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I went over to alltheweb.com and found that he actually had 18,000 backlinks. Immediatly I saw that many of them were guestbooks, so I did this search:
"link:site.com -guestbook" and now I only got 216 results. This means he has backlinks nearly exclusively in guestbooks - and it works.
This surprises me, because everyone here is always talking about how important it is to avoid links in guestbooks. Is this still true? And could there be some other reason for his high SERP?
No cache for the page, I'm guessing either gray or white bar, but the guestbook links are still there.
I don't know for how long it worked, but it did...probably not a long term strategy worth pursuing.
However, if all you care about for your domain is tomorrow, and not two months or more from now, link away :) It'll work for a time.
This is exactly what I was thinking. The original post says this site has just a PR6. I've literally seen teenagers with home pages that were PR6 because they managed to get just a handful of links from pages with good PR. Now if these 18,000 guestbook links got him a PR8 I might say that this is something. But a PR6? Think about this for a second. How long do you think it would take to find and sign 18,000 guestbooks? The time factor here has to be huge. He should have been able to get a PR6 a LOT easier by just spending his time on the site and asking other webmasters for links. If it takes 18,000 guestbook links to get a PR6 on Google, this just proves that this is something Google need not worry much about, as this is an effort only a handful of insane webmasters would do. ;)
Now dont go getting me started on Gator.......
Yes, I was following the links given on a WebmasterWorld thread earlier this week, which led me to a hotel site with a guestbook. There was an identical long, spam filled entry from one link seeker no fewer than 4 times in the same guestbook.
Presumably the guest book owner never looked at his own guestbook, otherwise he would have cleaned out that and all the other link seekers.
Unless of course you are signing guestbooks with your competitor's URL to get them banned from Google.
About half an ahour to sign 1000 guestbooks ... I have such a spammer software, but no longer use it. ;)
So this shall be banned by google.com in automated way .. as to get these links is very easy - the script is not very complex to do it.
I don't mind people doing this - I just mind that it works with Google.
It makes me want to set up a temporary site which advertises heavily for my main site, and just pull the same stunt: buy the software and submit the temporary site to 20,000 guestbooks. It obviously works, and if I do get penalized, I just close the temp site (and set up a new one).
thanks for bringing this up again! unfortunately guestbook links do count. in some keyword-areas websites with only guestbook-links dominate the serps which is a pain in the *** if you want to be visible without joining the guestbook-team. :-( this is why many people on WebmasterWorld hope that google will filter them entirely as soon as possible. hope GG has spotted this thread and related ones.
In reviewing their links, I saw one was a site that claimed "to end searching for reciprocal links forever". This program claimed that one reciprocal link to them will result in 10,000 links to other sites. This is the only explanation I could come up with to explain this sudden burst of links. Can something like this work?
They may not be filtering them entirely, but from that original post I have to figure Google in some way is filtering most of them. Note in the original post it mentions the site has 18,000 guestbook links, and 216 non-guestbook backlinks. All this gets is a PR6. Huh? I've seen many sites that are PR6 that only had a few dozen backlinks. How come with those 18,000 guestbook links this site is just a PR6? The only explanation that comes to my mind is that Google is spotting guestbooks, and not letting PR pass on. To have gotten 18,000 guestbook links could only come about by using a bot to find and sign them. Well, if these could be found by the bot this site used, the could *also* just as easily have been spotted by the Google algo. Google has programmers with PhD's. I have a strong suspicion that site is PR6 just from those 216 non-guestbook links.
Of course, no algo could be perfect with this. Almost all guestbooks are running off the shelf software that should be easy to spot by an algo. Even I could write the code that would spot almost all guestbooks. However, there is going to be cases where a site has a guestbook where the site owner wrote his own code and the algo would miss it. And, some site owners may have modified off the shelf guestbook code such that the algo wouldn't recognize it. Plus, new guestbook code will enter the market from time to time, and there will be a delay before Google adds how to recognize it to the algo. Thus, always a small number of guestbook links will slide under the radar, and a handful of site will do well with guestbooks. Anything done by the algo will always miss some guestbooks. This explains the occasional site that makes it pay off.
George
Obviously there would never be a penalty in that case. Stop and think. This is what you'd expect a lot from sites that used guestbooks the way they were intended. Webmaster comes by, and makes some comment about the site he found. I know a woman who, if she comes across a site with a guestbook ALWAYS signs it. She doesn't even know about Google PR. I think the reason she does it is she has a personal site without log access. Thus, about the only feedback she gets about her site is through the guestbook she has on it. I'd have to figure at this point that she has signed at least a couple hundred guestbooks by now.
