Using Google Alerts can notify you of the blog used to post your article. From there you can search the other blogs in the network.

Yep, if the content is not nicely diversified/spun – this is possible. Because if the content is seriously spun – it will not work at all.

Plus, this will help you to see the maximum of 30-40 blogs from thousands.

Plus, not publications will be indexed quickly, which will make the whole process a lot fussier. Because meanwhile you wait for the indexation of all 30 or 40 publications, a lot can change and the time gap here can be serious.

And in the example of this footprint you do a search of one sentence – 2 seconds – and you have it all.

You talk about this footprint on the other network, it being 1 test post per blog. But almost every post you produce also has a footprint – the link back to freetrafficsystem.com. Would it not be easy, if search engines so decided, to just ignore every blog post in which there was a link to freetrafficsystem.com?

Great comment, thanks for rising an important topic. I agree – this is just 1 test post – but on ALL blogs. No brainer to crack the network.

And very nice of pointing out the issue with the 3rd link being added to the posts of FREE users. This 3rd link is usually the link of the affiliates and they have nothing to do with FTS, they are promoting their sites.

So, this 3rd link can be:

- the link of your direct affiliate (and your affiliate can have plenty of URLs)
OR
- the link of the affiliate of your affiliate (and the affiliate of your affiliate also can have plenty of URLs)
OR
- in case none of the affiliates in the upline is getting the backlink – we put a link of ours (absolutely not necessarily to FreeTrafficSystem.com, it all depends upon category and other stuff)
OR
- no link at all (for PRO members)

So, as you can see, this issue is seriously diversified. Of course if we put FTS backlink to each and every post, that would be a footprint, and quite an easy one. But in this scheme our links can be less then 1% in all the links of the affiliates and affiliates of the affiliates. This is a very nice SEO disguise, because how can Google crack all OTHER sites (not added to FTS) that people are promoting with the help of this feature.

This is one of the reasons that we invented the giving away of backlinks to the affiliates in your upline (your direct affiliate or affiliate of your affiliate – each having unlimited number of URLs). First of all, it makes affiliates to be very enthusiastic about Free Traffic System, because PRO members will bring them money and FREE members – backlinks. Plus it hides any links that we put from the system into the pile of affiliate and affiliate of affiliate links.

Hi I have heard of this it it happens in at least two of the programs I know and they say it in there ads. I was just in a course that used ******** and they wrote in paragraphs eight paragraphs and just rotated the paragraphs and changed the titles. This was not the spin but they only used one article for all backlinking. I never did this because I had Free Traffic and Magic article rewriter. But I did make a mistake and got noticed by Google so now I have no sites rated by them.I do not know if this is a forever thing or what no one will answer my emails on this. I have built another site but it is not rated either. So for now I am thinking of changing that hosting or using another name. Not really sure but it was the first campaign I made sales on. I now only get the traffic from squidoos and hub pages. This has helped me learn their value because I get only about one hundred clicks but i get a seven % sales rate or more. Right now I am not sure what to do.

Everyone stop worrying about Footprints, get back to work , focus on article submissions to FreeTS and content on your websites. Get your blog backlinks, while few people know about it! Get your Links!

Hm. I am not sure which company you are a referring to but it is nice to know …..So does this footprint include the php webpage that a lot of companies use to produce more incoming links to your primary webpage. I guess it is safer to go the slow route of building links yourself like blogging, article marketing and spinning, forum posting, video posting etc etc

No, this is not a page from where you build backlinks. They simply send a test page which says something like “this is a test publication” “to read about this stuff – click here” “to read about that stuff – click there”. And this text is on all the blogs.

By this text you can easily find all the blogs in the Internet.

P.S. And surely you are right, diversification of link building strategies is a smart thing to do.

Thanks for this informative post. I just learned to be suspicious of strange link building schemes. So far I have not had any problems since I signed up with FTS and hopefully I won’t, this is my livelihood after all!

I am more than satisfied with the FTS service. However, I don’t rely just on it. Bad things always happen, and if Google decides to crack FTS down, it (Google) will surely find a way.

So, I wouldn’t worry about footprints, I would simply diversify the source of backlinks – article marketing, blog commenting, forum posting, directory submissions, stuff that always and still works!

Thumbs up on the diversification approach. This approach is smart in any business. In SEO as well.

Regardless of what you think you know, Google knows the footprints of your system, this ‘competitor’ and every other system out there. We’re all piggybacking their system. If you think you’re flying under their radar, you are sorely mistaken. I’ve used backlink services and marketing programs in the past and most of them even publish a list of sites and pages for Google to look at. Something about showing the inner workings so you aren’t a threat.

