For those of you who aren’t familiar with Fantomaster (aka Ralph Tegtmeier), he specializes in IP delivery or cloaking and is considered to be an expert in this field. Ralph’s expertise also covers many facets of SEO, SEM, and SMO including social news and the big four: Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Propeller.
Ralph was nice enough to grant Squareoak an interview about these news sites to discuss his interpretation, use, and gaming tactics.
If you’d like a little background information on Ralph, Link Juicy posted a fantastic interview article about advanced link building back in August.
Interview beigns:
Ralph first I’d like to say thank you for taking the time to talk with us today.
I’d like to talk to you about how people game social news sites and more specifically tactics used with what the people call the big four. Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Propeller.
Let’s start with the small guy first…Propeller. I’ve been neglecting that site and it’s probably something I should be paying more attention to.
I don’t know why you’re saying small, it’s certainly not very small in terms of traffic, we get less traffic from other sites.
Do you get less traffic from Propeller than Reddit or StumbleUpon?
Well it really depends a bit on the kind of posting you promote of course. I mean, obviously with every social networking site you have the demographics to consider and we get plenty of stuff from StumbleUpon as well but not so much from Reddit, for example. It’s not just like any old post which hits the front page will actually generate equal amounts of traffic. People have to be genuinely interested in the post to click through. It’s not automatic. It terms of Propeller… OK, it used to be Netscape, then they shifted it over to Propeller, I think they only have 380,000 – 400,000 members roughly. But they do have paid editors, so the quality really is a lot better than it is with many of the other sites.
What would you say is the demographic for Propeller?
Well, I wouldn’t know for sure, all I can venture is an educated guess. Probably mid to high income, educated, probably college level and up.
I get the feeling that the Propeller audience is a bit older than the Digg audience.
Definitely, yes, that’s my impression as well. Plus, you can see this in terms of how they behave, how they react upon each other. Much politer. And there’s very little sinking going on in Propeller.
Sinking? What do you mean by that?
Negative votes.
Ah yes, ok.
Not that it really matters because it won’t impact your postings or ranking, unlike Digg. You can’t really sink a post to hell on Propeller beause it doesn’t really matter. And you don’t see a lot of it happening, actually. There’s obfviously some sinkbots around, but generally people will either not vote or vote positively.
So the content that you submit to Propeller would probably have to be more substantial than images or video…would you say it has to be something that’s more textual and researched?
Not necessarily, there’s quite a lot of articles promoting funny pictures or cartoons or even videos but what they are fairly tight about is that there’s a no-middleman rule. Like, if there’s a video on YouTube and you post this on your blog and post a link. Now if you try to promote this on Propeller the editors or moderators will probably switch that link to the YouTube video in the first place because they don’t want that middleman approach. Unless you have something substantial to say like if there’s a critique of that video, that’s fine. Nearly linking there just to get the traffic won’t work very well. I mean, there will always be a post that will slip through but as a rule they’ll enforce it pretty tightly.
As far as getting your stuff on the front page, you’d probably have a network of friends via email or IM that you ask to vote…
Well, Propeller actually offers you to inform your contacts or friends, but only five at a go to prevent spam. Which is a bit of a nuisance. For example if you have an account with four hundred to five hundred friends and you want to inform them all, it can take hours to do that. So that’s the way that you usually go about it, plus of course there’s always the odd clicks which can amount to quite a few that can even push you to the front page without proactively soliciting votes.
“The odd clicks”, what do you mean by that?
Just people passing by, liking your article. That’s supposed to be what it’s about in the first place. Obviously the social networks want you to interact with your friends but they don’t want you to game the system. On the other hand, if you push it to some extent, if you do it right it will usually snowball. Like Digg, just lower numbers.
And at what point does it snowball, does it depend on the category?
It does seem to depend a lot on the category. Some categories don’t get a lot of votes or many of the postings there don’t get a lot of votes, so it’s fairly easy to push them to the front page from there. Other categories are very well trafficked or very well posted to so you need considerably more votes to raise your article to the front page.
So is there any way to get around sending out a shout to five friends at a time or instant messaging people or emailing people, is there any way to influence the post outside of the site or beyond the normal intrasite interaction?
If you know those people’s email addresses or whatever, then of course you can do it off the Propeller site, that’s one thing. It’s basically a syndicate game, where you actually sign up with your own accounts or forge an alliance with other people and agree to push your respective votes or your respective articles and vote for them… Propeller just offers the five at a pop thing. When you post an article it’s not that you can’t inform hundreds of friends, it’s just that per job it will only be five. You can only inform five people about any given article per alert.
So does it make sense to max out the number of friends you have on Propeller?
