Slightly Shady SEO | Blackhat is Back, Baby.

For anyone who concentrates on link building, there’s always a fear of setting off Google’s dreaded red flags to a sandbox/penalization. We can avoid this much easier if we take a look at the SEO related tactics that no longer work anymore, and how Google is most likely looking for these. By adapting our setup to avoid these, and checking them for ourself, we can use a naughty “link gathering” scheme, without getting caught. Hopefully.

As always, this entry is based on my personal observation, and as such, I can guarantee nothing.

• Tactic #1: Link Farms - Link farms are not a thing of the past. But they have gotten much trickier to implement, and they often get caught. Let’s examine.
  • The Original Incarnation: The original incarnation of a link farm was a series of websites which the owner would drop his own links. They were frequently hosted on the same IP or C class IP block.
  • The Modern Incarnatation: Parasite hosted splog farms, or carefully setup link farms.
  • How Google Filtered Them
    • Discrediting links from link on the same C-Class IP(lightly), and from the same IP(heavily)
    • Scanning multiple sites for their outbound links, mapping to see how frequently they linked to the same domains, and how similar the content within the domains is.
    • Attempting to ban/discredit domains with junk generated content.
  • How To Avoid This Filter
    • Parasite hosting, or having cheap hosting accounts for each site using a different provider.
    • Having a high signal to noise ratio. Most link farms hog their link juice by only linking outbound to their money sites. By injecting links to a lot of outside domains that have to do with the given niche into the content, you make it harder to relate the domains back to the link farm. For example, look at the SEO world of blogs. We interlink a lot. There’s a lot of us on different IPs. And we all link to the same set of probably 40 domains pretty frequently. And yet we set off no filters, since we link outbound to a fair amount of unique domains as well.
    • Having decent content. This is not to say you should be vying for a Pulitzer prize or anything. But either generate content so it’s not gibberish, or pay a lot of offshore workers to make posts on the link farm. My personal favorite was a friend whose fiance was a elementary school teacher. He just did a simple synonym switch/grammar repair on the papers the kids turned in. They were all within a similar niche(the assignment topic), and decent enough to pass a content review.
• Tactic #2: Paid Links
  • The Original Implementation: There were several ways to do this. Direct solicitation,text link networks, paying for blog posts.
  • How Google Filtered Them: There’s no way to be 100% sure how they’re detected. They can come in through manual reports first off. Other suspected avenues are infiltration of the larger networks. The way they’re actually confirmed is the important part though. Random topics in blogs, similarities in outbound linking profiles(like that done for link farms), these are all cues
  • How to Avoid This Filter: Privately arranged, word of mouth deals, where the link comes from a site within the proper niche.
• Tactic #3: Link Spamming
  • The Original Implementation: Originally, it was a numbers game. 100%. Drop as many as you can as fast as you can. Screw the fallout. Blogs, messageboards, wikis, whatever.
  • The Modern Incarncation: Cleaning your list, or more targetted, unique link spam that goes unnoticed.
  • How They Filtered It:
    • Link Velocity: It’s hard for link spam to maintain a constant speed of posting links. Eventually they run dry.
    • Link Temporization: Links that dissappear to quickly(aka are moderated) count against a new site.
    • Manual Spam Reports
  • How To Avoid This Filter
    • Link Velocity: Promote multiple sites simultaneously. Then re-use the list over again. The overall rate goes down, but it can be maintained more easily while still promoting at the maximum speed.
    • Link Temporization: Clean your list. Keep track of where your posts are sticking, and where they’re not.
    • Manual Spam Reports: Watch your incoming referrers, and clean those off your list.

Aren’t filters lovely?

If anyone has some red flags/tactics I missed, drop em in the comments and I’ll do a second installment.

Posted on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 2:02 pm in the category:google, seo. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment it , or trackback this post.