Apr
17
2008
Here’s a little story for all my tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist friends out there who have reason not to trust Google. (In the interests of full disclosure, I do not trust Google for a variety of reasons (which is an entirely separate blog post). That being said, my opinion is admittedly biased with respect to Google.
But recently, I’ve been tracking a very suspicious phishing campaign (of sorts) that appears to be an attempt to ferret out paid link buyers. I know it might sound a little crazy, and I may just be totally nuts (wouldn’t be the first time I was accused of that) but hear me out on this one.
I recently received several spam emails from several, self-proclaimed “SEO Marketers” looking to sell text links and blog post reviews. The first one that I received appeared totally innocuous:
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Mar
19
2008
There has been quite a firestorm in the webmastering community as of late regarding paid links. Actually for some time now, there’s been heated debate over the use of them, the SEO benefit and whether or not to engage or restrain from using them. Paying for links benefits a web site in 2 ways. First and foremost, a webmaster that buys a link on a web site with a similar theme or similar content theoretically improves the authority of his own site by nature of the “vote” or vouching that the site owner receives from the other web site. The entire paid link industry was born and has thrived from the well-documented search engine bias and improved search engine rankings resulting from the link juice that passes from one web site to another.
Now, Google in their infinite wisdom and unquenchable pursuit to secure FUD has dubbed them unequivocally evil. So eventually, I drank the Kool-Aid on the advice of Matt Cutts and other industry luminaries regarding paid links. But, of course, only after being toasted a time or two as a result of paid links.
I admittedly made the egregious error of “sponsoring” a WordPress template. Cringe and shudder. The site wide link essentially went on to be a hugely popular template that ended up getting thousands upon thousands of off-topic unrelated links that ultimately vaporized the site in the SERPs, particularly in Google. Double-Doh! All it takes is one miserable mistake like that to get screwed hard. So I paid the price… Continue Reading »