Linking Strategy

3 December 2009

Comment Spam

Posted by Mike van der Heijden

Photo by dok1 via Creative Commons

Being an avid link builder myself, I get frustrated by the hundreds of spam emails from people offering "Great Link Building Services" and finding out their methods include "commenting on dofollow" blogs.

Not that I read any of these emails, as 99% of them use the same software and 100% of the time they end up in my spam folder :)

The thing that has concerned me for a long time, and something that still makes no sense to me is the fact that webmasters of websites often hire these "link profile destroyers" to build a large quantity of links in an attempt to gain higher rankings. The only way to get a large quantity of these links is by spamming comment fields on blogs. Why? Because 99% of all blogs allow users (sometimes even anonymously) to comment and leave, their name and website address behind.

As you can see, this becomes very tempting to make a quick comment and leave your link without too much effort. As a result, many comments on blog posts are ridiculous (For examples check out Marc's rant about spam )or are generic no-value adding comments like "Thanks" or "Great post".

According to Google,

"..You are tarnishing other people's hard work and lowering the quality of the web, transforming a potentially good resource of additional information into a list of nonsense keywords."

I could not agree more, especially in the SEO industry where we often create blog posts for which we want to rank (or at least try to). When your perfectly crafted blog post is picked up by Google, and you start ranking for the keywords (isn't it a great feeling!) you know you did a great job.
Waking up the next morning to see your post suddenly having vanished from the index because these self-proclaimed link builders have polluted your comment section with so many spammy comments that now your most prominent keyword on the page is "Cheap Viagra".

Google has finally announced that they are able to determine the links that come from spam commenting and de-value these. In fact, you could possibly harm the quality of not just the site you are commenting on but also your own site.

Now, I see this as potentially opening the flood gates for people to see this as a measure of lowering the quality of their competitor's blogs/websites. Therefore, Google has come up with a couple of ways you could avoid this from happening.

You could:

• Disallow anonymous posting (People can still leave false information on your website, but at least it's better as the name of the poster appearing as "anonymous")

• Implement CAPTCHA checking when making comments

• Turn on comment moderation (So when someone comments on your blog, it has to go through an approval process)

• Use the "nofollow" attribute on links in the comment section

• Disallow link dropping in your comments

• Block comment pages out using your robots.txt or meta tags

Now, whenever you get another spammy comment on your precious blog, before you delete it, think about the person sitting behind his computer trying to come up with more ways to comment on as many blogs as possible and think about what a big waste of time it is... It is something that should bring a smirk to your face; I know it does for me!

Posted by Mike van der Heijden on 3 December 2009 at 1:05 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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12 November 2009

Promotional Links or Spam?

Posted by Grant Hilton

Photo by agjimenez via Creative Commons

To have a successful site, in terms of search engine optimisation, a site needs to rank in search engines for key products or services. As every man and his dog know, high quality links are needed from related sites and the best types of links are those anchor text links that contains your most important keyword/s. There are literally thousands of link building guides that comprehensively explain in gritty detail what others have considered to be the key to their success, whilst on the other hand, there are guides that have successfully prompted search engines to remove sites from the index because they have either linked to or been linked from a bad neighbourhood.

In terms of links, we all know what activities can attribute to spam; participating in link farms (communities of pages referencing each other), using hidden links, spam blogs or the practice of page hijacking. There is also the creation of multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other to generate traffic and links (doorway pages). It has got to the stage where everybody is very precious about who they link to and use PageRank as a guideline as whether a site is trusted or not.

So what about the links from a web development company stating in the footer of each site they have built "Web Development By [Company Name]" or "Web Design By [Company Name]"? The ethical question that comes out of using such links is whether these promote the work of the web development company or are purely a link building exercise?

This is a common practice amongst web development and web design firms and often results in hundreds of links from just one site. If you take into account multiple client sites that also have the link it can account for thousands of quality keyword anchor text links. It is clear that the use of a link in the footer is a good opportunity to promote the work of a web designer or web developer and theoretically it could bring more leads as the website is a testament to the quality of their work. However many would consider a link on every footer of the page of a website a bit excessive and even label it as an elaborate ploy to gain a large sum of text links containing important keywords. Is it not considered to be "spammy" having multiple links from the one website with the same anchor text (similar to links between domains with multiple doorway pages interlinking with each other)? Even if the anchor text was slightly modified differently for each page this would indicate that the links have been modified purely for SEO purposes rather than the promotion of their work.

