Paid Links still work : Death by SEO

 

UPDATE 4/4/12 : There has been quite a bit of talk lately about Google’s latest algorithm change and how it will devalue the content farms primarily used by link spammers and link merchants. I am definitely seeing a shift in organic results for quite a few sites, but the sites that are coasting on blatant link spam are still doing  just fine. When I see mezzaninesbydesign.com drop, then I will believe that Google has finally struck a blow to the dreaded link merchants. 

Link spam is alive an well, and is still the fastest way to the top spot in the SERPs, for a while anyway. I have two clients that are dealing with competitors who are involved in aggresive link spamming campaigns. It is frustrating as hell for me, because I am not going to risk the agencys or my clients reputation by beating them at their own game. So, short of submitting ineffectual tattle-tail reports to Google (which never do anything anyway), and mapping out the link spamming companies client list to let them know they may very well see their organic traffic drop to zero in the coming months, there isn’t much I can do.

So I am going to bitch, AND, I am going to name names. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the hardcore black-hatters, in the same reason I have a lot of respect for DB Cooper. In fact, I have so much respect for some of them that when I discover their secret, I keep it. Typically I am not a snitch, in all aspects of life. I just don’t believe in it, and its a safe bet that those who aren’t living right will eventually do themselves in, but if you are directly stepping on my toes, or making my life difficult, all bets are off.

So lets begin…..

If you are reading this, then you probably already know what link spamming is. If you stumbled on this article and don’t know about SEO, link spamming is the practice of building as many links as possible, from as many domains as possible, with your target keyword in the anchor text, and flooding the search engines with these pages. Here is the definition from Google:

Web definitions

The theory, and rightfully so, is that the sheer volume of links pointing to your page using your keyword in the anchor text will cause Google to give you favorable positioning in the search engine results. This has been the foundation of Googles algorithm since the beginning, and usually it works pretty well.

Now, on to the good stuff..

Let’s pick a random keyword, how about ‘Mezzanines’. There is a fair amount of volume for this keyword and it spans several industries. I would like to get in the top 10 for this keyword, how hard is it going to be? Let’s check the competition. I am going to use Market Samurai for a quick snapshot of the competition. If you don’t use Market Samurai, you’re nuts. It is hands down the best piece of software a web marketer can have. So this is what the landscape looks like:

Click the image to enlarge

For the most part, this is typical in the industrial safety supply world. Most of the companies have been around for close to the same amount of time, most got online around the same time, etc. Wikipedia is an un-movable so we forget about that, but what do we have here? Something is strange.  In the DA (domain age) column, you can see that most of the sites are about the same age, 9-12 years old. But it looks like we have a real up and comer in the #2 position, mezzaninesbydesign.com (yes that’s nofollowed). Mezzaninesbydesign.com is only 3 years old, and I know for a fact that they were not in the top spot for Mezzanines a few weeks ago, but look at em’ go! This needs some investigation.

So, what is mezzaninesbydesign.com doing SO well that they are able to just shoot up through the SERPs and pass all the old dogs? The RDD (referring domains) column shows that they don’t have nearly as many domains linking to them as most of the other sites, in fact, none of their numbers are that impressive.

Note: the screenshot of the competition is only a partial picture, if you would like to see all the site results you can check them out at http://www.noblesamurai.com/share/seo-competition/a84jtocflggkwcgk448w#historical 

The next step is to visit the website and check out what they are doing. It is clear that the site was built with search engines in mind. They really wanted to rank well for ‘Mezzanines’, but no matter what you do on-site, it’s not going propel you to the top of the SERPs when you are facing off against these other seasoned websites. Scroll down to the bottom and you can see that the site makes no bones about the fact that they are using a SEO company to get their rankings. The footer of the site says it all:

Click the image to enlarge..

 

I don’t have one client that would ever allow me to advertise my company in their footer so this makes me question the ownership of this site, certainly looks like there is more than just a client relationship between Mezzanines by Design and Magnetik Search Marketing. At least I don’t have to hunt to find out who is working on the site.

Given that all the important numbers from Market Samurai are lower than the competitor’s sites, it’s immediately clear that this is a backlink issue. Either the few backlinks that mezzaninesbydesign.com has are coming from seriously powerful sites, or they have an abundance of links with the keyword Mezzanines in the anchor text (or both).

