Risks of getting spammy links to social profiles

[DiscoStu]

Does anyone have any experience with the risks/benefits involved in building cheap spammy links in to a social profile, say linkedin, and then linking out from that to your websites?

The idea being to boost up your profile page, and then you have a boosted page on a trusted domain that you can use to link to your websites. The concern is that G will devalue that specific page on that domain...any thoughts?

[tedster]

The idea being to boost up your profile page...

And how would spammy links do that? Most likely they would be discounted or ignored by Google. In addition you could be creating a footprint for Google to follow, eventually jeopardizing any site they can see as connected to you as soon as one gets spotted as being over the line.

Also, at least on LinkedIn which you mentioned, I see only graybar PageRank. So I'd say there's no hope for your plan there.

[DiscoStu]

Well, I've read in several places that crappy links can still work if the domain they're ponting to has enough authority.

Checking the backlinks of hijacked .edu pages for the term "buy viagra" etc also shows this in action. It's clearly possible to rank for one of the most competitive terms around by using massive amounts of inbound no-shame spammy links and pointing them to a page on a trusted domain.

I'm just wondering if that page can pass on any juice to something else, and if that would possibly taint the link target (I doubt it, if that was the case it would be way easy to taint competitors sites and hurt their rankings).

You seem to be right about linkedin though, I was just mentioning that off the top of my head, but there are plenty of social media profiles that can get PR 1-2 fairly easily.

How do you mean G can follow the footprint? The only footprints might be on the crappy links, and they're pointing to some major social site?

[edited by: tedster at 11:47 pm (utc) on July 1, 2009]

[tedster]

I was, admittedly, playing devil's advocate. There may be some value in your approach at present, but if so, I think it will be short lived. It is about exploiting a possible loophole in the algo rather than building a solid business plan. That's not the kind of approach that I prefer to take personally - but your mileage certainly may vary.

About the footprint question, I'm certain that such a linking pattern would jump out on a graphic representation - and Google uses exactly those kinds of tools.