Series On Ethics In Internet Marketing - Lesson #2:
Tactics Spammers are Using to Engage You In Potentially Harmful Link Exchanges

Link exchanges. Several years ago link exchanges, quite literally, were all the rage. Many webmasters and SEO’s alike saw link exchanges as a quick and easy way to gain much needed link popularity to a website. In fact a majority of SEO companies openly advertised, as part of their service, to engage a certain number of websites in order to complete link exchanges on your behalf. Some actually still do to this day!

Some took the time to conduct link exchanges in a manner that, were in part, actually creating relevance and were themed to the individual site. Thus creating somewhat content based exchanges. However, the reality is the majority of the webmasters and SEO companies were creating complete “link farms” (defined by Google as link schemes) with trailing pages such as:

Theirsite.com/links16.html and theirsite.com/links17a.html

To put this into perspective lets say we had a website about local produce, for the sake of this discussion we will call it widgetslocalproduce.com. During the “hay day” of link exchanges you would often find a page on widgetslocalproduce.com similar to this:

Widgetslocalproduce.com/links/link15ae.html

The page link15ae.html would carry a plethora of links. At first webmasters would create a single page, typically links.html (or asp - dependent on the technology used) that could include hundreds of links. Some even had thousands. The real estate industry used this technique heavily. Once news started trickling down that Google was only counting a certain amount of each page and only giving a credit to a certain number of links is when the multiple pages started to be put into place.

At first pages were held to 100, than to 20. The thought behind the drop to 20 was to help link exchange partners to receive more PageRank and “link juice” from the exchange. Most of these pages had no rhyme nor reason to who they linked too, they were just a pure intent to artificially increase the PageRank and overall search engine position of their sites. This was evidenced by the myriad of sites that say “widgetslocalproduce.com” would link to like online casinos and mortgage websites.

As you can imagine this quickly became against Googles Best Site Practices.

The Rise of Automated Link Directories
This practice of exchanging links was exasperated by automated link exchange programs such as Zeus, LinksManager, and many other programs that allowed webmasters to put their link exchanges on auto pilot and for awhile it worked… (and to a lesser extent still can on other engines, but always build for Google the others will follow) Abusive link exchanging was well documented and ultimately dropped the relevance of results across all of the major search engines. That’s when Google stepped in with their “Big Daddy Update”. The big daddy update is when Google literally changed how it indexed the web. Sites who were #1 prior to December 2005 were catapulted to the low 200’s or worse, deindexed all together. It sent thousands of business owners, webmasters, and SEO’s into true hysterics (for those who were affected by it that is ) Sites found to be using heavy link exchanges were the kind of sites that were minutely targeted and hit by this massive update.

Fast Forward To Link Exchanges Today
Most SEO’s know the dangers of engaging their clients in link exchanges. Though I must admit we’ve recently run into a rash of clients who were currently working with SEO’s who were still to this day actively engaging and even installing link systems on these clients sites. With all of the information that Google and other search engines have made available to the public, and especially to the SEO community, engaging your clients in unethical search engine optimization practices (as defined by the major search engines) is really unacceptable in this day and age.

Now to the section that is the whole reason for this post
“Black hat SEOs” and just plain unethical webmasters are using linking schemes such as triangle link exchanges, Direct Link Exchanges, and several other forms of exchanges that you need to keep a watchful eye out for so that you can avoid endangering your own website and your current search engine ranking. You may receive an email like this:

We receive emails like this from link exchange spammers several times a day. In fact we get several different emails a week from the same link exchange company. The names of who is sending the email just changes. Sometimes its Annie, sometimes its Peter, and it’s even been Angela, but I think we all know that they are all just different names for the same person, SPAMMER.

Take special note of the subject of the link exchange email: “Following up on my Previous Email”. First we received no previous email. This is note worthy as link exchange spammers use this technique to try to create familiarity and to initially engage you. First by preying on the idea that most small business’ receive hundreds of emails per week. This gives the link exchange spammers a higher potential increase for you to open their email. With spam having such a low open rate it’s critical that they use a subject that will get you to open the email. “Following up” is an A typical way for many vendors to, quite literally, follow up with you their potential client. Link exchange spammers try to use the amount of other spam and legitimate business emails against you.

You will also take note that the link exchange email spam above does not follow the Can-Spam act of 2003 that requires commercial emails to include “A legitimate physical address of the publisher and/or advertiser is present.”

The Moral of the story? If you really want to achieve long term search engine ranking and visibility you will avoid harmful link exchanges requests like the example we give above. These exchanges could potentially cause immense damage to your website and domain. If you do receive an email similar to the above use these resources to report it:

1. Spam Cop
2. FTC - Spam (Government link)

BLATANT PROMOTION: If you want to ethically establish the link popularity of your site WE CAN HELP