Natural links come over time, and almost always are to the home page and use either the company name or the URL. If your keyword is your company name, well lucky you, but that not often the case. Mezzanines by design does have their target keyword in the company name and URL, but that’s not enough to get the top spot for this keyword. So let’s look at their link inventory and see what we can see..

Let’s cruise over to www.backlinkwatch.com and look at the links pointing to the site, paying particular attention to the anchor text.

 

OK, mystery solved. It’s clearly the links. The shot above is just a small sample but it pretty much all looks the same. Lots of links that use Mezzanines in the anchor text and are not nofollowed. In fact, out of all of the links pointing to the site, only one or two are nofollowed. We now know that none of their links are natural, they are all either spammed, planted, or paid. Google doesn’t like this, I don’t like this.

What is even more interesting is the domains. If this were a natural profile, there would be plenty of domains that had something to do with industrial safety supplies, but there are none to be found here. In fact, the only consistent thing we can see with the domains (other than the lack of nofollow), is that the word India seems to appear in quite a few of them. There are real estate sites, car rental sites, tourist sites, but no sites that have anything to do with Mezzanines.

I visited almost all of the sites and after the first ten or so it was obvious what was going on. First, they are all WordPress sites, all of them. Many of the sites are using the same theme, and they are all following the same format of a few articles and then a ton of links. A quick check of the WHOIS information shows that they are all owned by the same guy.

Registrant:
Mahender Reddy chintalapally

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, LLC (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: JERRYDMOOREFORCIRCUITJUDGE.COM

Domain servers in listed order:
SNS159.WEBSITEWELCOME.COM
SNS160.WEBSITEWELCOME.COM

Not even trying to cover his tracks. His process is simple: Mahender Reddy chintalapally is snatching up seasoned domains as they expire, throwing a WordPress site up and placing the links on the site. He has a big network of sites that he controls and sells the links. Buying links is the quickest way to get de-indexed in Google. They are quite clear on the matter. This is how mezzaninesbydesign.com was able to race to the top. Check out their link history:

 

That my friends is a link spammer profile. Again, not even trying to hide it. So, the next question is: what involvement does Magnetiks Search Marketing have with this technique? Their site is big and professional looking, they list some decent clients that I’m quite sure would not want to befall the same fate as BMW and JCPenny but who knows? Looking over the sites owned by this Indian link spammer, it’s just simple connect the dots to create a client list of people who are buying these services. I’m sure some of them know whats going on, but I’m sure some of them don’t and someone will lose their job when their marketing team see’s their organic traffic drop to zero and the CEO cant even find their website in Google when she types in the company name.

I have not contacted Magnetik Search Marketing to ask them why they would employ someone who is so brazenly breaking Google’s TOS. I’m sure they would plead ignorance, or say “we discovered this a while ago and are no longer working with mr. so-and-so”, and honestly I don’t particularly care. As I said earlier, I respect people who really put effort into working the system and do-so under the radar, but this smash and grab bullshit that $299 SEO’s engage in is very frustrating to me and when I have some free time, I will occasionally hasten their falling on their own sword.

I hate losing the top spot to spammers, but as long as I know and my client knows that this is temporary, I will sit back and watch, and wait for Google to hopefully figure out how to deal with this. If for nothing else than to see what new creative ways the true blackhatters come up with the game the system.

 

Affiliate Marketing : Put Your Links Everywhere

I opened my mailbox today and pulled out the usual assortment of bills and junk mail. I found a piece of mail that looked like it was a check. I was not expecting any money so I thought it was clever advertising. I opened the envelope and sure enough, there was a check in there for $235.00. Not a lot of money, but it’s money right?

I could tell by the name of the company that it was from an affiliate program for dating a dating site. I haven’t done any affiliate marketing in a couple years so I had no clue where it would have come from.

I looked up the number of the company that issued the check and called them up. The referral was from a webmaster referral to an online dating site called Fling.com (don’t click the link if you are offended by nudity). I dug up my old login for the webmaster program, www.HugeTraffic.com, and logged in. Sure enough I had a webmaster sign up and go active (sent a signup) last month. That’s $200 for me.

Getting links in front of webmasters is no easy feat. It’s really competitive, however somehow someone stumbled on a link that I had put up somewhere and signed up.

The lesson here is that you should always be putting links up. They might not do something now, maybe not next week. In fact if you don’t have any traffic and you start making pages then furiously checking stats you will probably be disappointed, but if you place a link up anywhere you can, whenever you can, you will definitely have a repeat of my experience today.