from a post about comment spam http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2012/07/most-subtle-spam-ive-ever-seen.html on http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com, this was in the comments
As someone who's stumbled into a job in the internet marketing industry, I'd love to throw in a few facts that I think most people aren't aware of, or at least don't fully grasp the ramifications of. Those periods are indeed a form of what we refer to as "link spam" - in this case, they are the sub-category of "comment spam." The assumption that they're not meant to drive traffic is absolutely correct.
Their sole purpose is to create links pointing at sites that are trying to soak up money from unsuspecting people when they appear on the top of the search engine results pages - or "SERPS."
Yes. This is a black-hat technique. I personally tend to avoid that phrase, because I think it implies that such internet marketers have the level of sophistication of much more intelligent people who are the classic unprincipled hackers/crackers. I prefer to just refer to link spammers with profanity. While this may or may not be the official position of Google, it is widely understood that links pointing to one's website (or "backlinks") have the greatest effect on a page's rankings on the SERPS.
There are a number of things that one can do to sink their page, but in general if you want to rise to the top (and that first result gets roughly 30% of the traffic for the average search) then you need links.
When Minnesotastan (http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com) takes a break and offers links to blogs written by readers, this is EXACTLY what Google is looking for - a respected webmaster offering links that are intended to imply that the targets are trusted. This is the way that Google sorts its index. Unfortunately, the spammer in this case sought to directly co-opt this function by adding links him or herself. This is one of the most classic schemes out there.
Blog comments and message boards which allow free access are inundated by these on a daily basis. The irony is that Google is hip to this. Recent updates to Google's algorithm have targeted sites with "suspicious backlink profiles." If one's website has nothing but thousands of links from websites that either A) are nothing but giant linking pages themselves or B) have anchor text that consists almost entirely of a single keyword related to the targeted page ("Viagra" comes to mind) then a site can pretty much vanish overnight.
The whole operation is a good deal more sophisticated than this, but this is something of a nutshell overview.
It's also for these reasons that there is a link attribute developed by Google and others called "nofollow." This attribute is handled differently by different search engines, but in the case of Google, it is a signal that a link is not considered to be an endorsement of the targeted page. Many blogs (most Wordpress blogs for instance) have this attribute applied universally by default. In fact, it was developed specifically for blog comments sections.
http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2012/07/most-subtle-spam-ive-ever-seen.html#comment-form
As someone who's stumbled into a job in the internet marketing industry, I'd love to throw in a few facts that I think most people aren't aware of, or at least don't fully grasp the ramifications of. Those periods are indeed a form of what we refer to as "link spam" - in this case, they are the sub-category of "comment spam." The assumption that they're not meant to drive traffic is absolutely correct.
Their sole purpose is to create links pointing at sites that are trying to soak up money from unsuspecting people when they appear on the top of the search engine results pages - or "SERPS."
Yes. This is a black-hat technique. I personally tend to avoid that phrase, because I think it implies that such internet marketers have the level of sophistication of much more intelligent people who are the classic unprincipled hackers/crackers. I prefer to just refer to link spammers with profanity. While this may or may not be the official position of Google, it is widely understood that links pointing to one's website (or "backlinks") have the greatest effect on a page's rankings on the SERPS.
There are a number of things that one can do to sink their page, but in general if you want to rise to the top (and that first result gets roughly 30% of the traffic for the average search) then you need links.
When Minnesotastan (http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com) takes a break and offers links to blogs written by readers, this is EXACTLY what Google is looking for - a respected webmaster offering links that are intended to imply that the targets are trusted. This is the way that Google sorts its index. Unfortunately, the spammer in this case sought to directly co-opt this function by adding links him or herself. This is one of the most classic schemes out there.
Blog comments and message boards which allow free access are inundated by these on a daily basis. The irony is that Google is hip to this. Recent updates to Google's algorithm have targeted sites with "suspicious backlink profiles." If one's website has nothing but thousands of links from websites that either A) are nothing but giant linking pages themselves or B) have anchor text that consists almost entirely of a single keyword related to the targeted page ("Viagra" comes to mind) then a site can pretty much vanish overnight.
The whole operation is a good deal more sophisticated than this, but this is something of a nutshell overview.
It's also for these reasons that there is a link attribute developed by Google and others called "nofollow." This attribute is handled differently by different search engines, but in the case of Google, it is a signal that a link is not considered to be an endorsement of the targeted page. Many blogs (most Wordpress blogs for instance) have this attribute applied universally by default. In fact, it was developed specifically for blog comments sections.
http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2012/07/most-subtle-spam-ive-ever-seen.html#comment-form
