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Link Spammer Complains To Google About Spam Not Working

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August 13  |  Black Hat  |   Ryan Clark

I just caught this while helping out companies on Google’s webmaster help and thought you folks might get a laugh out of this one. There are sadly way too many “SEO’s” who have 0 clue as to what’s against Google’s TOS in regards to building links. This bloke is definitely lost at sea as you’ll quickly figure out from reading his post:

Hi,
 
I’m doing only white hat SEO for my site www.e07.net but it is caught in Penguin update and it has given low ranking, it should be on top for the keyword “forum posting service” it is on the seventh place.
 
I don’t know where I made the mistakes.
 
Thanks

Yikes… While 7th place is no penalty, his site will surely end up much worse over the next few weeks. I know most of you forum owners most likely want to punch this spammer in the face so settle down… one more will bite the dust soon. A quick look at the site’s link profile shows more ignorance as they’ve just been spamming forums with a couple of targeted anchor texts. This is exactly the kind of stuff Penguin is automatically looking out for in its hunt – not to mention ALL the links are of one type.


 
So this brings me to another point. If you’re hunting around for a service provider to attract links for you, do your homework on them. A lot of folks have no idea what to do and where to start, so knowing what’s going to cause your business trouble in the long (or short) run will make your life a whole lot easier.

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Can Competitors Harm Your Rankings?

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May 28  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

Google has changed up its wording from “There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.” to this lovely bit of scary wording;

Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.

It’s pretty safe to say competitors can harm your site with links if done right, especially if you can do it yourself….they’re not going to be able to tell. There has yet to be any big and legit sites having a problem with links as it has mostly heen lousy affiliate sites. Most of the people complaining in the webmaster forums and Google’s help section have had not so good sites.

I’m not sure what else to say on this topic other than just focus on building up a real brand with more value to it that a set of links pointing to your site. What does your user want (apps, user engagement, deals, give aways, great content etc)? All of our clients that focused on these aspects have not been touched at all by any of the algorithm changes over the years, so it is possible to do good by Google.
 
Read it yourself: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34449

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The Future Of Google Spam?

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May 3  |  Black Hat  |   Ryan Clark

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Buy Cialis Online Google Results

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April 26  |  Black Hat  |   Ryan Clark

So the super duper spam attack Google algo update hit this week and continues to roll out, so what do the search results for some of the most spammed keywords look like? Well let’s take a look at buy Cialis and see what we can find ranking in the top 10 for one very competitive keyword.

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Negative SEO Fiverr

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April 21  |  Black Hat  |   Ryan Clark

While this is most likely just a quick way to make a few bucks while jumping on a trend, we will however see an influx of these services. I’ve been enjoying the debating on whether or not you can penalize a site with boat loads of links. If you can buy yourself a bunch of junk links and end up in all sorts of trouble, why couldn’t someone else. There’s no way to tell who paid for those links so we have an interesting year ahead of us still.

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PRWeb Called A Link Scheme & Spam On GWC

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April 15  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

I thought this would make for an excellent topic because there is a lot of talk and debating on what is link spamming these days. Press releases have long been a great way to get legit and worthy news out to the right people and of course links are a bonus of that. I don’t think that using a service like PRweb or any of the top wire services is spam unless you’re releasing useless/fake news just to get an anchor text link…then we’re getting into link scheme territory.

So onto my Google Webmaster Central Help section this morning which is a morning ritual of mine while drinking my coffee. It’s a place webmasters go to inquire with non-Google employees as to why they’re having a problem or issue with the big G. Keep in mind the regular “help” aka bionic posters are NOT Google employees and this sometimes is a frustrating thing because they, like most SEO’s including me from time to time, think they know all. They however do know a lot and are helpful for the most part although the tone coming from a lot of them usually entails a negative touch and or a whole lot of sarcasm in their responses. If this were happening with just about any other company those people who have been fired long ago as it’s a disgusting way to handle customer service. I don’t claim to be a saint either as I have been sassy from time to time within my posts.

So this morning I was reading a thread about a company claiming that competitors built spammy links to their site and they ended up getting penalized. So we’ve all heard this before but the bit that stuck out was when their bionic posters claimed that submitting a PR with PRweb is nothing but link spam.

seo101Level 15 Post reply

Apr 14 (11 hours ago)

Why do you submit via PRWeb for? It is to get links isn’t it? That is what PRWeb offer (they have “SEO” on their home page!). That self promotional link building … that the very definition of a link scheme!
Besides, I see nothing newsworthy about your site that you even need to do press releases!!!!

You can continue to delude yourself about your link building. Until you get over that, your site will continue to languish in mediocrity.


You are also making a fool of yourself re the class action law suit. Google has no contractual obligation to you or your site (written or implied) to give you any organic ranking, so has they have broken no contractual obligation, so you have no case!

Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal did talk about press releases briefly in a 2011 Pubcon interview and it’s one of the few references I can find on the web about the topic. They pretty much lay it out like I’ve mentioned on how you should go about utilizing a service like PRweb.

