• (the usual) take a high %  (or even 100%) of unique WITHOUT any referrer data (that also are not a bot)
• Make a “bookmark this” link, but make the bookmarked url something like “http://example.com/?camefrom=bookmark”. Then just do something like

• if ($_GET['camefrom'] == “bookmark”)
  {
  // +1 to your stats thing counting bookmarks (database? etc)
  }

If you want to make sure they (probably) don’t remove your profile, make it look as crap as you can. Search for myspace layouts, put everything, glitter graphics, songs, the works. Upload a picture of an attractive girl, get a few friends, get some comments etc.

Now you have a few methods to make some money:

• Use the groups thing to make a group in your niche. Collect people who have a similar interest to what you are promoting/selling into a group. Use their search function to find people. Only bother adding people who are actually interested or at least your target market in/for your product.
• Get lots and lots of friends. Use auto adders (Google for them, most you have to pay for). Don’t do too many at once. If I were you, I would set up 5-10 accounts now, occasionally login add 5-10 people. After a couple of months after it looks like you’re a regular user (not a spammer) then start mass adding. Don’t do too many, they do remove profiles that spam friend requests. Once you have all these friends, then send bullitens or send messages/comments saying something such as “Hey, talk to me on here”, here being a webcam site such as IMLive (affiliated link, through their company Pussy Cash. You can even get around $2 per free sign up there – it is easy money) etc.
• Leave lots of comments with affiliated links. Ringtones etc. Make it seem you are not a spammer.

A good way to get people who are interested in your product, is to do a google search like site:myspace.com “your keyword”

You can also get a load of backlinks, by spamming links on comments.

Let me know in the comments for your thoughts etc on spamming myspace.

If you want to do a cron job, but don’t want that email giving you the result, such as for example when doing a wget command, do this:

wget –quiet –output-document output_filename http://www.urltoget.com/

It will still email you with errors, so if you want it to never email you, add this:

>/dev/null 2>&1

to the end of it.

What is robots.txt

I’ll let Wikipedia explain:

The robots exclusion standard or robots.txt protocol is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website. The information specifying the parts that should not be accessed is specified in a file called robots.txt in the top-level directory of the website.

It is normally just found in your root directory, for example http://domain.com/robots.txt. Most robots will read it – some of the spammy robots or nasty ones won’t, and there isn’t much you can do about it (not related to robots.txt, anyway). You could use a htaccess or a script to block nasty bots, but that isn’t for this article.

How to block all robots from all of your pages

This is quite simple, however at this basic level I doubt you would want to use it much

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: * includes all user agents (* is a wildcard – standing for anything, any length). There are many pages on the internet which will help you, such as this one with a massive list of user agents.

User agent info:
Some common search engine user agents that you may be interested in are as follows:

• Main web search (some also image search):

• Google: googlebot
• MSN: msnbot
• Yahoo: yahoo-slurp
• Ask: teoma
• Alexa: ia_archiver

• Google: googlebot-image
• MSN Pic search: psbot

So if you wanted to block just Alexa from all directories, you would use:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

How to block a certain directory (or more than one) using robots.txt

This isn’t very different to the previous example. This will block all user agents to /private/ and /cgi-bin/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /private/

Comments in robots.txt

Comments in robots.txt are simply written after a “#” sign, for example:

User-agent: * #this is a comment here
# another comment
#
# another one! robots.txt is so much fun…
Disallow: /temp/

Other things to add to robots.txt

There has been a Extended Standard for Robot Exclusion proposed, adding features such as request rate (# of requests per # of seconds) and visit time (time that the bot should visit, such as 0400-0800). Some bots will follow it, but you can’t count on it (at the moment, anyway) being too handy. Here is a basic example of it in action.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /temp/
Request-rate: 1/3
Visit-time: 0400-0800

Further Reading/Related Links

• Robots.txt Generator – a neat robots.txt generator
• Robots.txt blog on Webmaster world. Making very good use of its comments feature…

•  Keyword Stuffing - don’t put the same keyword again and again and again…and again. It is very easy for search engines to spot automatically, and even easier for an employee of theirs to spot
• Invisible text - again very easy to spot by search engines (how hard is it to see if the background is #FFFFFF and the text colour is also #FFFFFF (or even something like #FDFDFD…). Don’t do it.
• Doorway or fake pages – sometimes these are harder to automatically detect, but you will still get caught.

I am not in any way just discouraging all of black hat seo – some can work (for a while, at least…) and if you are lucky you may not get banned or removed from Google/Yahoo/MSN/other search engines. But just don’t be stupid if you are going to do black hat seo.

• Underlining words in forum posts, then making links. EG they make a whole post underlined, and add in links, so you can’t see that they are links (unless your mouse goes over one of the anchored words), and the post won’t get deleted as the admins will just think it is a legitimate post with some fancy formatting
• Hacking sites and redirecting them – this can take the form of hacking the htaccess to make all pages go to the spammer’s website, or just editing some pages (javascript redirects, meta redirects or script redirects (such as php’s header() function))
• Of course the javascript redirects. Search engines ignore javascript (generally) so the seo’er will make a keyword rich page/site that gets to the top of search engines and either redirects (via javascript) it to a business page (where they can’t put keywords on for whatever reason) or some affiliate link
• Referral specific redirects – similar to above, but only if the referer is a search engine. This will normally mean that (well they hope, anyway) search engine crawlers don’t notice the redirect. This can be done using htaccess.
• Referrer spam - yup more to do with the referrer. This time they hope that the website somewhere either shows its statistics or shows the referers with most hits in. Then of course they get their precious link to their site.
• Trackback spam – blogging software often has some form of trackback or pingback. Some software will imitate trackbacks so that blog posts have a “trackback link” at the bottom of the pages. This isn’t so common now thanks to the rel=nofollow.
• Auto generated content – Some people use scripts to make hundreds of pages (all with links to whatever they are trying to promote) of garbage. But its garbage that might get through search engines filters to make sure only “real” pages get indexed and also might show up in some searches for a bit off topic searches
• Mirroring Sites - some people will mirror sites with a lot of content, on a different domain, hoping the search engines will put them higher than the real site. They will often use lots of on site optimisation such as putting keywords in the url, bold keywords for the article etc
• Lots of subdomains all pointing to one site - It isn’t used quite so much any more but is still used. Search engines see these as spam most times.
• XSS - Cross Site Scripting – using exploits in high pr/high traffic sites to add a link to the spammers site. For example, some site searches will display “No Results found for [query]“. So if you searched for the html code for a link to your site, you would get a link back to your site. Geddit? And then they just add a link to that search query (assuming it uses a “get” method) to get it indexed by the search engines.

There are many, many more methods but they are just a few from the top of my head.