Top 5 Stupidest Link Strategies that Might Kind of Work

Well, you know us….

We are really NOT huge fans of spam in any of it’s greasy forms. However, we do confess that some of the slimy things that spammers do are grounded in some measure effective. Otherwise, why would anyone pollute the universe with their dreck?

So, in the interest of full SEO disclosure, here’s a list of very questionable link tactics that seem to bear some fruit. Tainted fruit. Cursed, tainted fruit.

1. Blog comment spam. We hate this shit. No really. If you’ve got a blog, you’ve seen it: “Wow! what an idea ! What a concept ! Beautiful . Amazing.” (Actual comment submitted to us.) They submit this en masse, to pretty much every blog anywhere, hoping enough suckers approve it to give them some link joy. Of course, we do approve them sometimes, only we change the referral name to “Asshat Spammer” just in case whoever hired them takes a look into their referral logs…. Effective? Maybe. This is one of the things SearchDex got in trouble for.
2. Reciprocal link request spam. We hate these too. You know the ones. An email out of nowhere, with boilerplate stuff like “My name is [random name here], Web Marketing Consultant. I’ve greatly enjoyed looking through your site searchmarketingmagic.com and I was wondering if you’d be interested in exchanging links with my website, which has a related subject. I can offer you a HOME PAGE link back from my PR 4 related website… ”  These requests are generated by software, which is purchased by losers who then flood the world with crap hoping to get a link or two from unsuspecting webbies. Does it work? If you send a million spam emails like this, you might get 50 or so links. So if you don’t mind being an asshole, you might get some return on investment. If you want to hate them even more, here’s a kind of fun exposé….
3. Fake blog posting spam. This is where your genius black-hatter might create a host of one-post blogs that are nothing more than a vehicle for a backlink or two.  They are usually sort of on topic with whatever page they’re linking to, but of little to no content value. The content in them is also copied (sometimes with minor changes) from one fake blog to the next. Does it work? Meh. Used to, maybe. Nowadays, while Google likes links from blogs, they seem to lose value if the blog doesn’t update at least semi-regularly. And duplicate content gets picked up pretty easily now.
4. Multi-way reciprocal link network spam. Some of these get complicated. It’s an effort to fool Google by trading links in such a roundabout fashion that the Goog can’t tell they’ve been traded. At first, they were all three-way links: A links to B, B links to C, C links to A. That worked pretty well in the old days. For a while, lots of sites had “link networks” set up. Of course, Google caught on to that. So then it was four-way, five-way, many-way link exchanges, which you can buy your way into pretty easily. Do they work? Maybe, but not very well, unless every site in the network is in a similar topic space. Which would make it kind of easy to spot, we think.
5. Referral log spam. This one is kind of obscure, but still epidemic.  Here’s what they do: using software that mimic internal search engines, they pull lists of blogs within specific topicspaces, then fire off an automated click to all of those sites. What the site gets is fake traffic, but traffic that shows up in their referral logs. Since some small percentage of web hosts leave their referral logs on unsecured severs—in theory—those logs should get spidered and then count as backlinks to the originating site. Does it work? We really kind wonder how it could.  First, do that many hosts really leave their logs unsecured? And second, do search engines really index them? And third, what possible link value could be derived from a giant text page full of thousands and thousands of links? Dunno. But there must be something to it, because the sonsofbitches keep filling up our traffic reports with them.

So there are five link spam tactics that we better never catch you using. Because they suck. And they all pretty much piss us off. And we know where you live.