For those of you wondering why sites like Sphinn, Digg, Reddit and Propeller are always full of spam the answer is below. People seem to have misunderstood the whole concept of social news sites and are paying money for people to spam them.

For $59.95 at http://linkbuilders.com you can get your site submitted (and probably banned) from all the major social bookmarking sites in just 4 business days.

Social bookmarking is all the rage right now and Google absolutely LOVES this stuff. Sure, building one way links only pays off slowly but it really has to be part of your game plan, your long range plan. Yes, you may get immediate traffic from people visiting social bookmarking sites but the real value is the long term deep link roots. We can build one way links to your interior pages, too.

We will build you 100 one way links, bonafide DOFOLLOW (PageRank is passed) links within 4 business days for only $59.95. You will have links to your business on sites
such as slashdot.org, propeller.com, furl.net, bookmarks.yahoo.com, digg.com and many, many more.

Google can stop this quite easily by removing sites like http://linkbuilders.com from their index and stopping the “upcoming” pages on social news sites from passing value. Social sites can stop this by monitoring and auto-moderating the upcoming queue for phrases that are commonly associated with spam but they don’t seem to bother.

Since I’ve not tested services like this I can’t say whether they work or not. Rumour has it that if you do enough you get some value from them but surely Google shouldn’t be that vulnerable to spam, should it?

Today we found the most amazing links page, it’s got 3260 links in one giant list with no formatting. The page doesn’t even have the sites template.

Check it out here.

Have you ever seen a better links page?

Competitor sabotage is something that website owners and SEO companies need to watch out for, we are developing software to track the problem for our clients but a lot of small companies are unprepared and totally unprotected.

A Blogstorm reader sent this email today, his competitor has hired an SEO company who appear to be deleting as many of his links as possible by pretending to be a web design company.

I can’t imagine sabotaging your competitors is legal, is it?

To whom it may concern,
We are working for a company called XXXXXXX of which they have a link from your site. We are currently undergoing a website redesign and this will extend to the site structure.

As we are going to be making changes to the relevant pages and their page names, we would kindly ask that you remove any links from your website as they may be out of date and could potentially have a negative effect on your own site.

I hope that this request shouldn’t be an issue but if you require any further information please do not hesitate to contact me on this email address.

Kind Regards,
Jim
Senior Web Developer

Everybody is talking about InLinks today. I’ve had access to the system for quite some time but haven’t ever bought or sold a link using it.

Before you get too excited about the opportunity please take some time to actually evaluate the sites offering links. You get to see the post title and a snippet of text before you purchase so it’s not hard to identify the site.

When I first took a look at the system I found that Engadget and Gizmodo were both selling links for $10 per month. Fantastic! Of course it was just scraper sites purely made for selling text links.

Secondly take some time to think about the nature of InLinks compared to normal blog links. A normal blog post has links added at the point of publishing – they don’t have keyword rich links added 6 months down the line.

You won’t get a penalty for adding external links to your old blog posts but it would be easy for Google to give them less weight.

Everybody’s favourite link analysis tool Yahoo Site Explorer has a new look today.

Yahoo should be congratulated and praised for not only making this tool available but spending time to update it as well.

John Wanamaker, a US department store merchant, once came up with the most famous advertising quote of all time:

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.

Read more >>

A study carried out this week by Dave Eaves reveals that mainstream media outlets actually benefit by linking out to their sources.

The study, which takes into account incoming and outgoing links, uses statistical calculations (the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient) to show that there is a strong correlation (0.842733801) between the number of times a site links out compared to the number of links it gets back in return.

In addition the study shows how strong the domains of these mainstream media sources are using the new SEOmoz Trifecta tool.

Most mainstream media sites are quite good at linking out from blogs although some still link less from their main stories and are not always known for crediting their sources.

James Montgomery, Editor of FT.com, points out that:

one needs a clear distinction between “attribution” and “sourcing”, journalistically speaking. Citing a non-FT source would not, generally speaking, meet the FT’s required standards of verification. (Just because something is reported by the New York Times, say, doesn’t make it true, however much we implicitly believe what we read in that newspaper – we have to check for ourselves.)

Just because a blogger writes something before another site doesn’t mean they are the source. A mainstream news site like the FT.com has to publish accurate news – citing a blogger as a source isn’t usually reliable enough.

A strange new bug in the search feature of the Yahoo Directory seems to be showing sites either hosted or extensively cross-linked with the site you are searching for.

For example when you search for Blogstorm which isn’t listed in the Yahoo Directory at present you get a list of sites that Yahoo seems to think are related in some way.

Consumerist.com isn’t a client nor do we have a relationship with them but the other site is an old blog we own.

Other searches to try are bigmouthmedia, justsearching and any other company you can think of (these were the first 2 I found from a quick Google search).

Dave Eaves from seoco.co.uk commented:

I am not very happy about my customers coming up on a search for my name, anyone could find out who they are very quickly and easily.

DaveN reckons it might be “pulling keywords from the pages that they have in the directory listings”. For example Consumerist has the word “blogstorm” on the page so it brings up a match.

In the past I have sometimes thought twice about writing reviews of products on blogs in case Google thought they were paid reviews. A couple of posts from Matt Cutts have got me thinking about where to draw the line.

Take a look at this post and this post, both are promoting products and link to them with some nice anchor text. If the writer wasn’t Matt and the seller wasn’t Amazon then I would be convinced it was a paid review. Pretty cynical I know but if I had written these on Blogstorm I would probably have felt the need to either nofollow the links or write a disclaimer that they were not paid reviews!

My point is that this review was exactly the same as a paid review, even though it wasn’t paid. So to turn things around it seems that I could write a paid review in the same manner and just not disclose that it was paid.

This would be against the Google Guidelines but how would anybody know? Is the review any less trustworthy if money has changed hands?

My view is that trust should flow through links whether they are paid or not – the trust should be based on the trust of the domain giving the link. If The Times starts selling links you can bet they are good ones and should pass trust to the target site. Note that I say “trust”, not anchor text.

If Google started ignoring anchor text from paid links but still let trusted sites pass their trust to other sites that might be a good solution to the paid links problem.