LinksManager.com Blog

Dear Matt Cutts:

We’re not trying to get you fired, but given the state of today’s economy and the pressing need for Fortune 500 companies to adapt to the new realities by slashing labor costs (much as every webmaster on Planet Earth has to adapt to new internet realities whenever you and your cohorts at Google decide to proclaim them) we feel it is our duty as good corporate citizens to suggest ways in which your workload could be significantly decreased.

Since this is the LinksManager blog, it will come as no surprise to you that our suggestions for lightening your workload have to do with eliminating link spam and scam attempts.

Understand, we’re not talking about ferreting out link abusers and punishing them, as you’ve long been trying to do with limited success. What we are talking about is eliminating search-engine link spamming by taking the potential benefit out of it. In other words, making it pointless because someone who succeeded in “fooling” your team would gain no Page Rank or return position advantage whatsoever.

Furthermore, we believe that Google’s adoption of our suggestions would improve the web experience for the vast majority of end users and — in capital letters AND — result in more accurate and useful Google search returns.

So, if you can spare a few moments away from the bloody-walled rooms where the Page Rank Unibombers are gently interrogated, pull up a chair, a pool float or a bar stool and lend us your ear.

For fun, let’s start with something we can probably agree on: The vast majority of SE web spamming schemes related to linking fall into one of two classes. Those that offer to sell webmasters vast numbers of random reciprocal links delivered automatically without any regard for suitability, relevancy or quality and those that offer bogus one-way links generated via three or more-way link exchanges or shell websites that exist only to host the scammer’s outbound links.

Now that the fun part’s over, let’s continue with something we absolutely won’t agree on: Google’s guidelines — your rules, in other words — are not only what inspired the perpetrators of these fraudulent linking schemes in making their career choice, they — the guidelines — are also what has enabled those scammers to live so long and prosper so richly.

Consider the way things were — or at least the way you were — during Google’s formative years. Reciprocal links were king, they were considered hot ballots in Google’s beauty pageant of life. Racking up links was like getting votes in baseball’s all-star competition, the players with the most votes made it into the big game … the top of the returns list.

OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But it is fair to say that in attempting to eliminate the evils of earlier search engines that screamed “jackpot” whenever a site operator inserted the same hidden keyword into a page 2750 times, Google did go more than a bit overboard in rewarding sites with large numbers of essentially unevaluated links.

The results were both predictable and inevitable. Operators began bargaining, begging, lying, cheating and stealing to get links and end users were treated to such truly doleful apparitions as web rings and free-for-all link exchange pages. Ugh!

Fast forward a few years into the early 2000s and we find you trying to limit link abuse by publishing a guideline “suggesting” that webmasters not put more than 100 links on a page. Turns out it didn’t require too much effort to spread 1,000 links over ten pages instead of one and life went on as before until the guidelines were happily changed to favor relevant links from quality sites.

Too bad you didn’t stop right there. If you had there would be no need for this blog … not to mention a few zillion other blogs, rants, queries, protests and bloody, sweaty tears scattered from one end of the web to the other.

The reason you should have stopped there is because, as you very well know, quality, relevant links between sites are what make the web work. Despite the fact that very few people have used the phrase since Al Gore — not realizing that outraging nine or ten Florida computer geeks could cost him the presidency — made a mockery of it (and himself), the web is an information superhighway and like all highways the more lanes (links, in this case) it has, the more smoothly and efficiently it handles traffic.

Unfortunately, however, someone at Google traffic cop central decided that demanding links be valuable, useful, non-spamming, etc. etc. wasn’t good enough. Suddenly, the means became as important as the ends. Googlebot became as interested in a link’s origin as it did in its quality. One-way links were perceived as having more glitz than reciprocal links and a whole new black-arts industry devoted to schemes intended to generate bogus one-way links via three- and more-way link exchanges and dummy sites containing nothing but pay-for-play outgoing links was born.

Bottomline is that despite the fortune in financial and human resources you SEs spend in trying to root these scams out, the bad guys (i.e. spam artists) have little or no problem staying at least one or two steps ahead of the good guys (you and yours) because your rules are so complex, unwieldy and arbitrary you can’t revise them as fast as the con artists can develop new workarounds to evade them.