We don’t publish the lists of sites. And though I do not doubt that Google is definitely a huge trend setting player on this market, still I see no sense to give away the list of blogs just because we might look to be a threat to them. I think giving away this information “behind the backs” of our clients who trusted us – is fishy.

Wouldn’t people also delete the test post over time? No different than any other post.

I think they should delete, and this is part of my we started this discussion – to give a field for ideas. And I hope if they delete, this will do some good.

Though, it is possible that Google stores this info, and maybe – for a long time.

I’m really impressed by your statements. First of all, because I’m quite a neophyte of internet marketing and ICT as a whole, so I needed to read your whole publication twice before completely understanding what you were speaking about. Now I’ve understood your content and would like to express my opinion as follows:

- I was one of the members who asked you in the recent past why did you not publish the URLs of the blogs where we got our backlinks: your answer was so exhaustive that I immediately agreed with your choice. This, together with other arrangements, attitudes and statements by your side have persuaded me about your reliability;

Thanks for the kind words.

- to tell the truth, I can’t say the same about your competitors as a whole and am very scared that I could bump into this blog network (I’v just a very few other memberships, but who knows…?);

As far as I know, there are only few services who do that, others don’t run into that sort of troubles.

Plus, please don’t take it as a doomsday. Yes, this is not smart to give extra exposure to your networks and that is why we raised this discussion. And yes, there is a possibility it may have negative effect.

But this is not something that will definitely create problems for you. Simply, the sooner you learn about stuff like that, the better for your future SEO experience.

- how can we recognize it? Could you give us some more hints on how we can identify it and take steps in order to protect our hard work from such a possible disaster?

Based on this post I would give 2 rules.

- If they report direct URLs – this is already not very good, as one can easily harvest their base of blogs. Still, this is not a “OMG, we are doomed”, because one needs about 3-4 weeks to do zealotish submissions and harvest the stats.

- If they send testing post – this is much worse, because then catching the whole net of their blogs is super easy. This is not 3-4 weeks. This is about a few seconds maximum.

Nice One Dim,
I hope you included a little invite to all their blogs to come over to FTS for their content where you do things properly

You might not believe me, but I really did not use this chance.

You see, we have one thing that makes all this “hurry up for blogs” a lot easier for us – we reward people with more bonus backlinks for adding at least one blog to FTS.

This viral marketing strategy has proven to be a very nice tool to grow the network of our blogs. Thanks to this strategy now we do not need to be afraid of blog leakage (a big problem for lots of services right now), we don’t need to set any limits for our submitters making them to add blogs, etc.

It is good to know that FTS keep SEO safety in high priority.
But still it looks very fragile business in mercy of Google.

We can do as much as we can. Plus we will always disguise in the mediums and under the conditions where Google will have 2 ways – either debunk half of the sites in the world to stop FTS, or leave us alone.

And surely we try our best to leave the obvious footprints aside.

Well… I think that if anyone wanted to crack FTS, they could quite easily join FTS, publish several articles in each category, and follow the blogs where they are published. It is a little more difficult than pulling a simple search in google, but doable.

I agree, this is possible. And it is really a pleasure to see lots of enthusiastic minds reading this post (sorry for self flattery)

But if you do more calculations, then you will see that in practice it turns into big “catch me if you can” game. And on a certain stage of this game it starts to lose any sense.

(1) First of all, with one article you can cover only a portion of the blogs. Tiny little portion. So, it means you will need LOTS of articles. Not 20, not 50. But surely one can pay even for several hundred of articles and submit them to crack FTS.

Then comes the best part.

(2) It will take time for the articles to get published, then it will take time for the publications to get indexed (because publications quickly disappear from the home pages of blogs and search engines will need to find them deep in the blogs, on single post pages of these articles).

So, to see the publications indexed and in this way catch all the blogs for 1 article you will need 4-6-8 weeks. Sometimes even more. And now imagine you have to do that for several hundreds of articles. You lose much time.

(3) But ok, let’s say you did a huge job, spent months of time on articles and their checking. But during this time a lot has changed on the blogs. Some of them are no longer in FTS, tons of new blogs added. The map of blogs has seriously changed.

And you end up like “Heck, I did so much job, wasted SO MUCH TIME – and this is all that I’ve got?! I saw a spit in the ocean and during this time it all has changed!!”

So, once again. The strategy you suggest makes perfect sense and it is doable. But check it in practice and you will understand what I mean

Nice post.. This convinced me more about the services you provide. Thanks a lot to the freetrafficsystem.com team. From now on, keep on posting articles to the FTS. because backlinks still work well. Have a good day to all of you..

Does this mean what we are doing here is essentially ‘black hat’ SEO?.. something that google disapproves of and could penalize us for?

