Linking Schemes for Achieving Google Rankings

Linking Schemes for Achieving Google Rankings
12/30/2004

Google slowed the spread of selling PageRank when they penalized SearchKing and also brought about a keen eye on link spamming. Google stands behind the branding / marketing angle of letting the democratic nature of the web determine relevancy, but just like all other engines they hand edit at least some search results. At least 9 time out of 10 people reporting spam would be far better off focusing thier time on making their own sites better instead of worrying about competitors.

Make content, socially interact, buy / rent / trade links…there are lots of things you can do to make progress. Even if you tell on someone today odds are that another site will replace them tommorow. Just make a kick ass site and get the links required for a search engine to understand that your site kicks ass.

What constitutes a linking scheme? What makes one link valid and another one not? Automated, deceptive, and “for the user” are easy words to use, but then there are also legitimate and cheap techniques that have exceptional power over relevancy. At the end of the day it is just a game of semantics.

A bunch of easy (and often cheap) ways to build linkage data:

* blog comment spam (free – other than bandwidth costs and potential reputation costs)
* legitimate blog comments (free)
* blogrolls (free)
* trackbacks (free)
* wiki spamming (free – other than bandwidth costs and potential reputation costs)
* forum spamming (free – other than bandwidth costs and potential reputation costs)
* guestbook spamming (free – other than bandwidth costs and potential reputation costs)
* leaving testimonials (free – other than potential reputation costs)
* tell someone just how awful they are (free – other than potential reputation costs)
* writing press releases (free – other than the time it takes to write. to distribute on some of the release sites there might be a small fee)
* renting links from websites (cheap – sometimes you can get links from sites for well under their market value. some bloggers and the like may sell links for $5 to $10 a month)
* renting links from brokers or a third party link renting site (usually a bit more expensive than some of the other options, but you are paying for convenience, and they may get you on some sites that you could not have afforded if you had to pay that site directly)
* registering in directories (usually free or cheap one off payments)
* participating in community linking programs (free or cheap)
* support non profits and the like for links (free or cheap – It doesn’t cost me anything to give away my ebook or for a software vendor to give away software. some charities may also provide long lasting or perminant links for a one off fee.)
* general reciprocal links (free – other than time)
* using RSS to get a ton of links (free)
* creating your own link network (cheap – only need to pay hosting and design costs – though if you create link scheme networks you will want to have a good number of them that are not cross connected so if your network gets penalized you still have other income sources.)
* buying out old sites and fixing them up (cheap – I have been offered top level category sites in DMOZ which were one of the top three or four sites in their category as ordered by PageRank in the Google Directory for a one off $2,000 fee.)
* buying out old community sites and entering them into community linking programs (cheap)
* renting links on a site and entering those link slots into a community linking program (cheap – pay for links from one site and get links from a wide variety of sites.)
* actually posting things people would want to link to (free)
* lots of other stuff I probably forgot to post…

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Guest Columnist Aaron Wall is the Author of SEO Book

Posted by — GuestColumnist @ 10:02 am