Our solution is simple and two-fold.

1. Get out of the mass numbers game. Allow — encourage, even — a million links to bloom but only evaluate a handful of them for ranking purposes. In other words, program Googlebot to only consider a maximum of, for example, 50 random links each time it visits a site and use those links to establish a “plus” or “minus” rating factor based solely on their relevancy and quality.

2. Stop caring about whether any given link is one-way, two-way, sideways or upside down. Follow your own oft-stated advice to think about things from the point of view of end users. Does an end user care whether a link is reciprocated if it leads him to information he finds useful? Does that same user find following a one-way link to an irrelevant site rewarding?

If you do both these things, what happens?

A number of things, all of them good.

First, all the “buy automated links by the pound” schemes disappear. No point in paying for hundreds of links if nobody’s counting higher than 50.

Second, the incentive to have only quality links increases because one bad apple in a small barrel makes a lot more of a mess than two bad apples in a huge barrel.

Third, website operators no longer have to balance the benefits of generating traffic via lots of links versus the possibility of violating some hidden line in the sand separating what a search engine considers a proper amount of links from what it thinks is an excessive number.

Fourth, end users would have access to more relevant links to streamline their passage along the path to enlightenment, i.e. their inquiry into the relative merits of seven brands of toasters.

Fifth, site owners with only a few links would benefit (or be penalized) by the quality of those links to the same degree as owners of sites with hundreds of links.

Sixth, three-way linking and storefront outbound link scams would become irrelevant and the black-hat entrepreneurs running them would have to retire to wherever their offshore bank accounts are.

Seventh, webmasters could concentrate on giving their site visitors the links they need without wrenching their necks trying to see if the Google Monster is gaining on them.

So there it is, Matt, the official LinksManager Twelve-Minus-Five-Step Google Anti-Spam Czar Workaholic Recovery and Search-Engine Improvement Program. Please feel free to share it with your opposite numbers at engines Y, M and A.

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Attempting to fool Google and other search engines into thinking three-way links are actually one-way links is a no-no.  It is one of those schemes Google calls “search-engine spam” and the rest of the legitimate WWW universe, including all the other major search engines, considers it a “black-hat” SEO practice.

Every search engine integrity team in the industry knows about three-way linking scams and has devised ways to identify it and punish sites which practice it.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog or of LinkManager’s exclusive Linking School, you already know quite a bit about three-way linking and why you should be leery of dark-side operators trying to seduce you into doing it.  In fact, you may even be wondering why we’re covering it again.

The answer is that extremely diligent, time-consuming and stressful research (namely looking through the junk mail folder) has uncovered the most perfect specimen of a three way-linking come-on we’ve ever seen.  A seductive proposal so sublime, so off-the-wall, that anyone encountering it will feel hit on like they’ve never been hit on before.  Hit on by a bursting nitrous oxide balloon or a Guinness Book of World Records-sized pie in the face.

A seductive proposal so inelegant and totally resistible that it’s impossible to believe anyone with the intelligence of a gnat would buy into it.  Yet many people undoubtedly have, just as many threw away their life savings in the belief that some crook in Nigeria was waiting to transfer the contents of the state treasury into the bank account of a brain-dead American on a spam mail sucker list.

So here’s the “Pleasant Day” three-way linking solicitation directly as it came to us, complete with misspellings, bad grammar and gmail security warning:

Hello Webmaster,

A Pleasant Day to You!

Knowing that quality inbound, one-way links are among the best sources of improved ranking in search engines, it is a huge part of SEO campaign and for sure in yours too. For this reason, I am presently searching for potential linking partners for my website (Mail Scanner warning X domain attempting to be Y domain intentionally removed). In this regard, I found your site and have appropriately considered for a link exchange. My sole intention is to have a link from your site and do the same to you in return.

I would appreciate your favorable reply with a timely quality reciprocal link to your site from our (domain intentionally removed)/resources.htm choose category OR (domain intentionally removed)/direcrory choose category.