I can tell you that if you go to Google webmasters forum and tell that you are building backlinks to push your site XYZ – then don’t get surprised that big G will dislike site XYZ.

This is not exactly what you asked for, but this is a piece of advice about what not to do.

Think about it – how can Google adore anything that is related to pushing sites to page 1 in Google. The whole idea is contradictory to what Google wants. And Google wants SEO to be dead and push sites to page 1 only with the help of their AdWords program.

If Google loved SEO, we would not be talking about footprints at all.

That is why here it is important to stay under the radar. And we do that by using … article marketing. You submit your article and it gets published on the blogs. And for us the most important is to make sure that Google “sees” these blogs as natural blogs.

And this is where (together with the footprints) viral marketing has helped us.

As you know, we reward clients with more bonus backlinks for adding their blogs to FTS. Thanks to this unique viral feature we made sure that our network of blogs grows naturally and quickly. We do not need buying our own domains, setting up 100 subdomain blogs on these domains and add them to the system to “make it huge”.

Thanks to this viral marketing idea of giving more bonus backlinks our system grows naturally with:
- real blogs
- with different IPS
- with domain owners from all over the world
- with different versions of blogs
- with different structure of settings on these blogs

In other words, the most natural network of blogs.

And this “naturalness” + all possible precautions against the footprints make sure you build backlinks and stay happy.

Dont you think that your inclusion of a totally unrelated blog URL link at the end of the peoples blog posts is a big footprint also.

You provide a really nice service, I just don’t understand why you would allow the unrelated URL’s at end of posts that could ring a bell. And certainly is questionable to any actual reader of the article.

(1) Relevancy, the loveliest topic of mine

If Google is so cool about relevancy, then please check this screenshot
http://freetrafficsystem.com/photos/relevancy_paradox.jpg

… then “What the heck is Texas Education Agency site doing on position #1 for ‘tea’ search query in Google?”

I know why it is there. Because most likely people (when mentioning Texas Education Agency) are using abbreviation TEA in the anchor text of their backlinks. So, this site has gathered lots of backlinks with ‘tea’ as anchor text.

But, do you think that tea websites were giving them backlinks? I really doubt that

This is the best proof that Google cares about anchor text, number of backlinks and their quality. But – sorry – not the relevancy. If Google would care about the relevancy, I would never be able to make the screenshot that I am quoting.

(2) Why adding this 3rd backlink at all?

I know you were not asking this question, so please excuse me for using your comment like a platform for this issue, but it is important.

So, this 3rd backlink is a platform for the system grow. You – as affiliates – get your backlink added as 3rd backlink to the publications on the 1st and 2nd tier of your affiliate downline.

Yes, this backlink is not relevant. And we could introduce the mechanism of choosing some category for your affiliate link settings. But imagine that you need backlinks in fishing and Forex, and your downline has people who are submitting articles only about diets, weight loss, beauty and gardening. This means you will never get a backlink published, though you referred people into FTS and we promised that we will publish your affiliate backlinks as a reward.

So, we know that Google is pretty blind about relevancy (I gave you proof, and this is just one of MANY), we decided to add your 3rd/affiliate backlink to the publications.

Thanks to this strategy we have some folks who do not submit articles at all, they live on their 3rd/affiliate backlinks.

And thanks to this viral feature FTS from a “project from the basement” (without big mailing lists) grew up to one of the top project on this market. You can check our traffic and see that only few networks are on the same level with us. But if you check WHO is behind these networks, you will see that these are people who are GURUS for years and they have massive contacts and huge mailing lists – they did a great job over years to build their reputation. And we jumped out of nowhere, with a few viral marketing ideas (like rewarding affiliates for bringing even FREE members, even if they never upgrade to PRO).

Sorry for the long answer, but this is an important topic. This 3rd backlink is not a threat for SEO. But is a huge pipeline for getting backlinks from your “link building slaves” on 1st and 2nd tier of the downline in FTS.

Does this mean we should not promote FTS on our blogs etc? I mean why would we want to call attention to something if it further risks all of us? I guess im naive but whats the problem with submitting articles the way we do in free traffic system?

No problems with submitting articles. And this is exactly what this post is about.

What about in my google analytics where I can see visitors coming from freetrafficsystem.com? are you aware you can see this in analytics?

Most likely you are talking not about visitors, because we don’t send you any traffic, you are not our JVers – at least as far as I know

Perhaps you mean if your site is plugged to getting content (sent via XML RPC), then this can be reported in Analytics. Then we have several options:

Option #1 – don’t get content from FTS.

I mean, we don’t say that you have to plug your blogs, if you want to build backlinks to your blog. You can be building backlinks and push the blog A with the backlinks and have this blog with Analytics. And – for the bonus backlinks – plug blogs B, or C.