Question: Are PRWeb and press releases considered black hat due to duplicate content?

Matt Cutts: Press releases are going to other people and asking them to write about you. Instead, work hard to produce high quality content on your site and people will want to write about you. It is harder to fake natural than be natural.

Amit Singhal: The content must be high-quality and useful from a reader’s perspective. If the content is high quality and you work hard for the users, it is OK.

So this is kind of a touchy subject and I would love to hear what the wire service and inbound marketing community thinks of this. Google is really cracking down on manually built link building processes but I don’t think you’ll ever run into a problem if you steer clear of putting keyword specific anchor text in your press releases. Those who have been paying attention will know that site/brand links are killing it in the SERPs lately and you best be just letting those natural links coming in.

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Google Sends Warning For Article Marketing

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November 24  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

Are you link building via article marketing for your main source of links? You might not be as safe as you think. While I’m aware I’m spouting and promoting fear a little bit here, I do have my ear to the ground when it comes to this topic. Clearly the majority of companies out there are pumping out ultra low quality content. That’s not the only problem though, everyone is also gaming anchor text and that’s what Google hates…a lot.

I like the fact that Google would discourage this because too many sites are way too shitty to deserve a top ranking spot. Google’s guidelines when it comes to links makes it pretty clear that link schemes are going to cause you trouble, and most article marketing falls under their definition.

You might remember the violation emails Google sent out regarding unnatural links detected pointing to a site. While it’s a very rare occurrence, the possibility is a reality and something you’ll see pop up in Google’s webmaster help central. I just came back from a trip and while catching up on the latest posts on my trip, I discovered this instance that caught my eye.

Meanwhile I submitted a reconsideration request for my other sites that had the same -50 filter, some which had zero inorganic links. In the E-mail I received I was told that I needed to remove any “inorganic links” that I could and if I couldn’t remove them I needed to create a list of the links I couldn’t remove.

It’s important to keep in mind that this person is most likely running a bunch of thin affiliate sites and they were also doing user profile spam. A lot of people think that links can never have a negative effect on your rankings, but those people haven’t been around long enough. Even the link schemes definition from Google clearly states that “This is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results“. That alone should end the debate.

If the post is true, it’s still a rare case and, in my ninja opinion, pretty difficult to get in trouble with links. Pretty much every top niche is dominated by unethical link building practices and it has been that way for the last decade. We, of course, do a lot of high quality content marketing and I’m not claiming to be pure by any means, just be careful out there. That statement is also for those companies who are just blind hiring an SEO to get mass links.

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Fortune 500 Company + SEnuke = Disaster

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July 3  |  Black Hat  |   Ryan Clark

Before we get into this quick post I’ll state this is in by no means a bash to SEnuke, but more of a lesson when hiring an in-house SEO. A lot of the link building tactics used in the software are 100% link schemes, and are going to eventually get you in trouble. However, it is also in the user(think guns don’t kill people, people with guns..) to make it black hat. You could most definitely use it for legit purposes in small doses. But for the most part, this software spams forums, blog comments and web 2.0 profiles. It also now does link wheel “strategies”, and by looking at the diagram below, what do you think of;

If that’s not a visual definition of a link scheme. So in came an email from a fortune 500 company asking for help when their homepage dipped out of the SERPs, and a whole ton of their target kw’s were now bouncing around the 50-70 range. Not good right? Naturally my first step was to run a link report and see what was going on. I nearly spat my coffee all over the keyboard with what I saw after my Link Research Tools (shameless plug for Cemper here :) report finished.

So what happened? This company is an old school one, and they for so many years just relied on a webmaster, basic on page SEO and the natural links they received. After a few of the higher ups went to a conference and got all jazzed on online marketing, they decided to put together an in-house team. This lead to someone fresh out of university being picked up and hired, along with 4 other graduates from the same school/marketing program.

Perhaps a risky move, but the university has a great reputation, and the fresh hires were cheaper than some one with a lot of real world experience. Perhaps the first mistake, but not necessarily a bad move. The problems arose once the team decided to implement SEnuke as their link building platform and methodology.

After learning about link wheels, profile links and all the other “techniques” out there they went to town with this software. After 8 months there were nearly a dozen link wheels setup with spun content, but the worst part, the thousands and thousands of forum spam, blog comment and 2.0 profile links. To back that up, only 6-10 different money keyword anchor text were thrown in the mix. This got real obvious real quick.

So a year later and some very major problems are now a reality in this companies life. The clean up process is going to be down right awful, and guess who gets the clean up work duty? No me, that’s for sure! We’ll be taking their link building efforts into 2012 with awesome content, resources, web apps, mobile apps and beyond. Large companies have huge pull and don’t need to resort to anything other than natural link creation, so let this be a warning to all.

Be careful who you hire, don’t use questionable tactics and do things right if you want to stick around longer than a year in the SERPs. Google is going to be really focusing on SERP quality over the next year (and beyond), so now is the time to go over everything and make sure you’re squeaky clean.

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