Link spamming is considered black-hat not just by the search engines but by most legitimate marketers and businesses online.
Google hates it and has designed and put into place algorithms to try and identify this tactic and then penalize the offending website.
The sad fact is that many online businesses that employ outsourcing companies without first having a complete understanding of link building usually find links that have been created for their online business are nothing more than link spam, this can have a huge impact on how a website is indexed in the search engines.
These types of links can end up seeing your online business receive a damaging penalty.
Understanding Link Spamming
Link spamming was used as a way of exploiting a weakness in the search engines to gain top 10 rankings, which is why today you still see marketing companies all over the internet offering this as a guarantee.
However after the Google updates in 2012 and the continuance of this throughout 2013 many of these companies started to disappear and so did the businesses they serviced.
Despite this you can still see many forms of link spamming online today as some are still saying this tactic works and are encouraging others to continue doing this.
Whether this still works or not it is not a solid long term strategy to have for your business and here at MarketingTilt we strongly advise against the use of these tactics.
What Are Some Forms Of Link Spamming
The first is a tactic that has been used very effectively which is called Link Farming, the idea behind this is to create a community of pages and then interlink them all together while sending links back your site to help increase your page rank and search indexing.
The next is called the “Sybil Attack” this is nothing more than malicious intent and should not be done, what happens is links are placed on numerous sites forging different identities. WikiPedia has even been a victim of this type of spam due to the ability to allow open editing on their site.
Another form of link spamming is known as splogging where the user simply adds links to blogs, forums and guest books either by setting up profiles that allow URL links or signatures or comments on another blog including .EDU (EDUCATION SITES) or .GOV (Government Sites). This form of spamming has been identified mainly with affiliate marketers trying to increase page rank and their search index.
Many of the off shore outsourcing companies also use the same techniques with spam comments on blogs and forums, so you need to be careful.
For us article spinning can also be added to this mix where the user has an article and then re-writes it using some form of spinning software, which is then submitted to hundreds of other sites, usually un-related to their niche. The idea behind the spun article is that would be made totally unique on each site, however in most cases the article quality was very poor and so were the sites these articles went to resulting in a very low quality link. This last method was also another reason for the Panda & Penguin updates.
Building links is now more important than ever, you need to get this right the first time or you are risking your business online. Duncan Carver has released a must have 206 page PDF eBook that will step you though every aspect of Building Backlinks the right way. Read More About The Link Building Dossier.
At the end of the day the time it takes to do any of the above spamming techniques you could have spent your time more wisely and built just two high quality links from sites that are related to your niche and you would have seen better results, not just for long term but in the rankings as well two or more well placed links will always far out weigh thousands of low quality spam links.
Answer This Question: Have you used any outsourced SEO companies, did you get the results you expected or did you suffer a devastating Google penalty like many others have. We would really like to here your thoughts and suggestions on this topic.
