Alright so I had this idea...let me give some background.

About a year ago, I stumbled upon an old forum system/CMS that was widely in use on .edu domains and .gov domains as well as .coms, you name it. Anyway, it's unprotected and mostly abandoned but they stem from OLD domains, the type that have been around a while. So I've spidered a database of several hundred thousand of these suckers. I know in the right hands, this is worth a mint, but to me it was just a fun exercise. What I want to do is release an app that posts to these things, totally free. The catch is that in order to have access to my massive and ever-growing database, they will have to pay up some subscription fee that I've yet to decide on. Now the technicals:

What I am doing is storing all the links RC4-encrypted. My program knows the password and it grabs the links and decrypts them as it's posting. It's multithreaded so it's fairly fast, only limited by the user's pipe. I am afraid of the user being able to figure things out by sniffing packets and watching my requests to the remote sites, because I plan on only listing the *domain* to where it's posting, not the exact link. That way I keep my secret sauce secret, and of course with enough work people could figure out the footprint and collect their own database of these things, but hey I stumbled on it while searching for the usual (buy viagra) so I figure if they are paying me for the database, it must not be worth their time to find them, program a tool to find them, whatever. I just want reasonable security for the app, as I know it would be nigh on impossible to make it 100% secure and still have it be functional.

Suggestions, thoughts?

if your server is the one that is going to do all the posting, why not just make the whole thing web based and never let them see anything at all.

mind you a totally closed system like that, where links are being posted to "somewhere" without being able to verify, is going to be a hard sell.

If your intent is to have a client side App, then your basically screwed since it can be sniffed. But again, if you are charging for database, not service, then why does it matter really? If they know the link, they will post themselves, but you are the one growing the database.

Good points NBs, and you're basically echoing my thoughts. I think the best solution is just to host the database and charge for that service. I'm sure people who are non-technical will see the value in hundreds of thousands of high quality links at their fingertips without having to do any work, and if there are techies who want to subscribe for a month so that they can find the footprint themselves and then exploit it for their own use, that's fine. Better they pay for a month than not at all right?

If they're so great and not already flooded with other spammers then why not just keep it to yourself. Surely using it solely for your own sites would make you more money than selling a monthly subscription..

q:  would it help to wrap the app in something like Flash or Flex?

I'm not a sniffer guy, so I'm not certain what's exposed in doing it this way, but I've often thought that would add an extra layer that someone will have to go through if they want to get at anything.

Told you vsloathe:
1) geek buys subscription
2) geek waits a week
3) geek searches for link:domain.com or "domain.com"
=> geek finds cms, end of business.

Yeah one thing you guys don't get is that I don't enjoy

SEO

 . Don't like it. I'd rather code and make money from it than code my own

SEO

  stuff and make money from

SEO

 . I spend a few days writing a program, I use it once then I never touch it again, that's the way I am.

Like I told you before though mrsdf, a geek wouldn't have given me money anyway, so at least he'd pay for it for a month and then cancel after he's figured out the footprint (which is REALLY hard btw, I gave about 50 of these links away and no one could help me find more).

My market here is people who like doing

SEO

  and are hard workers but don't code or can make a lot more money than they invest in the software. I don't care about the geeks and maybe it's arrogant of me, but I doubt anyone would be able to catch up with my collection of these links. Most of the pill pushers don't even have as many of these things found as I do, and in my experience those are the only guys who know about these things.

Ah well, I will experiment and see how it goes. Maybe I can just find a buyer straightout for the database. I have no use for it as I don't really need to linkspam anymore.

if you have hundreds of thousands of places to post, then and you limit a submission to say 20 random ones [or related]
then even if they find the links what can they do with it? unless they know how to write a spider / db combo to find and spider them all they cant do shit...tbh even though i could do that id probably pay because i cant be arsed lol

make it completely web based though so they cant sniff etc, make it as hard for anyone as poss to figure out how, and hey if it only works for 6 months then you may have made a few k, move on, good stuff, give it to me lol

Hey VS.  I'm kinda sorta interested in this.

Have you decided on a price?

Fanto thinks somewhere around 150$/mo is fair. I haven't decided yet, but to people I respect from Syndk8 like you, I'm sure there will be some sort of deal.

vsloathe, i think i have discovered just the forum cms you are talking about 

Oh fish when'd you get here? 

Welcome to The Cache taky.

/p

hahah, sorry i didnt have a chance to respond ive been coding a cronjob system based around it to promote my sites  . thanks for the welcome msg btw, hope to be posting alot where i can, still a

php

  beginner  .

I did similar. When I used to do

blackhat

 

SEO

 , I would add each site I was creating to a big database along with the keyword it thought that it could rank for (not its root keyword, depending on the number of serps, I had a sliding scale that would determine how many terms in the keyword that it thought it needed to rank). Twice a day, a cron job would run and get the rankings of the sites so that I could bring up my "control panel" and see how I was doing in the SERPs (grabbed from the big 3 all). Every 10 minutes, a cron job would randomly pick a site to spam for and its keyword and then spam a good 10-100 links for it. This looked fairly natural as links were added over time rather than all at once, and my sites grew naturally as people hit them for new terms (scraped content, user triggered). Generally I lasted in the SERPs for over a year.

Man, sometimes when I'm in a good mood, I give valuable shit away.

And that is the juice... the deal here, without giving away my own secret sauce, is that "natural" trumps "bulk" any and every day of the week. So if you can do "bulk natural" you're cookin' with gas...

me likes this thread. 

gah good advice, thanks.

im much too automated to go in and enter keywords and whatnot, i just let my stuff go by itself. im using this cms stuff along with automated bnp for each of my sites, just loops through exactly like you said, randomly promoting random sites.

lalala. the only thing i would see with doing what ya said is not varying the anchor texts, did you, or did you just set the anchor to the term you thought you could rank for?

I don't change up the anchor texts except to maybe rearrange the words.

I never said anything about manually picking keywords m8. Everything's done for me except feeding it a list of domains. Well, when I did this stuff that is.

i am setting up a similar system to the one you have described. i am getting tired of the grind of having to produce more and more sites just to keep my head above water. as opposed to creating sites that can stay in the index for months and months and just continue to grow and earn more and more.

now, if i could just break my addiction to .info's i think i might be more squarely on the path to success. 

Buy whatever domains are cheapest, my friend.

And the best hosting is free.

Chew on that for a while.