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The new link spam raises its ugly head

Posted by Michael Martinez on February 19, 2008 in Web spam

I’ve been receiving an increasing number of inquiries both here at 1st Query and through my private contact form on Xenite.Org from people wanting to buy links. I don’t sell links and I’m pretty sure I have stated that publicly in many places but I suppose what I say may seem like a smoke screen to link buyers.

I don’t recognize the names of the people offering me money for links, so either they are new players or they just haven’t gotten around to nagging me before or else they are using pseudonyms.

As far as I am concerned there is nothing wrong with the buying and selling of links. The only people who claim it hurts their business practices are Google employees, and Google’s business practices have raised more than a few eyebrows over the years so I’m not inclined to sympathize with Google. Besides which, Google has misrepresented the historical reasons for why people buy and sell links. If the truth doesn’t work well enough to help Google’s cause, then Google’s cause is morally questionable.

Nonetheless, if you want to rank well in Google buying links entails a certain risk. You may waste your money on links that don’t pass Google value for very long if at all. You might get some very good links that send you actual traffic, which can be better than a lot of number 1 listings in Google. In fact, there are many people who paid for number 1 listings in Google that didn’t provide any traffic at all.

Still, most SEOs blindly follow Google’s ups and downs without looking at real search engine market share (and since no one actually bothers to calculate a realistic market share SEOs should not be faulted for having no clue about the fact that an estimated 30 million people visit Ask each month, and more than 100 million people visit Yahoo! and Microsoft each month).

Google is king because bullshit rules in the SEO world. The latest and greatest bullshit is that Google has crushed the paid links economy. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As many of us predicted, the paid link brokers simply went underground. There have always been link brokers who build their inventory quietly through private correspondence but it seems that Google’s long overdue reaction to complaints about link brokers using Adwords to find inventory and customers has only caused the link brokers to dig deeper for new inventory.

The cost of buying links may increase as a result of the change in recruiting practices, and to justify that increase in costs link brokers may now be willing to tempt site owners who have steadfastly refused to play the link selling game. In fact, link brokers may only be looking at Toolbar PR and deciding that if they cannot get the PR 7s and 8s in the large numbers they need that maybe the PR 4s and 5s and 6s will do okay. I don’t know, not having discussed this with any link brokers.

But I am pretty certain that a shakeout has already occurred on several levels and that link buyers and sellers have pretty much gone back to business-as-usual. Google’s little campaign against the buying and selling of links was not so much a non-event as a bump that caused a slight change of course.

The inconvenience of link spam has now been shifted to the people who really didn’t want to deal with it: those of us who have for years complained about unsolicited reciprocal link requests. Thank you, Google, for increasing my spam. You’re so good at doing the wrong thing consistently.

If this trend follows historical patterns we’ll probably see a gradual increase in unsolicited link request emails for the next 2 years or so. I’ll be one of the lone voices decrying the practice for the next 6-12 months but eventually everyone else who blogs about SEO will start complaining because they, too, will be getting increasing volumes of unsolicited requests to “talk about [your] Web site”. Their customers will call them up and say, “Someone is asking me to talk about my Web site. What do they want?”

Odds are pretty good they either want to offer you SEO services or they want to buy links from you. I don’t think there is anything wrong with an SEO firm telemarketing its services (it’s a legitimate if annoying form of marketing) as long as they can back up what they say, but I do have a real problem with people offering me money that will cost me more in the long run than it’s worth.

For me, personally, not selling links is a point of pride, honor, and integrity. I’ve said for years that I don’t do it so if I start now I’ll look like a hypocrite. Worse, I would be considered a cheap sellout. They can buy links from my cold dead fingers as far as I am concerned, and I ain’t plainning on dying any time soon (God willing and the river don’t rise).

That doesn’t mean I’ve always done things the search engines would approve of. When Inktomi started dropping my most important pages from its primary index in 1999 I figured out a way to keep them in. When someone approached me to test their link farm service later that year I figured I had nothing to lose, so I played with the link farm for a year until the owner shut it down (oddly enough, some of the link farm members were unscrupulous enough to try to bypass its rules).

I used to reciprocate links with people. We’d trade graphical links, text links, whatever. I had quite an extensive list of links to sites I never cared much for except that they were linking back to me. The list included Yahoo!, Looksmart, NBCi/Snap, and other once well-known “honorable” link providers. In those days, everyone reciprocated their directory links to help search engines find those pages. Of course, there were less well-known sites in that long-defunct reciprocal program.

The record shows that Xenite.Org discontinued its reciprocal links program in November 2002. That was more than 5 years ago and in that time many people STARTED reciprocating links. Reciprocal links are still comment-worthy. Reciprocation itself is not a bad thing. Even some Googlers have said it’s okay to exchange links where it makes sense for your visitors, as long as you’re not doing it to influence their search results.

Reciprocal linking got its bad reputation from the horde of emails that people sent out, asking for link swaps. I had to create special contact form filters at Xenite to cut down on the unsolicited requests for links that were sent despite very clear, blatant, and quite rude language on our contact form telling link swappers to go away. I’ll probably have to update that rude language to include people who want to “discuss your Web site”.

If you want to talk about Xenite.Org, say nice things about it on your blog or forum. I might give you a link for free. If you want to buy links from me, go find another idiot to play that game with.

Do I manipulate search engine results? Absolutely. I do it every day. I do it with links and content, content and links. But I feel I’m pretty open about how I do 90% of my work. The other 10% is experimental or considered a “trade secret” or “confidential business practice”. If search engines were perfect we’d still need perfect content publishers and perfect searchers to eliminate all potential conflict produce the maximum satisfaction all around. None of us are perfect so we’re all going to have live with each other’s faults and fallacies.

That doesn’t mean I want to receive unsolicited emails from people who want to “talk about your Web site”. Nor does it mean I want to continue having to click through to deeper search results pages on Google because they’re too lazy to promote the most relevant content to the top of the search results. It does mean, however, that I’m willing to continue practicing the SEO Method: Experiment, evaluate, adjust.

If more people did that, my email probably would not overfloweth with unsolicited link swap and link buying requests. And the sad thing about all this is that it’s only a matter of time before someone else finds a reason to send me emails I don’t want and won’t respond to.

Thank you, Google, for making your problem my problem. All you had to do to fix this was to stop allowing links to pass anchor text. Of course, you could also rank the most relevant pages first regardless of which index they are stored in.

Oh, and to all you Gmail users: over the weekend I finally got fed up with link drop spammers using Gmail accounts to sign up for Spider-food forum accounts. I’ve now banned the Gmail domain from Spider-food.

Thank you, Google, for making your problem ours.