Archive for January, 2008

I’m probably not going to make any friends with this post but I don’t care. Whitehat linkbait turned spam pisses me off because this type of junk is what ruins perfectly good link building techniques.

When Matthew Inman left SEOmoz and talked about his dating site and it’s accomplishments using linkbait, I was happy for him and truly impressed with his results. He took a simple idea like funny quizes and turned them into a backlink building machine using badges that linked back to both the quiz, and the dating site hosting the quiz. I don’t think anyone could consider it spam.

So yesterday I was talking with someone about how all this worked and went to show them an example and to my surprise, I see JustSayHi has turned Matt’s quizzes into a link spam machine. No longer do the links below the badges point to the dating site, they point to what looks like rotating, off topic affiliate sites. This reminds me of the hit counter spam that Google has been known to love.

Examples (nofollows added by me):

69%

Looking for payday loan?

54%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

Find Ultrasound technician schools near you

Normally I’m not one to point out specific examples of shady SEO, but I am taking a hard stance against this particular technique. At this time, Google and the other search engines consider badges and widget a white hat technique but if normally white hat companies pull this junk too many times, this form of linkbait will sleep with the fishes (paid links).

Update: Looks like they changed back to only linking to themselves. Lets hope it stays that way.