Linkbait Gone Spam
Written by Jeremy Luebke on January 3, 2008 – 6:46 pm -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):
Looking for payday loan?
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.
Posted in Black Hat, Linkbait |
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:02 pm
I think it’s ingenious, personally. He showed it to me and I was like, wow! Damn that’s clever. Besides which, if he’s entertained you, is it that big a deal to give a link to one of his sites?
The real problem is that off-topic links like those can benefit you enough to rank, wouldn’t you agree?
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:43 pm
The off topic links will definitely help the sites rank.
But if promoting crappy affiliate sites with bait and switch linkbait becomes common place, we will start to see penalties associated with it. Right now, the search engineers aren’t even looking for it.
January 4th, 2008 at 2:53 am
[...] I also noticed a lot of coverage of link baiting again this week, which is great, because I always enjoy reading these kind of posts. If you can’t come up with new ideas; ProBlogger published 7 types of blog posts which always seem to get links. Patrick over at 10e20 showed his process of creating linkbait graphics for the second step, while Donna made a list of 9 tips to get the most SEO benefit from your campaign to help you in the designing stage. And if your campaign doesn’t seem to get off the ground, you might find this week’s Whiteboard Friday interesting. Still struggling now? Go read Manish Pandey’s post with 11 popular link baiting guides for even more info about the subject. However, remember that using the wrong tactics will backfire eventually. [...]
February 14th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Looks like the Guardian.co.uk is following in your footsteps…
http://tinyurl.com/3dvh6l
Looks like their whole network of sites has been penalized. ;0
March 25th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
“Update: Looks like they changed back to only linking to themselves. Lets hope it stays that way.”
The article at Guardian made it sound like the links have always been pointing to only their sites. Inman said that as well in the last paragraph of the article. I don’t see the wrong in this.