There is always discussion about whether free hosts and free hosted blogs are worth ones time, and there always has been such discussion. I understand why people say they are not worth it, but I think most of it comes from prior experience (or inexperience) with shitty ones. Without getting into the plusses of such places, I'd like to tell a little story.
Since most of the stuff I'm about to mention is past, and no longer works nor is given weight like it used to, I thought I would share a little story about how I made a small fortune off free blog services. By small fortune I dont mean enough to eat out nice a couple times, I mean enough to buy a house or two.
It all started about 4 years ago when I had discovered a cool backdoor into yahoo via myyahoo and rss feeds (which I found the day they started allowing them) and that backdoor lead me into a job or internship with what I thought of then, and still today, the Adult Industries Best Seo. During my 6-8 months of mindblowing revelations, while surfing yahoo, and dmoz, for more information on blogs and rss and how it could all work with real, old school webmastery and search engine manipulation, I stumbled upon a 404, that eventually meant more to me then any live webpage.
Here's what happened. I clicked a link in dmoz directory that lead me to a blogspot site, that had been deleted. It was a pr5 with about 2300 backlinks, and well basically, a total fucking shock to see it there empty. So I logged into my blogger, and almost shaking, created the same blog. Blog created successfully.
By the end of the night, actually 6 am the next morning, I had a list of about 40-50 pr 5 blogs, maybe 100-200 pr4s and so many page rank 3 that I stopped looking. When I told the man I was working for that day he said "you've just found a gold mine John".
Within weeks I was approaching the 3000-3200 area of total pagerank. I didnt spam porn pictures or movies on any of the blogs but instead used their link power to brute force links up to first page in google,such as my referal links for big terms. There is a post on this very board about if there is a "trick" to ranking TCG Hosted galleries with blogspot, cause someone stumbled upon my links. Anyone in the squirting niche will remember in google, my referal link as number one for 2 years, until any url with wm_refer=jdoughs in it was banned from google. (sigh)
Blogger changed their entire 404 system the first time, and while it never effected how I found them, the second time they edited the system effected how which were deleted and such. In the early days nobody in the world was picking these blogs up, and nobody thought anything about it, there was so many sites with backlinks that it literally was sickening. I was nearing about 600 sales a month (new joins not counting recurs) from "free blogs" that everyone and their brother advised to stay away from, and nobody else seemed to realise they were even there. Of course that didnt take long to change, and you will be hard pressed to find any with PR at any of the sites. There is people reading this thread who have spidering bots they search with, good luck
I still hold many of the links from them blogs, most are deleted now, caught in the eventual doom of deletion by mods once found. It has taken about 4 years for the traffic and sales from the links to completely die. But to this day I get new joins from those old links.
Long story short here I guess is that there is value in everything, you just need the right wisdom, timing and experience to take advantage of that value. While it may seem silly or trivial to one, it is almost certainly someones moneytrain. You just may not see it.
I still to this day use free blog services to incorporate extra link power into my network, that yes, was built by a whole lot of free blogs. While some of the other blog networks have turned the focus to mainstream they can still be used to pursue those avenues, and adult free hosts like thumblogger are certainly viable replacements as hardcore "superdomains" that allow you to actually link to yourself. Lots to be said for that. A couple housefull's worth of reasons I can think of.
Since most of the stuff I'm about to mention is past, and no longer works nor is given weight like it used to, I thought I would share a little story about how I made a small fortune off free blog services. By small fortune I dont mean enough to eat out nice a couple times, I mean enough to buy a house or two.
It all started about 4 years ago when I had discovered a cool backdoor into yahoo via myyahoo and rss feeds (which I found the day they started allowing them) and that backdoor lead me into a job or internship with what I thought of then, and still today, the Adult Industries Best Seo. During my 6-8 months of mindblowing revelations, while surfing yahoo, and dmoz, for more information on blogs and rss and how it could all work with real, old school webmastery and search engine manipulation, I stumbled upon a 404, that eventually meant more to me then any live webpage.
Here's what happened. I clicked a link in dmoz directory that lead me to a blogspot site, that had been deleted. It was a pr5 with about 2300 backlinks, and well basically, a total fucking shock to see it there empty. So I logged into my blogger, and almost shaking, created the same blog. Blog created successfully.
By the end of the night, actually 6 am the next morning, I had a list of about 40-50 pr 5 blogs, maybe 100-200 pr4s and so many page rank 3 that I stopped looking. When I told the man I was working for that day he said "you've just found a gold mine John".
Within weeks I was approaching the 3000-3200 area of total pagerank. I didnt spam porn pictures or movies on any of the blogs but instead used their link power to brute force links up to first page in google,such as my referal links for big terms. There is a post on this very board about if there is a "trick" to ranking TCG Hosted galleries with blogspot, cause someone stumbled upon my links. Anyone in the squirting niche will remember in google, my referal link as number one for 2 years, until any url with wm_refer=jdoughs in it was banned from google. (sigh)
Blogger changed their entire 404 system the first time, and while it never effected how I found them, the second time they edited the system effected how which were deleted and such. In the early days nobody in the world was picking these blogs up, and nobody thought anything about it, there was so many sites with backlinks that it literally was sickening. I was nearing about 600 sales a month (new joins not counting recurs) from "free blogs" that everyone and their brother advised to stay away from, and nobody else seemed to realise they were even there. Of course that didnt take long to change, and you will be hard pressed to find any with PR at any of the sites. There is people reading this thread who have spidering bots they search with, good luck
I still hold many of the links from them blogs, most are deleted now, caught in the eventual doom of deletion by mods once found. It has taken about 4 years for the traffic and sales from the links to completely die. But to this day I get new joins from those old links.
Long story short here I guess is that there is value in everything, you just need the right wisdom, timing and experience to take advantage of that value. While it may seem silly or trivial to one, it is almost certainly someones moneytrain. You just may not see it.
I still to this day use free blog services to incorporate extra link power into my network, that yes, was built by a whole lot of free blogs. While some of the other blog networks have turned the focus to mainstream they can still be used to pursue those avenues, and adult free hosts like thumblogger are certainly viable replacements as hardcore "superdomains" that allow you to actually link to yourself. Lots to be said for that. A couple housefull's worth of reasons I can think of.
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