Link Spam is Internet Cancer
Not for the frst time I find myself challenged by link spam. As link building guru Eric Ward puts it, “The frenzy for link building today must be like what I imagine the gold rush was like in the 1800’s.“
I’m bombarded daily by emails from link pedlars, some with good intentions, most selling crap, and it’s occurred to me that links are like a cancer devouring the Internet, clogging up the digital highways and corrupting the SERPs.
It was always going to be thus, as soon as Google announced a merit based search engine where merit is measured, for the most part, by being cited by other pages you’re on a hiding to nothing.
Most site owners now understand the value of links and are suspicious of link requests which only serves to feed the link spam industry, especially when Google continues to inadvertently reward sites that buy link spam.
For our part we are still flat refusing to play the game but I fear we are suffering financially because of it. Why would people pay us to try and secure real links when they can simply buy spammy links that work and virtually guarantee results.
Just like 95% of email is SPAM I wonder what percentage of websites are simply link farms and managed spam pages?
RIP the Internet.
TTFN
d
We had a client who previously used a seo firm for serps and they got nothing but spammy articles, most of which used incorrect anchor text and links to pages that had nothing to do with the article, and to top it all off a monthly link report of 150 links from nothing but link farms and spammy even hack attack websites.
We advised the client to drop them in their tracks and after much back and forth correspondence they ended up staying with them because the spam technique was paying off in first page ranking.
We even spoke with the seo firm and questioned their technique and methodology and their swore up and down their techniques were ethical.
All we can do is wait for the day the big G catches up and slams all sites sleeping and linking from link farms and then we will have out work cut out for us undoing all the harm these spam seo firms have done.
It is so confusing!!! What are we supposed to do! I read in some forums that link building is the most important thing to do, then on others it says that link building with the wrong sites will have you penalised by Google, and others even say that Google doesn’t penalise for links! Us newbies have no idea who to trust, who to listen to, who’s advice to act on, I wish Google would just bring out an official rule book and let us all have a free copy : )
As for Meta Tags, I won’t even go into that one, I’ve heard a million different things about meta-tagging and headers and description. We were at the top of Google for a long time, foolishly, I went in and played about with the meta-tags after reading some websites, we dropped to 4th place almost over night!
I think it is great that SEO companies are there to help, but the fee’s they charge prevent smaller companies from getting help, thus making the big companies bigger and the smaller companies smaller, slowly pushing them out of the market.
It’s only confusing if you keep looking for answers when you already know the answer in the hope that there’s a short cut.
Links to your pages should be from pages that are relevant. A diving school might link to a site that sells wet suits for example.
On the other subject, why did you mess with your site when it was already number 1!!??
d
Thanks. I wish I hadn\’t touched the meta tags, Although, I think we are back on top now??? It\’s strange, we are top in chrome but not IE or Firefox. I\’m still working on that one, It\’s like a black art understanding what engines do what. I am fighting hard to get links on other sites, it\’s going up slowly but surely.
Search results are not browser dependent. Are you by any chance logged into your Google account in Chrome? Search results when logged in are often different.
d
Great post can totally empathise with you, for those of us who make that extra effort to stick to \\\’ethical SEO techniques\\\’ it is difficult. Google continues to allow pages of content full of spammy links to rank highly in the UK.
I\\\’m hoping the new Google search engine is the answer (www2.sandbox.google.com)
, it certainly seems to put more emphasis on quality content.
All the Best
I totally agree with the above comments, google really need to get their s..t together. Content should be king but somehow that isnt the case…any fool with a few blackhat tools can outrank the best content sites…things need to change and soon…
Good post and right to the heart of the matter. Had a conversation the other day with a friend about his website. His new SEO ‘professional’ was guaranteeing results if his techniques were used.
Nearly fell off my chair when my friend told me that these techniques included things like cloaked keyword stuffing using hidden text!
Please don’t tell me we’re reverting that far back?!
Google are impossible to deal with, I asked them a few questions through our google adwords centre, they wouldn’t give anything away at all!
I noticed that you get ranked higher if you have a webpage like http://www.guitarlessonsedinburgh.org/guitarlessonsedinburgh/edinburghguitarlessons.html (This is just an example link) but surely this isn’t fair?
The problem we have is that we teach more than one instrument, the others teach only guitar, so when people search for guitar lessons edinburgh, we don’t come up first because our site has more than just guitar, it is so frustrating!
When I search for Guitar Lessons in Edinburgh I find you at number one (your Polarflame site that is).
d
Is it? I notice google.co.uk and google.com have different result, neither appears to be top? I wish Google would release a book explaining their rules to us all!
Yes, different country specific versions of Joomla will show different results. Google do publish a ‘book’ about how to rank it’s just people choose to ignore it
d