until its out. So get out your reading glasses, and I have it on good authority that every reader of this blog happens to be the kind of dirty old men that hang out and harass high school chicks at gas stations so don’t tell me you don’t have a pair. Get ‘em out and let’s begin….

Alrighty

Let’s discuss the SEO Empire Part 1 post.

The post covered a ton of information very quickly and talked about a lot of different types of example sites for each level. But the million dollar question remains; Why the structure? Why not just stick with the proven practice of, if you throw enough mud at the wall eventually something will stick? Why not just build site after site until something makes you money? After all, that is how most Internet marketers have made it. Well the answer comes from history.

Gray Hat SEO. Gray Hat SEO. Gray Hat SEO. I’m not keyword stuffing, I’m thinking. If gray hat is so widely accepted as a popular tactic than why are there no good articles on what it is and how to do it? Maybe, and this is just one theory, its fuckin’ impossible to write about. It’s just too damn much of a gray area in the industry (pun intended). Well, we’ll see about that.

Well I hope everyone had a great thanksgiving. I love them turkey birds! I love them stuffed. I love them covered in gravy. I love the little gobbling noises they make.

Back to business. By now you should have at least a decent understand of what scraping is and how to use it. We just need to continue on to the next most obvious step, crawling. A crawler is a script that simply makes a list of all the pages on a site you would like to scrape. Creating a decent and versatile crawler is of the utmost importance. A good crawler will be not only thorough but will weed out a lot of the bullshit big sites tend to have. There are many different methods to crawling a site. It really is only limited to your imagination. The one I’m going to cover in this post isn’t the most efficient but it is very simple to understand and thorough.

In the spirit of releasing part four of my Wikipedia Links series we’re going to spend a couple posts delving into good ol’ black hat. Starting with of course; scraping. I’ve been getting a few questions lately about scraping and how to do it. So I might as well get it all out of the way, explain the whole damn thing, and maybe someone will hear something they can use. Lets start at the beginning.