Well, as friends go – I mean, some will be more active, some will be more responsive, some will be mere leeches, some will only hit the site every other week. What’s fairly critical is the fact that you have about a 24 hour time window with Propeller and within that time it either makes the front page or it drops out and won’t return.
So it’s pretty similar to Digg just a different demographic.
That’s right yeah, and obviously the Digg numbers are far higher, that’s true, but then Propeller is in my view better structured, though that may be an age thing.
So what’s your take on Reddit?
I won’t bash it but I find it very confusing.
It’s really quirky isn’t it?
Yeah, it’s ugly as hell. Apparently it’s very biased, I mean so is Digg of course, but they’re very biased politically, whereas you’ll find a wider range of political opinions on Propeller if you’re looking for that kind of thing in the first place. Reddit’s fairly easy to game, to put the black hat touch to it. On a personal level, as a private surfer I wouldn’t want to use it because it’s just a hodge podge of everything cropping up with hardly any order to it. But I know many people who are really happy with Reddit because lots of them actually have genuine friends there and loads of contacts, so that’s fine for them, I guess. Personally I’m not such a social network and forum guy anyway, so… Reddit doesn’t really make it easy for you.
Yeah unfortunately my Reddit account is completely screwed up I think I’m banned at this point…
Well, you can set up a new one.
I know, I can do that but won’t it register both user accounts under one IP address?
Well, you’ll have to use a different email account and you’d be well advised to use a different IP. Digg is very strong on IP checking. With Reddit I’m not so sure. I haven’t done such a lot of it there to find out the hard way, but as a general rule for any of these social networks, at least at some point they’ll probably checkout your IP too, if only to avoid double and multiple votings.
Luckily I live in Brooklyn, New York so there’s plenty of café’s around here with wi-fi access so I tend to go over there and…
It’s not illegal yet, is it?
No not at all.
It is in the UK now.
Really?
Yeah, they’re actually putting people in prison for that if they catch them. They’re basically stealing people’s bandwidth.
Well here they offer it for free. It’s a draw to get people to come to the café. The unfortunate thing is if someone else goes to the café with a Reddit account and does the same thing then it’s going to look suspicious.
That is always an issue, so if you really want to do this seriously then you really ought to set up you own private net of proxy IPs, i.e. proxy servers.
Is that difficult to do?
Well, let’s put it this way: that’s system administrator level. So unless you know what you’re doing you’d better leave it to some geek who is really into system administration. Then it’s fairly straightforward but it does require a bit of expertise. Obviously you’ll have to have access to all those IPs in the first place. I mean, you can always use a free open proxy network but they’re highly unreliable and with some networks it actually won’t work that well. When they’re Ajax based and using fancy Javascript and stuff it doesn’t go well with all free or open proxies.
Yeah that’s something I’d probably leave to someone else…Then StumbleUpon of course. StumbleUpon from my perspective has been fantastic.
Yes, what I really like about StumbleUpon is the design. I’m not so fond of the toolbar but overall I think it’s a very, very cute and very well thought out and quite beautiful interface and we’re achieving very good results with that too.
It seems as simple as just asking your friends to Stumble whatever needs to be Stumbled.
Yeah, that’s right.
I had a couple friends submit something for me today and it received like 2,500 hits in less than six hours. You don’t really have to go through a lot when creating content you just throw it up and if people like it they’ll thumb it up and it just keeps on going from there.
Come to think of it, I hardly ever detected any spammy or shitty kind of posting on StumbleUpon. Quite a lot of people might be gaming it but they’re being very sensible about it, or they seem to be at least as far as I’ve seen, because I really don’t see a lot of trash there.
I mean how would you even game StumbleUpon?
Oh, there’s means and ways. (laughs)
Because it just seems like you would ask your friends to Stumble something and it just goes from there.
So you set up tons of accounts or you set up a voting network or reciprocal voting network or whatever. Actually it’s that easy because you don’t even have to hit the StumbleUpon site. If you have say several browser instances or several people or automation scripts, that will do it. It’s a piece of cake.
Do you think they pay attention to IP addresses?
Not as far as I’m aware of, not currently. But then I always slip this in as an added layer of protection because if they don’t do it today, they might well do it tomorrow.
Digg seems like it would be easy to get banned from.
They are very, very, very strong armed on spam. If they detect it they’re quite ruthless and they’re pretty savvy too, I’d say, because those people running Digg, they really know what they’re doing. That doesn’t mean that you can’t game it but you have to be bloody careful about it.
With Digg are there any tips & tricks besides asking your buddies to vote on your stuff or is there anything you should be wary of?