In the end, we will be helping each other for better rankings in search engines.

My site details are as follows:

URL: (domain intentionally removed)

Title: Sell My Property Quickly

Description: Bastion Properties UK Based leading property buying services offers to buy your property quickly for fast cash. You have to sell your property, house quickly for fast cash.

In the time that you have completed a link to my site, please contact me so that I may be able to confirm it and appropriately link back to you. We are glad to have link relationship with you.

Hope to hear from you soon

Kind Regards, Salil

Hhhmmm … what exactly is wrong with this word picture?  Aside from the basic fact that it seems to be inviting you to participate in a scheme to “help each other for better rankings” by violating Google guidelines and anti-spam policies?

Let’s start at the top.

First, it’s a piece of spam addressed to “Hello Webmaster” and destined to be automatically junked by any non-prehistoric email client with an activated junk filter.  Good link solicitation letters should be a bit more personalized, such as “Dear Bastion Properties” or “Dear Bastion Properties Webmaster.”  This is especially important in trying to get link request emails past junk filters. N ote: You can safely eliminate the personal greeting if you are responding to a “link-invitation” or “contact webmaster” link on a site.

Moving along, there’s the “possible fraud” warning from the mail scanner.  Let’s stop and think.  Why would someone sending a few million copies of this particular email from their site want mail scanners and other internet traffic cops to think the message was coming from some other site?  Duh, duh, duh, DUH!

We’ve got it.  Because they’re doing something wrong and they don’t want to get caught.  And they don’t want to get caught because they will be punished — probably by having their site delisted from Google — if they are caught.

But wait, there’s more.  Salil’s “sole intention is to have a link from your site and do the same to you in return.”  We’ll, there’s one point on which he or she ain’t lying, the idea is definitely to “do you” … do you as in “do you in” not do you as in “having sex with you.”

Because what Salil really wants is for you to link to his legitimate (or not) property sales site in return for getting a link from one of his two so-called SEO sites (Seologistics and Adsrack.)  A quick look at the Seologistics site (domain intentionally removed) was non-existent as of July 23 is enough to convince most anyone that it is everything Mother Google ever warned you about … a shoddy front for bottling search-engine snake oil.

Links from sites like this can accomplish only one thing, hurt the ranking of the sites linked to them.  They are never relevant, they are from web pages generally filled with search engine spam, and they often reside in bad neighborhoods. Likewise, linking to Salil’s property site — even if it happens to be legit — will probably not be relevant to your site’s content (unless you happen to be in the real estate business) and can negatively affect your ranking because of that irrelevancy.

So what’s the point of Salil’s scam?  What’s he trying to achieve?  That part’s simple, he’s trying to attract bogus “one-way links” from legitimate sites like yours to inflate his PageRank.  He does this by offering a three-way trade.  You link your white-hat site to his and he reciprocates by linking his black-hat site to you.

In theory, he wins and you lose.  In practice, you both lose.  Google and the other engines are very good at spotting and punishing three-way scams even when the promoters aren’t as stupid as Salil, who made Matt Cutts‘ job very easy by using some email flim-flam that threw up red flags on email servers around the globe.

Unfortunately, the engines are not as good at separating the perpetrators from the innocent bystanders.  Or, maybe, they just don’t think there are any innocent bystanders since they’ve made it abundantly clear that three-way linking is a bad practice and a guideline violation.  Therefore, they may take the somewhat justified position that you are as guilty for accepting Salil’s “generous offer” as he is for extending it.  Bottomline is that when one part of a nefarious linking triangle is uncovered all three sites involved risk being spanked.

The moral of this message is simple:  Beware of spammers bearing gift bags that might blow up in your face and select your link partners on the basis of the benefits their sites offer your end users.

As we’ve said here before over the years, end users come in all sizes, shapes, colors and genders.  Some of them, like Googlebot, even come in tower cases filled with silicon chips.  Despite their differences, all these end users, most especially Googlebot, are looking for one thing:  Quality.  Quality content, quality navigation, and quality links.

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