Hi All, Apologies for the length of my question, wanted to give some background: One of the sites I look after has done very well in SERPS for over a year now with page one (including several number one) rankings in google.com.au (Australia) for almost all relevant keywords, with it all based 95% on basic whitehat SEO and good solid content. It's a reasonably low competition niche, and has no affiliates etc - just company websites. Work done SEO wise has been pretty much white hat, there no need to mess with a formula that worked! ANYWAY a competitor who never ranked very well at all (solid page 2/3 guy) has shot to top of page 1 and above me for almost everything. Checked out Yahoo site explorer, and this has all been on the back of a lot of postings (not comments) on what i would call Splogs (Spam Blogs). These have a whole series of completely random, semi-nonsence articles on nothing in particular, with the last two words of each post being hyperlinked with keyword text to a particular website (including to my competitors site). There is however no relevance between the keywords and the proceeding article, and these blogs were not created by this guy I don't think - they seem to have lots of different people who the owner is putting up links for. Almost all these splogs seem to have a Pagerank of 2 so they themselves are being promoted somehow. The questions are: 1) Is this a relevant/worthwhile strategy to copy? Or something else I should focus on? 2) Is this likely to work long term? (this particular site is one I don't want too much risk with) 3) Who would he be buying this type of link from? Would these all be owned by one SEO company for promoting their clients? - I notice a lot of the links (50%) are to Australian sites. 4) Does anyone on here offer this kind of service? (Hope this isn't wrong to ask). FYI examples of the Blogs / Splogs that are being linked from are as follows: http://www.cosmik-debris.net/ http://www.figure11.org/ http://www.anonimator.net/ http://www.laodongfa110.com/ http://www.ametrica.info/ http://www.bordadosimperio.com/ http://www.bigtallwish.com/ http://www.lajeanfenske.com/ http://www.acaii.org/ http://www.gravenscars.com/ ETC Any help or advice welcome! Thanks Matt
You can easily buy your own links. Tricks like this typically don't last long. You can report them too Google, but likely nothing will happen. That's the game. If they have little to offer they won't make anything anyways. You are either a spammer or you are not. What's your business model? Are you willing to throw it all away for a short term possible gain?
It's a blog network that offers 100's or even thousands of pr backlinks for a one time price. The SEO landscape is littered with this type of trash. And in the short term, it can be pretty effective. The problem with this technique is that sooner or later this network will be identified for what it is, a 'made for advertising' network of sites that has no purpose, and offers no value other than to sell advertising and manipulate SERPs. And when it is, all URLs in the entire network will likely be de-indexed, and the clients site will return to it's normal position, and the client's money will be wasted. Honestly, if you're going to go black hat, there are better ways to go about it.
Thanks very much for your advice. I'm definately NOT wanting to throw it away for short term gain for this particular website, as it's for an "offline" manufacturing business and we don't want to lose things. That said, i've seen way too many examples of those "not playing by the rules" successfully staying ahead and not geting penalised for a very long time. I guess what I need to do is focus on ways of building similar amounts of links without being in such dodgey neighbourhoods.
One more thing - sorry: Selectsplat I notice you sell text links - i'm guessing your service is different that what i'm describing here? Can you let me know exactly it is different? (I'm guessing relevancy/quality of blogs/content?) Matt