Dolemite - 12:22 am on Jun 10, 2003 (gmt 0)

An SEO that has a competitor of mine as a client has a very simple, yet effective, linking strategy that has paid off in a big way in Google SERPs: adding inconspicuous links to other clients' domains (and in some cases the SEO's site) on the bottom of every page of each client's site.

This has collectively added up to several thousand backlinks (measured by ATW) and solid PR7's for the sites that have been clients for a few months. The SEO site itself is now a PR8 with over 50,000 ATW backlinks.

In my mind this is something that has no value to the user, and only designed to boost SERPs, and therefore should be considered spam. It seems to have evaded any crosslinking filter thus far, in part I think because he's working with a large number of sites and is able to crosslink them very "loosely". I.E., not every site links to every other site, though each individual site links to a select set of sites. So some links are one-way, others are reciprocated, but speaking in web-graph terms, there are too many nodes and too few closed cycles to reliably detect the crosslinking with an algorithm.

I'm sure everybody's thinking "this is what the spam report was made for" and believe me, I intend to report this extensively, but I also feel it bears mentioning here as a cautionary tale to webmasters/SEOs and as a notice to Google.

The sad truth is that artificial off-page SEO-spam is working and Google's spam filters are not. I'm sure that's part of what this update is about, and I'm confident that this will never be a good long-term strategy thanks to Google's diligence, but its very frustrating to see it paying off in the meantime. Sometimes I wonder if the real lesson is "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" and I'm often tempted to buy a bunch of domains and do something similar, but I just can't bring myself to knowingly deceive the user or put so much effort into anything that will later be cast aside by a few lines of spam-detection code. The problem is you'll always have some competitors who have no such morals, and some SEOs just take the cake in that category.