Are you making these Deadly SEO Mistakes?

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 by: Ed Zivkovic

Black Hat SEO: Web Spamming and Linking to Bad Neighborhoods

So you want to exchange links with other web sites in order to get higher search engine rankings?

So you want to create hundreds of auto-generated, keyword rich pages for your site?

Before you go and link to every website that is willing
to exchange links, it would be a good idea to know where not to link
to. Sometimes it can mean not linking to your own sites.

Firstly, lets take a look at the Google webmaster guidelines page which states:

"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase
your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web
spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be
affected adversely by those links."

I know that Google is not responsible for all search
engine traffic, but it is a good guide to follow because other engines
seem to be following along the same lines.

So what is a web spammer?

A web spammer is someone who creates hundreds or
thousands of keyword rich pages in order to create the illusion of a
themed site with related pages. These sites can be composed of sneaky
redirect pages, doorway pages, gateway pages and now the latest craze
seems to be auto generated directories. SEO circles call these types of
pages "search engine clutter".

The Professional Web Spammer

The aware, professional web spammer places the search
engine clutter on a secondary domain and looks for link partners. If
you exchange links with these webmasters, you will be at risk of
getting a penalty if one of those sites gets banned.

These sites are created on disposable (secondary)
domains and they all link or redirect to a main selling website which
does not link back to the spam pages. Usually, all the secondary
domains link to each other too.

This professional knows all about not using the standard
web page templates that come with the auto directory generation
software. This webmaster is clever enough to realize that common
templates will be easy to detect by search engines which means that the
web spam site will get banned very quickly. This webmaster will rebuild
the pages from scratch which is usually a good way to avoid detection.

The Amateur Web Spammer

The amateur web spammer, hungry for high search engine
rankings will purchase software which creates search engine clutter and
make the mistake of not creating a disposable domain to serve these new
pages and they will use the basic easily detected templates to generate
the web site.

They upload these pages to their main site and link to
them. The problem with this is that if a search engine perceives these
auto-generated pages as spam, it will penalize, the site that links to
them as well as remove the clutter from the index.

Sometimes these sites do not get detected straight away
which means that they could have a decent amount of Page Rank, but is
it worth taking that chance? Your biggest challenge will be to develop
the ability to detect these types of pages with the naked eye.

One Linking Myth Exploded

Please understand that you will not receive a penalty if
web spam or a bad neighborhood links to your site. It is the other way
around. It is only if you link to web spam or a bad neighborhood that
you risk getting penalized.

There is much misunderstanding regarding this issue.
Look at it from a logical point of view. If this were true that you
would get a penalty, all you would have to do to eliminate all your
competition would be to create some web spam and link to your
competitors. So it is plain to realize that you cannot get a penalty if
web spam links to you. It's the other way around.

So what is a bad neighborhood?

I do not know how exactly to define a bad neighborhood
because a bad neighborhood is not a bad neighborhood until it gets
defined as such by a search engine. Examples include Free For All Links
pages (FFA s), Link Farms and useless directories designed to do
nothing more than create the illusion of a themed web site.

A good guide to follow would be not to link to any site
which does not contain useful information or relevant content. More
info about bad neighborhoods here: http://www.v7n.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11376

The Obsessive Compulsive SEO practitioner

The obsessive compulsive SEO practitioner will go to any
length to get top search engine rankings quickly. It is sort of like
gold fever. The bug bites and it becomes difficult to let go of the
insanity.

This webmaster is always looking for the easier softer
way. The delusion is strong. The insanity has got a grip of the
obsessive compulsive SEO. In the end, when they get sick and tired of
getting banned, they swear off Internet Marketing altogether claiming
that everybody in the industry is a rip off artist.

The problem is that they got exposed to rubbish before
they discovered the good stuff. They have been permission marketed by
someone they trusted and ended up wasting a lot of time. (and I do mean
a lot of time)

Why not create a legitimate web directory?

Here is some good stuff. In the long run, it seems to me to be a lot easier to go to a script archive like hotscripts.com or scriptsearch.com
and search for terms like "toplist", "directory" "community" and
"portal". These single one word search terms will produce many results
which contain scripts which will do a much better job of creating a
directory than the latest auto-directory generation software sold by
Internet marketers who own big mailing lists of newbies.

Many of these scripts are free and there is some really
excellent ones you can buy. The point here is that you can create a
useful web site with these scripts which you will be proud to link to.

Copyright 2004 Ed Zivkovic

About the Author

The author, Ed Zivkovic owns his own website which contains articles, tips, tricks, free downloads and more. Here is the site: http://www.ezau.com.

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