The one that is annoying the hell out of me at the moment is the arrival in my email of what appear to be genuine requests for a link exchange. As I handle the SEO, and linking, for quite a few sites, I see the exact same emails in many accounts despite the fact that these sites have little or nothing in common.

The technique is as follows. The email requests a link to a site that looks good, and informs you that they have already provided a link back, supplying the URL of the page where the link to your site is located. Usually there is quite a bit of text between the URLs, and at first glance it appears that your link is located one click away from the home page of the requesting site. However, if you look closely you’ll find that the site you’re being asked to link to has a different URL. For example, the email text might look something like this:

“We are marketing ( http://www.ZYXsystems.com ) and we feel that reciprocating it with your site should help increase traffic and also search engine rankings to a certain extent.

We have placed a link to your website over here:-
http://www.ZYXsolution.net/web-development.html ”

You’ll then visit the page where your link is located, and it will look decent enough - there probably won’t be more than 10 links on that page, and the link text used will be something taken from your meta-description. The page will have PR0, but sometimes that’s not the point, the site might be new and may increase its Page Rank at the next update. The problem is that if you remove the extension so you’re looking at the main URL, and view http://www.jewelsolution.net what you’ll find is a standard link farm.

I estimate that I’ve been getting 4 or 5 of these requests per site per day. Obviously, because I’ve quite a few years experience in SEO, I always check out every aspect of a proposed link exchange, in particular I look for a link from the home page to the page where the link to my site has been placed - even for the good sites. My worry is that with more and more small sites taking care of their own linking programmes, more and more site owners are going to fall for this scam - and a scam is exactly what it is - and give a link to a good site, passing on PR juice in the process, while getting nothing in return, apart from a link from what can only be described as a bad territory. Link farms are frowned upon by the search engines, to say the least, and there is no good can come of this.

I’d love to hear from any other marketers or SEO folk out there who have encountered this new technique, and hear their views.

I tried with 6 queries, none related to the other, and scrutinised the results delivered until I could figure out which one was best. This is not as easy as you might think, so if you’re going to try this experiment I’d recommend using queries the answers to which you’re already familiar with. For example, I’m often searching for posters of Killing Joke (I’m a fan of the artist who created most of their early art work), so my first query was “Killing Joke posters”. Stuff relating to the Batman comic of the same name does not interest me, so it was easy to spot the fluff. When I chose the results that I felt best matched my query I was surprised to find that Bing! was the hands down winner. Yahoo won the next round. But Google was top of the bunch, winning 4 out of 6.

The experiment was set up by a Microsoft employee, who states “This site is not affiliated with my employer, it is not a Microsoft initiative, it’s simply me having fun in my spare time.” I’d be inclined to believe him.

However, having gotten the links, most site owners tend to forget all about them. Big mistake. It is well worth the effort, and the time, to set aside one day every two months or so to check the sites to see if they are still linking to you. This is especially true if you’ve exchanged reciprocal links, keeping in mind that search engines don’t like broken links. And that you’re passing “link juice” to the sites you link to, so you don’t want to be wasting any.

One of the most popular ways of getting links to your site is through submissions to directories. As anyone who has spent any time making these submissions will tell you, there are literally thousands upon thousands of directories out there. Some are little more than link farms, and these are best ignored, but the fact that there are so many make them an obvious choice for new sites, especially directories that accept free submissions. The length of time it can take to get listed varies, but can be expedited by linking back to these directories, and these links should be checked regularly for a variety of reasons. You may need to remove your links to some of them, for a number of reasons:

• The home page of the directory now has a Google PR of 0
• The directory is now a parked domain
• The directory has vanished
• The link to your site from the directory now goes somewhere else. I recently checked a directory, add32.com, and the link to Avatar led to some Persian site in Farsi!

If you have submitted but can’t find your link in the directory, check out the number of links the directory has, and the number of pending links. Usually a directory displays these numbers alongside one another. If the comparison seems ludicrous, give up on the directory. I found one directory which had a total of 324 sites listed within, and 61,596 sites pending. Obviously this directory isn’t being maintained, was probably set up by someone who thought they could make easy money with Adsense programs and discovered that there’s quite a bit of work involved maintaining a directory, and simply gave up.

Looks good, but will it be able to oust Google? A lot of the stuff it’s talking about has already started to appear in Google, and to be honest, I don’t see anything that hasn’t been done before.

AdAge seem confident that the new engine will be called Bing, and not Kumo as has been previously touted, although there doesn’t seem to be any discussion of why this name was chosen. Regardless of what it is called, Microsoft face an uphill struggle in shifting the balance of power in the fight for our searches, and throwing such a large amount of money at an advertising campaign shows how seriously MS are taking the issue. Whether they’ll be any more successful than all the previous off-line campaigns is anyone’s guess, but the news made me think of past campaigns by search companies begging for our traffic. I did a little bit of searching on youtube to see what I could find, and discovered this gem of a compilation created by the good folk at SearchEngineLand.

The first thing I noticed is the number of now defunct search engines, which should be a sobering thought for the Microsoft team.

These cowboys, for want of a better or more accurate word, have the Adwords Authorised Reseller logo in their email! Are they? Are they really Authorised Resellers for Google Adwords? If so, what does that say about Google’s quality control? The final punch line in this absolute joke of an offer is that there is a  wee asterisk next to their column of figures, and a scan to the bottom of the page reveals that these figures are sourced from “Google AdWords Customer Satisfaction Survey: 12/03-01/04, U.S./Canadian advertisers.”

So there you have it. If you’re seeking a professional company in Ireland to manage your Adwords accounts, this shower of muppets should probably be avoided at all costs. You’d be better off spending your money on a trip to Switzerland, where you could shout your messages from the mountaintops in an unusual musical fashion.

Whatswhat contacted Google, who confirmed that the UK company’s claims are completely false, responding with the following statement

“We’re extremely concerned to learn of companies without affiliation to Google using our name to mislead or mistreat small businesses who want to advertise online. Our legal team investigates such abuses and we continue to work with the relevant authorities to combat the problems caused. We always urge businesses in the UK and Ireland to work only with agencies they know and trust. We have established a programme of Authorised Google AdWords Resellers whom businesses can trust to manage their advertising on Google. Alternatively, they can do this directly with us at adwords.google.com.”

This piece of news was first published at www.irishpressreleases.ie but unfortunately it makes no effort to name and shame the company involved, which is a real shame. If anyone out there has been approached by this company, we’d love to hear about it here at Avatar Web Solutions.

• That brands and businesses can control their message online
• That we own our online data
• Contracting to survive a recession
• That individuals and companies think they own their domain names
• That “Content creates itself.”
• That the “government” knows what its doing
• That having a credit card means you are over 18
• That high traffic volumes equals a successful website
• That they will come if you build it

All these, and more, are discussed on the NetMag site, and in the print magazine. Which I recommend highly.