I wasn’t aware of Love.com until I read Aaron Wall’s post “Does Google Love.com Spam?” which lead me to peering into their backlink profile and more. Aaron is the man when it comes to pointing out the crazy things companies will do and AOL is redefining content scraping. Now most sites wouldn’t have lasted this long but when you’re AOL you have a little bit more sway that others. I don’t want to get into the ethics of it all, but instead take a peek at their backlink profile and how they’re abusing social media.
Love.com Backlinks:
So far they’re blistering along in the search engines with nearly 150,000 pages indexed in just Google. Aaron tweet’d that he’d give away some SEOBook prizes if anyone could guess the date this would start dropping, and honestly I’m not sure if this will happen quickly. Love.com is going to at least have a grace period mainly due to the age of their domain name, and when you see their backlink profile you’ll shit a brick. Before I even ran them through LinkVoodoo’s Backlink Analyzer I expected to see a lot of AOL owned sites providing most of the juice. Well as of today I’m seeing just over 1000 backlinks with 93% of them being dofollow which is quite rare in a backlink profile, but I was right in guessing most of them would be from an AOL owned site. Also as expected, since most of the sections are on their own subdomain a lot of the links are coming from those.This also means that 93% of the links are pointing to their root index.
So far this has been working out in their favor and I can see the pagerank is flowing around to a lot of the Love.com subdomains. So all in all despite the crazyness this site is going to bring out in the SEO world it is worth the behind the scenes look at how you can manipulate the search engines. I’ve attached the .csv file from out private beta version of the LinkVoodoo backlink analyzer in case you’re wondering how I’m getting reports. It will be out soon so don’t worry, we’re still testing and fixing some bugs so this report may not include all the backlinks but it will be damn close.
Download: Love.com Link Analysis
Love.com’s Twitter Usage:
Everyone is using Twitter these days and it didn’t take me long to see how Love.com was making use of it either. It’s a great way to get traffic, but they’re seemingly taking it to the next level. If you do a quick search for Love.com on Twitter you’ll see what’s going on here. Tons and tons of seperate Twitter accounts based on niche feeding in news from the site. It is too early to tell if this is working out great for them but it’s interesting none the less.
What do you folks think about this?
Love.com’s Alexa:
I know Alexa isn’t the best for measuring traffic volumes but it will do fine just to see how things are progressing so far. As you can see the Scraping + Domain Age + Link Profile is bringing in the traffic so far, but I can’t wait to see the results a few months from now. I think Aaron’s guessing game is a great idea and I think I’ll make my bid.