So, blog A will have no traffic from FreeTrafficSystem.com – no fears and hesitations.

Option #2 – get the lovely Analytics off your site.

I mean if you are playing the backlink game and want to get the “unfair advantage of pushing your site to page 1″ – then inviting Google to check everything on your site is not strategic.

Most likely in your case I would prefer option #1. Though we – for most of our sites – do not use Analytics. I do not want Google to have their two fingers into everything.

FTS,

I have been a long time user and I really appreciate the lengths that you go to keep getting us backlinks and to keep up us under the radar.

Now, back to work getting backlinks!

Thanks again,
~Jimmy Grippo~

I could have no idea of what I’m talking about here, but don’t blogs have to plug into the system. You would think that would be the biggest tip off of all. Every blog plugged into the freetrafficsystem would be associated with it.

Just my 2 cents

It is possible to do like you say, so that all bloggers review content before publishing – but then the submitters get screwed.

In all networks where the feature of content approval is in the hands of bloggers, you usually face astonishingly small number of submissions. Either because they don’t have time to review (but still have the blog on manual approval), or because they get many articles and are simply tired of the content.

And, of course, we are not talking about BS articles. But when an article with very important tip, very secretly hidden tip, not a typical blah-blah, with seriously spun title and content – gets 6 publications by the end of 2 weeks – this is hilarious.

That is why we need to balance here between the interests of the bloggers and the interests of submitters. We have moderators who review articles before the publications and lock the articles who choose irrelevant blogs. But we do not want to leave approval in the hands of bloggers, because then you – as submitters – will see that the publication numbers are very poor. And this is definitely not what you want in FTS.

Thanks to not giving the approval thing to the bloggers – right now FTS has one of the highest number of publications in the industry.

FTS,

I’ve been using FTS ever since you guys posted your WSO on the Warrior Forum. As you know, there are many so called “Gurus” promoting their Link Building solutions on the WF, but for my money and time, I’ve found that FTS delivers the quality links I need to get Social Media Marketing Plus ranked with Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Post like this with good intel on what NOT to do is very helpful – thanks!

I am learning some good stuff here.

I’ve just started and I am a tough sell after many years of so called “guru” tactics…and 20k in education costs.
I grew up though as of 2 years ago at the age of 52 and started studying from smart folks like whoever built this concept.

But I am now winning and yesterday I found this site and have done my due diligence.

I have joined and have your banners on my blogs now so I’m pumped to give this a go.

Genius idea.

I hope it’s as good as it sounds.

Thanks for the genius idea here.

GREAT article and you’re so right. Every time something happens, the market goes crazy with rumors.

Agreed with Neil, info like this that shares ‘what not do to’ and why are excellent. Thanks for sharing!

To be honest FTS is a little unique in its way of posting the articles with the time gap, the spinning, and of course the approval. In my opinion anyone who ever got penalized by search engines when using FTS just didn’t put enough work in in terms of spinning and so on. I wrote some apps for spinning, but in reality every article I submit is unique and you can beat the human eye, however I still continue to “tweak it” but at the momement I still find it quicker to type them by hand!

All in all FTS does a great job and although I should really make an effort to do 1 website at a time I have seen some of the benifits from using FTS

I like the way FTS lets you submit relevant content to relevant sites. Backlinks from relevant sites carry more weight than non-relevant sites.

I am also pleased with the content FTS has given my blgs, always on topic and relevant.

The blogs I have put into FTS have gotten PR1-2 just from the content from FTS. I have done nothing else to obtain PR.

Yea, FTS works!

Brian Ankner

Footprints plays major role when analyzing competition. I’m very happy to hear that you considered it from the designing stage of the system. Thanks for letting us know, it definitely increases my confidence in the system.

Thanks for taking the time to make sure the footprint is not found. I started using the free version and am pretty excited about it!

The footprint is the biggest risk in IM. In the past I have used different tools. And, there was always a discussion around “what type of footprint does this leave?” The developers went as far as allowing the user to obfuscate the folders. It’s pretty interesting this discussion.

I came to this page via an unrelated search string and had to write a comment, sorry.

Do you people ever stop to think? If a footprint was an issue, anyone would be able to wipe out the competition by flooding the internet with ‘footprinted’ links to the competition. No search engine will ever be so stupid to penalize a webmaster for things that CAN be out of his control.

Hello
You would think that the perfect blog network would distribute their articles to multiple blogs, but have those blog owners review and submit the content themselves.
Commenting On Other Blog Posts. Find posts which are relevant to your own blog and regularly post your comments. Every comment you leave counts as a backlink which will eventually be attributed to your blog. Also, as the page rank of the blogs you comment on increase, so will the page from your blog that links from these pages.