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Google takes on Rand Fishkin and Link Baiting

Posted by admin on December 17, 2006 in SEO Theory

Google BlogSearch is the only major tool for which Google doesn’t offer an official blog. Tonight the Blogsearch interface went offline for a while. I don’t know why. I cannot check the Blogsearch blog because there is no such blog.

About the best you can do is browse the various official blogs and see what they may say about Blogsearch (and I suspect they won’t say much). Nonetheless, I was interested to see something new on Webmaster Central’s blog, where they pretty much threw down the gauntlet for the link baiting community.

Building link-based popularity:

Discounting non-earned links by search engines opened a new and wide field of tactics to build link-based popularity: Classically this involves optimizing your content so that thematically-related or trusted websites link to you by choice. A more recent method is link baiting, which typically takes advantage of Web 2.0 social content websites. One example of this new way of generating links is to submit a handcrafted article to a service such as http://digg.com. Another example is to earn a reputation in a certain field by building an authority through services such as http://answers.yahoo.com. Our general advice is: Always focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your optimization strategy. Ask yourself what creates value for your users. Investing in the quality of your content and thereby earning natural backlinks benefits both the users and drives more qualified traffic to your site.

Well, that’s a huge whompin’ lot of topics to target with a very vaguely worded warning. Nonetheless, in March 2006 Matt Cutts wrote on his blog that

…if someone comes to you and says “I’ll give you $N to rent subdomains, subdirectories, or pages from you. Just link to my doorway pages from your content,” I would recommend to say no as well….

I’ve complained about sub-domain spam for years, though I have yet to see Google actually do something about it. Nonetheless, the warning went out and I have to suppose in the last coupe of updates Google may indeed have implemented some sub-domain spam filtering. It’s not like I bookmark the offending sites or link to them, so it’s difficult for me to check these kinds of things.

I don’t rely on social link spamming, either, though Rand has publicly admitted to seeding DIGG and other social linking sites with stories and links. Other people in the industry have hinted or semi-publicly (hiding their true identities) conceded engaging in similar tactics.

I think Google is wrong to call this practice “link baiting”. It’s social link spamming, which is entirely different from link baiting. Link baiters may have transformed the social linking sites into crutches, but it’s easy for less-technically savvy people like Rand to develop crutches. After all, when you’re specializing in marketing, inventing new tools every week draws vital resources away from your business. Rand’s business is built around creating buzz for client sites, not developing new SEO methodologies for the rest of the community to exploit.

Most true method builders take their time in sharing their secrets. If you give away too much openly, other people begin copying you like crazy and you lose your competitive edge. When I first joined the SEO community in 1998 I was all for sharing as much as I possibly could about marketing Web sites, but as I made the transition to developing Search Optimization Methods, I learned the hard way that telling people all my neat ideas too soon ruined the party for everyone.

It takes about a year to prove that a method works. Maybe I can do it in 8 months. Maybe other people can do it in less time than that, but there are very, very few SEOs who actually engage in this kind of risky research. After all, their clients are not paying them to put value sites at risk. You have to go out, create new content, and set your ideas loose on it. You have to be willing to walk away from an entire domain that could have dozens or hundreds of pages of original content on it.

Ain’t too many people in the SEO community willing to throw away a month’s work on a crazy idea that has about a 1-in-10 chance of working. And when you get an idea to work, you have to use it again and again to see if it works consistently or if you mistook the original results for something else.

So let’s assume for the sake of discussion that Google successfully tackles link baiting strategies. What will they do, and how long will it take? They may already have done the hardest part of the job. The filters could already be in place. But I think it will take about 3-6 months for us to find out if social links no longer pass as much value as they did.

Since I don’t think Google holds the founders of Newsvine, DIGG, del.ic.io.us, Technorati, and other social linking services responsible for the excesses of search marketers, I doubt those sites will feel the full might of Google’s wrath. Rather, I think Googlers may have developed a way to evaluate the quality of links relative to other links on the same host (which, for now, I will consider to be a sub-domain or a full domain that has no sub-domains).

People have always gone into news groups, forums, and mailing lists and said, “Hey! I’ve got a great new site at URL. Please take a look and let me know what you think.” This is the crux of launching a new site. But through the years the basic practice has been perverted and abused in so many ways there are now quite a few unwritten (and written) rules about how one should do this.

Google has apparently just added to the rule set. There may or may not be some fuss in coming days. Maybe the SEO community won’t even take notice.

But my feeling is that adjustments will be made by those who are willing to take risks, some of those people will privately share information with their friends in the field, and eventually social link buzzing will migrate in a new direction.

Google has, at best, only laid an obstacle in the buzz marketer’s path. Call this the first round of “Google versus the Link Baiters”. They’ll be back in a few months with new strategies to get around whatever filters have been put into place.
And then we’ll get to see round two, which should be interesting indeed. I think Google is struggling to find new ways to devalue links. Maybe I’m wrong, but normally you don’t beef up a software team unless the old team is overwhelmed by the task at hand.