How Spammers Host Blogs

Spam operations are never commendable, but you have to admit that the technical skill involved is pretty impressive.

Spammers can control tens of thousands of sites and domains, countless servers and dozens of advertising accounts from automated control panels.

What can we learn from the way spammers work?

The Shotgun Approach

Let’s look at the basics first.

Many spammers don’t centralise their efforts. Instead, they host a number of blogs on free or cheap web hosting accounts.

Most shared hosting providers will allow the spammers to host unlimited domains for a few dollars per month. Also, he servers are almost always located in the US or EU, making them speedy.

Spam accounts are shut down routinely, but each closure only hits a small part of the network.

This approach proves that it’s sometimes better to spread your hosting over several providers, providing you have the time to maintain them all.

The Centralized Approach

Some spammers do the opposite. They find a tolerant host and purchase high-end hosting, such as dedicated server hosting.

A single successful closure can mean the death of a large portion of a network, or the entire network. But getting the host to act is the tough part.

These accounts are often hosted in more obscure locations, so hosting is slower and the content generally less trusted by the search engines.

This approach proves that a centralised host can improve reliability if you trust the host completely. It also usually costs a lot more.

Learning From Spammers

Whatever you think of spammers, they know SEO and hosting inside out.

While we don’t need to respect them, we can certainly pick up on some of their best tricks and tips.