Black Hat Technique for Generating Hundreds of Comments Almost Instantaneously

What’s the first thing you check when visiting a new blog?

Click on me to Tweet this post

I’m betting it’s the number of comments.

Do you actually read any of the comments?

I didn’t think so.

In this article, I will show you how to trick-out your post with hundreds of human-generated, relevant comments almost instantaneously.

This is a black hat hacking technique if I’ve ever seen one.

I showcase it here NOT to encourage you to do it because it’s unethical to put it mildly.

Instead, my hope is that:

You will place less stock into the quality of the post based on comments alone
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You will be less susceptible to Internet Marketing trickery when you see it.

Let’s get to it, shall we.

I stumbled across this Ninja technique whilst testing a funky and otherwise useful plugin called Genki.

Genki is used to bring your own comments into WordPress.

Here is some background on what Genki is actually designed to do.

If Genki WordPress Plugin was a cartoon I think it would look like this. Oh...and btw...you can click on Genki to post him on Fcaebook.

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Typical Setup

Online videos are usually hosted (uploaded to) on YouTube. Most bloggers however, prefer to “embed” their videos on their own websites.

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, so chances of your video being seen on YouTube (assuming you tagged it properly) are quite high.

If the video is informative, entertaining or useful in some way, chances are people will leave a comment. The problem?

Now you have one set of comments on your own blog and another set on YouTube.

If only there was a way to bring those YouTube comments into your own blog. Well, there is.

Genki to the rescue.

I will show you how to setup Genki in a moment, but for now I want to fast forward to the results.

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Since the nature of Social Media is open, and Genki relies on the YouTube-issued Unique ID (visible in the URL) to pull the comments, you can grab ANYONE’S ID and bring ANYONE’S comments into YOUR post.

What’s more, in order to do this, you don’t actually have to embed the video itself.

Furthermore, you can pull the comments from multiple videos into the same post.

You better Buzz this post before it's too late :-p

But Dino, you’re probably saying. The comments will have nothing to do with the article on my blog.

Not necessarily.

YouTube is a 2nd largest search engine. Remember?

Simply search for videos that match the subject of the article, and BA-GOOSH!!

Here’s a step by step for those of us who need things spelled out

When everything is said and done your post’s Custom Field should look something like slide 5.

Congratulations!!! You just generated a whole mess of comments.

You can either wait for Genki to update on it’s own or go back to Settings to run a manual Genki-YouTube update (see slide 3).

Here is what my post looked like after I “published” it. Notice ZERO comments.

And his is what the post looked like AFTER the update. Notice 189 comments (kinda blurry in the beginning but really obvious once I start scrawling down)

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There they are.  189 comments that were not there before.

Since I don’t actually recommend anyone do this (I was just testing to see if it can be done on an offline sandbox) I don’t really care if you encounter problems with this.

Having said that, there are few issues I did encounter and this is how I got around them.

I had to set up multiple Custom Fields/YouTubeID combinations. Even tho the selected YouTube had hundreds of comments, Genki seams to be importing only about 20-30 comments per video. 

I don’t know if this is Genki throttling the updates or YouTube being stingy. But setting up multiple youtubevidid values circumvents this issue. 

If Genki is used in the manner in which it was intended this wouldn’t be an issue since all comments ARE eventually imported.
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While the comments are human-generated, they all get the same Gravatar in the comments section. This looks extremely suspect and it might be a way to tell that something is queer. 

I imagine someone smarter than me could come up with a way to randomize Gravatar pictures, but I don’t care about this shit that much to actually bother with it; and neither should you.

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This was a classic “I wonder if it could be done” type of exploration into the world of WordPress Ninjas. I hope you enjoyed it.

What’s the coolest Super-Secret Ninja trick you’ve come across?

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Human Generated Related Posts:

Genki Home Base