It doesn’t take long time of research to realize that the methods used for blog scams are actually repetitive.

The systems are more or less the same. Just that a product is just a slight improvement upon the predecessors. This is understandable, especially if you study what makes blog scams possible and what make them scams.

The facts that people are searching information online and many untapped keywords are available mean as publishers we could fill in the demand.

Legitimate blogs carefully write useful content so browsers find something useful.

Scams fill that needs by generating as much content as possible to satisfy the demand. Chances are it is impossible to rank on very competitive keywords, so they target all keywords. Hopefully some of them will rank quite high on search engines that search users will click.

The holes in search engines make the pages rank in result pages.

So, in short, we should see very similar models between one scam to another. Just that the tools need to be slightly different to process the source of content like search engine results, free article directories or affiliate merchant datafeeds.

With that said, here are some common blog scams techniques:

Blog content generation tools

• Auto RSS feeds to blog posting. Source one or more RSS feeds and post each entry as standalone content on the new spam blog (splog). Not only they add no value to existing content but often they fail to credit the source.
• Auto keyword stuffing content. Get content from random places, including search engine results and stuff keywords into the content if necessary before posting to the blog.
• Datafeed processing tool. Process important data from affiliate merchant’s datafeed and post them as content to the blog, complete with the affiliate links.
• Free article directories scraper. Search article directories for free articles related to the topic you want to post.
• Private label content spinner. Private label content is the cheap way to get huge amount of content. Rather than manually rewrite the content, the author could use the tool to spin paragraphs, words and bits of contents to make them unique.

Inbound link tools

• Blog and ping. Ping as much services as possible. Some of the services will index the pages, which in turn are followed by search engines. Others will let real users find the post when searching for information. However, these tools usually focus on the benefit of getting strong link popularity instead of real visitors because people detect fishy content relatively fast.
• Tag and ping. Use tagging such as Technorati tags, and auto submission to social bookmarking sites.
• Auto reciprocal link request. It is surprising that people are actually linking to splogs, but it happens especially between splogs to boost each other link popularity.
• Auto site submission tools. Submit to directories and also sites that allow adding links.
• Blog comment and trackback spamming. Automatically post blog comments that link back to the blog. Some of the comment spam get into the blogs, for each which doesn’t include the nofollow attribute, it is a boot for their link popularity.

Other tools

• Auto blog creation tool. Create hundreds, if not thousands of blogs automatically from one interface.
• Keyword research tool. While not exactly a scam, they are used by black hat publishers who make money from AdSense arbitrage method, but directing traffic to spam sites/splogs.

I am sure there are many tools either publicly sold or privately created by many sploggers, but the lists above are very common. Some of the old versions are available for free.

Blog and ping tools, for example are less effective nowadays because blog search engines are getting smarter, but they are available for free now.

Really, if you understand how these tools work and instead take the time to write your own content, network with other bloggers to gain links, post comments to other blogs, you are going to get some real exposure and build a legitimate blog. The laziness and automation part are what make them destructive for long term business.