Well Digg is very, very strong on IP checking so they can be ruthless at weeding out spam very fast. This really holds true for all social networks, really spammy stuff doesn’t really make the mark or cut the mustard because people will usually find it. It will either be buried or weeded out. For example Propeller - with the admins there’s the facility to report stuff. So if it’s no content at all or some auto-gen stuff that doesn’t make any sense to read or whatever, it will get reported. There’s lots of that around but it also gets weeded out quite quickly. The question is, why would you want to do this, because gaming the social networks isn’t so much about traffic, it’s more about link love. That’s where it really gets interesting.
It seems like it’s more about traffic and links then it is about converting because it doesn’t seem like anything converts when you’re dealing with social news.
That’s my experience too and everybody else’s experience as well. (laughs)
I was talking to someone recently about this and I said I’d like to write something about how to help Digg traffic potentially convert and everyone said it just doesn’t happen, it’s not going to happen. It just doesn’t convert. The conversion lies in the residual effects of the traffic and the links. I submitted a piece of linkbait for a client recently and they received a total of about 100,000 hits in twenty-four hours and then the traffic fell and kind of petered out but then gradually because of all the links, all the keywords that we were tracking for that site they gradually went up and now their traffic is gradually going up.
It’s kind of a convoluted way of branding, you know. You make your site popular and you get lots of visits, some stuff will stick, people will return and put links to it and that’s where the real effect comes about. You don’t really get any immediate conversions as a rule.
With this last thing that I submitted, I took out any header, navigation, and footer, it was just the content. There were no hints of anything commercial or marketing going on there. It didn’t even have a Digg badge on it and it was just completely blank with the content. Then after we received the traffic and links, 2 days later we put the header, and the nav, and the footer back in there.
Yeah, that’s basically a bait and switch tactic.
I mean the content was still there…
Sure it’s legit, it’s just that you did a page redesign on the fly. (laughs)
Yeah exactly and that seemed to work pretty well.
Yeah, that’s the way I would do it as well. Unfortunately, there’s lots of sites where you can’t do that gracefully. Especially if you’re working with big corporations and content management systems or something.
Yeah it’s kind of difficult sometimes where you’re dealing with bigger clients.
We have some clients in the fortune 500 range and there’s no way they will…you know how these big corporations run, I mean every little trivial decision takes about a half a year. Then again they’re usually not worried about the conversions anyway, so that’s the upside.
They’re more about branding?
That’s right, yes. The branding and the link juice.
Ok to recap a bit…as far as checking for IP address, you know Digg does, StumbleUpon doesn’t, Reddit?
I’m not sure: There are conflicting signals so I can’t say for sure at the moment, but then again I don’t really care a lot because we run all these through our private proxies anyway, so we’re not really digging into this, pardon the pun, to actually find out 100% because it can actually take quite a while to get banned if you positively want to be.
So what you must do is have all those accounts in-house with the proxy server and just do it that way and just have people…
The other aspects to it, this is a mix, grey hat mainly. For example, you can throw up a ton of accounts if you know how to break captchas automatically, fine, but you’ll be well advised to make use of some names which are fairly plausible, not like xyz123 or something. You can throw in a few of those but in general those aren’t the kind of names people will use. Many social networks support avatars and some bio information like date of birth and your homepage or something like that, so it’s usually a lot better when you fill in some of this information. So that it doesn’t just look like a boilerplate generic account you’ve set up.
I’m sure they use this to help build community and to thwart spamming.
That’s right, and if you’re working with a community and your content is more or less auto generated then you have to be dead careful about voting patterns because they own the voting behavior data. So it’s easy for them to find out what’s above or below average. They detect patterns and footprints. So it has to really be done in a very intelligent manner, otherwise you’ll probably just lose accounts all the time which is no fun either. For example, some months ago there was a guy on Digital Point Forums who had a voting networking for Propeller, which was then still Netscape. So what he did was, he would guarantee a front page listing, else money back. So we thought we’d give it a try even though it’s not the kind of traffic that we needed for the fantomNews blog, but you know, just to give it a try. And it worked like a song! You see, six hours after he had started we were right up on the front page. fantomNews is banned now, banned from Propeller because of “member complaints about us using a voting network”. which is true - we did! Apparently his whole network was called out and this was the only time we did this, but this is also when we really became interested in how to do it. Maybe we’ll ask for reinclusion sometime.
None of this stuff is illegal now but do you think in the future that networks will be able to fine people or press charges for spamming the network or compromising the integrity their systems?
Well it has happened to some extent with MySpace hasn’t it? I’m not sure that they’d ever be able to press criminal charges but civil charges in terms of bandwidth wastage, damages incurred, you know, that kind of thing that can be very hairy and obviously it depends on which jurisdiction you’re operating in. I mean, if you’re working in Russia, which American network will actually want to sue you? Better forget it. I don’t think that will become too much of a problem.
Ralph this has been great, very informative. I want to thank you for taking the time to talk with us about the major social news networks.
My pleasure. Thanks for calling.
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