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The
Marketleap Report
Volume
III, Issue #4, March 19, 2003
Search Engine Spam
Are you employing tactics that could get you kicked
out of the search engines?
by Keith Boswell
Mention the word spam and people automatically
jump to thoughts of their email inbox overflowing
with smut, Nigerian bank scams, and thousands of products
they never knew they needed. It's not until
they experience search engine spam that they realize
that other online mediums suffer from being duped
by mischievous marketers as well.
This past week I was researching an
Inktomi paid inclusion customer's web pages because
they were being penalized in Inktomi's search results
due to their participation in one of many link popularity
schemes. These schemes create pages full of links
shared between participating websites with no editorial
purpose. They exist only to improve a websites ranking
in search results.
Strangely, I also found the same pages
were getting first page rankings at Google for the
same phrases. Was Google, the king of anti-link popularity
schemes, getting fooled while Inktomi was catching
the scheme?
Because search engines rely on link
analysis (aka link popularity or link flux) as one
of the factors for determining relevance, link-popularity
networks can fool the engines into delivering tainted
results. Google has a pending legal action against
SearchKing, a company that sold links to sites looking
to improve their ranking within Google's results.
You must be wary of services and companies
promising thousands of links to your website instantly.
These networks create pages full of links and descriptions.
They sometimes offer participants the ability to choose
the category of sites they want to link back to them.
Perform a search for "link popularity"
at Google and you'll see paid advertising promising
some of these instant results. Even if these networks
deliver results in Google today and you saw the ad
at Google, it doesn't guarantee Google won't
get around to penalizing you in the long run.
The same thing goes for Inktomi. Searching
at HotBot for "link popularity" delivers
sponsored results from Overture right above the Inktomi
results that promote services that help build your
link popularity. The point is, buyer beware.
If you're offered a service
to identify all the websites linking to you and suggest
other sites to contact about linking to you, you're
not really spamming the engines. If you're told
you need to put up an updated page regularly that's
full of links and it will create thousands of links
to you instantly, you're doing something with
the intent of artificially boosting your link popularity.
This is search engine spamming.
An article
from the Wall Street Journal gave examples of
companies who had suffered in their Google rankings
for participating in these networks. A recent article
in Search Day provides another example of a company
discovering that a linking scheme was getting them
penalized by Inktomi.
Don't be swayed by the appeal
of the short term boost from sites advertising "1000's
of links instantly". Instant gratification will
never replace long-term success. It's not worth
getting penalized or kicked out of the engines altogether.
That's when you find out the only way back into
the search engines is through Overture or Google AdWords.
Build your link popularity naturally.
Create appealing content that people can't find
anywhere else. Think of applications or services you
could offer on your website for free that have value
to your market. Remember the concept
of sticky? Think 1996 and content
is king. Sticky sites get linked to organically.
If you can't make your website content
as appealing as you'd like, you need to roll
up your sleeves and start contacting websites relevant
to yours and explain to them why and how their site
should link to yours. Every step you take in marketing
your website without a "guaranteed quick-fix"
is another step towards building a solid, long-term
online business.
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