Forum Moderators: open
I am running out of patience and am too about to jump on the band wagon.
What am I going on about you may ask? Well here it is.....
I am trying to run an honest business here - One website, very comprehensive - no duplicate sites, no nonsense link pages, etc. But I am finding it increasingly hard to compete with the link popularity spammers of the world.
Let me go into more detail:
I sell widgets - blue widgets, red widgets, brown widgets - widgets, widgets, widgets - you name it I sell it.
Heres the problem :
I sell all my widgets off one website www.widgets.com - for red widgets I have a page www.widgets.com/redwidgets for blue widgets www.widgets.com/blueswidgets ,etc, etc. As far as I am aware this is fair practice and not spammy.
In order to promote my website and increase my PR, I spend most days swapping links with other relevant websites. I have found it necessary to setup sub link pages for each widget cataegory and swap links with other specilaist widget sites. E.G on my red widgets links page you will only find links to red widget related sites, on the blue widgets links page you will only find links to blue widget related sites, etc.
PROBLEM: I have ONE website, the competition (IN DROVES) is setting up ONE WEBSITE per category
e.g www.red-widgets.com www.blue-widgets.com ,etc. Its not just a few domains - its HUNDREDS - if not thousands and its not just one or two operators doing this - its MANY MANY MORE.
This gives them an UNFAIR advantage - WHY? Because each of these websites have their own links page and all theses links pages(on all domains) are more or less identical. So all they have to do is find 100 link partners for www.blue-widgets.com and then offer these link partners the opportunity to swap links with www.red-widgets.com, www.brown-widgets.com , etc, etc.
Starting to see the trend?
So poor me, who can only swap ONE link with jo-shmo is competing with these spammers that can swap 100 links with jo-shmo each pointing to all of their separate domains.
See what I mean? Jo-shmo will only link to my site ONCE (One domain - one link). The spammers get 100 links pointing to 100 differnt domains.
My point is that, I and many others are losing ground and if we dont split up our sites into millions of specailist domains and follow these tactics then we will swept under the carpet.
Is this what link popularity and pagerank is all about?
I seriously hope Google and the like are aware of the problems this technology is creating.
I think Google need to include somekind of better filter to pickup on these duplicate external link pages and BAN ENTIRE sites that use these devious tactics. I have seen, on very few occasions, these duplicate links pages getting PR0'd, but the index pages of the domains still have PR7.
Fathom, not sure if you were referring to me...
No, just general observations and stole a quote.
I do think you brought up a few interesting questions in the above post Mark_Candiotti.
To effectively discuss these I've started a new thread.
Single Domain vs Muliple Domain Strategies [webmasterworld.com]