Of course, the dream around here of folks is to find that mythical PR8 guestbook with just a few links on it and sign it. Worst case scenario is Google just won't count the links. Also, this very thread proves a point I made some time back about if guestbook links could get a site banned, all a competitor has to do is hire some bored teenager to sign his competition to hundreds of guestbooks. It is even easier than that. There is no way that site with 18,000 guestbook links did that by hand. They obviously have a bot that does it. That same bot could be used by someone to sign their competitor's URL to 18,000 guestbooks. If Google bans sites for guestbook links, standard SEO practice will be to use such a bot to sign the URLs of your clients competitors to thousands of guestbooks.
YOU ARE RIGHT! I never thought about this... a complicated case this guestbook spam thing..
The whole reason behind acquiring in bound links is to build real valuable market relationships between sites so that YOUR VISITORS can find the information they are seeking...it is very unlikely that any significant (if any at all) traffic will result from guestbook entries and Google definitely frowns on this type of stratagy just to increase PR....this is akin to link spamming...
Please don't try to take short cuts to the top...Google probably doesn't show the in bound links via their link check because of the low value nature of guestbook entries...
The other site you mention may just have one or two high value in bounds and this could do the trick
Don't build for the PR algo...build for your intended audience..
<meta name="sitetype" content="guestbook">
If Google dedects this Tag i won't increase the pr of all linked sites! It will take some time till this tag is generally known, but it might work and Gustbooks can be still indexed without giving the oppurtinity to be used for pr-spam.
Apart from that: I suggest to all webmasters to set the NOINDEX Metatag in their Guestbook sites, like all Gustbook Script Programmer should do so, because most Webmasters don't really know the reason why their Guestbook is used for spam. Most Spamers search for "Guestbook", so if your guestbook isn't indexed you will get at least very few spam entries.
Greetz,
syco
P.S. sorry for my bad English ;)
Wouldn't work. Spammers wouldn't care. They'll spam every guestbook they can. Remember, even without Google PR people would be spamming guestbooks for the click through traffic.
18 thousand links for a PR6 doesn't sounds like a good deal as far as effort to locate spamming software, pay for it, install it, run it, etc. for a PR6. But if you send me the site, we'll use the backlinks to improve our algorithms even more.
Nice that this thread got posted because we were looking for a little more data on this. Anyone who knows of a site that seems to be using guestbook signing successfully, drop a note over at the spam report form. We'll tighten up the algorithms.
Out of curiosity I went to Google and looked for UK hotels with guest books, went into those guest books, and bingo, straight away found a couple of sites using guest books for spaming on a large scale.
Go to one of those spammers, do a link:www.spammer.com, look through their links, check out a few of the entries in the same guestbooks as they are shown to be in, and soon you have a fair list of how its done.
Its difficult for me to say how big it is, but those that are into it seem to be keen users of guest books.
I went on to look for guestbook submission services or software and again bingo
Submission To Over 1,000,000 Guestbook's $99.95 USD
The company offering it have various alternative deals ;)
>>18 thousand links for a PR6 doesn't sounds like a good deal as far as effort to locate spamming software, pay for it, install it, run it, etc. for a PR6.
If they can get it (and more) for $99.95 then it is a (relatively) cheap way of buying links
Interestingly the company offering the service is a sponsored link on Google ;) ;)
I would never have thought of searching for that. Quite an intriguing find cornwall.
Brilliant in fact!
They are only PR4 however, why is that? Do they not trust their own methods?
with 5,500 links seems they do it too! (alltheweb)
And I was worried because I have been to one or two guest books, phew, I had not realised it ran so deep.
George
Very interesting indeed Cornwall! In fact, it bleeds irony. Tightening the algo ...we will get rid of them. If they pay, however, well...
Tonight, a client told me about editorial refusal at Overture, I told her to go to Adwords, you will have no problem.
As far as guestbooks are concerned, as long as PR is the basis for ranking, there will ALWAYS be ways to exploit Google's intention in using PR. It is a cat and mouse game (a very expensive one for Google) that unfortunately will never end. Hence the re-postering...
Greater adoption of this relatively simple technique would work wonders, in fact I've seen a company offering a service using the same technique to do email spam filtering.
It 100% works anywhere you want to stop a bot doing a human's job.
Perhaps G should get pyra to market it ;o