One would think that Google would lower the value of multiple links from multiple pages in one domain but research (just do a search for "web development" in Google Australia) reveals that currently sites employing this tactic are being rewarded in rankings. According to Google Webmaster Help they consider a link scheme to be "Links intended to manipulate PageRank" and "Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")". Therefore according to Google's own definition, does "web design by ..." links not fit under this classification? So with that food for thought, what does the general SEO community think about this issue?

Posted by Grant Hilton on 12 November 2009 at 11:17 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)
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12 October 2009

The value of StumbleUpon

Posted by Marc Elison

Essentially the Bruce Clay Australia blog was started on the 1st of April (I do love the irony of starting a blog on April fool's day). Since then I have not only been the main contributor of the blog but have also been tasked with content syndication goals for the blog to increase the profile and publicity of the blog. I have experimented with RSS content syndication engines as well as the usual social bookmarking sites ( Digg, Sphinn, reddit etc) but by far the best referral in terms of sheer numbers, low bounce rate and average time on site is StumbleUpon.

Photo by topgold via Creative Commons

StumbleUpon is a social website which allows its users a new way to experience the Internet. Users list their preferences and likes and are randomly directed to a site/ blog post that is tagged with and matches those interests, think of it like the Pandora music player but for content. It was originally sold to eBay for $75,000,000 (that's 75 million if I got my zeroes right) and recently it was sold back to the original developers. StumbleUpon has more than 8,453,000 members as of October 11, 2009. It even has a nifty StumbleUpon Toolbar which makes it easy to rate selected articles and submit new articles for review by the StumbleUpon readers. One of the great things about StumbleUpon is that their algorithm is pretty good at choosing fun and interesting articles that match your tastes and deliver them seamlessly to you.

To put this in perspective during the month of September, StumbleUpon sent 5 times as much traffic to the Bruce Clay Australia blog as the next best referral site. Granted the time on site was slightly less that the site average but it is a great result regardless. A great piece of advice on a guest post from Problogger states that "write posts for your target market, not for the many" and I think this is really sage guidance. StumbleUpon has also driven traffic from places in the world where I'm pretty sure nobody had ever heard of Bruce Clay Australia (Isle of Man for example)

Now it's all good and well that you know StumbleUpon can generate lots of traffic from a wide variety of sources for your site/blog, but how can you write articles that effectively garner new traffic? Well, I now present Marc's Super StumbleUpon Submissions Secrets (try saying that a few times over):

• Make an eye catching headline- this will entice readers to read the article (this is true for all social media bookmark sites but seems to be particularly so for StumbleUpon.

• Dont let you blog/site look like a barcode-Spice it up a little, most of us are visual beings, throw in a cool image or two, research has proven that our eyes are attracted to images immediately and words secondary.

• Vote and Stumble often-the more you vote and Stumble other posts or article the higher value your Stumbles will become.

• Use Relevant tags-Don't forget to tag your article with the correct and relevant tag, or it will never find the target market you are after.

• Suggest new sites- dont just Stumble the same site all the time, if you have found a new site that knocks your socks off, Stumble that too. StumbleUpon seems to give more weight to users who consistently Stumble new sites.

I would recommend submitting a series of articles to a number of social bookmarking to find out what works best for your genre or niche. When I did this, I found for the Bruce Clay Australia Blog that StumbleUpon was the best resource and shall now leave the Digging and Sphinning to my peers.

Happy Stumbling everyone.

Posted by Marc Elison on 12 October 2009 at 2:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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2 April 2009

Steak Digital, Katie Hodgkinson on Link Building Fundamentals, SMX Sydney

Posted by Marc Elison

Katie occupies the role of Digital Search Manager at Steak Digital. Steak specialises in online brand building for some of the best known brands in Australia. The chosen topic for today's discussion is Link Building Fundamentals, where she will outline the plan for getting a link building campaign up and running.

Katie starts out by outlining that link building is important, a link to your website is seen as a vote. Search engines also look for factors of relevance, a link from a more relevant page is going to be seen as more valuable than a link from an off topic page. Katie jumps into a top 10 list, always suitably popular at conferences.