Industrial web design and flash animation was done by the talented BMD Studio in Adelaide.

Visit the site at www.areaconstruction.com.au

It smelt like a Google penalty, in particular a -50 penalty. But I didn’t understand, we hadn’t purchased any links, all of the links we obtained were on topic, relevant, using a range of anchor text. So I went to the source to see the outcome. Googling the clients URL I discovered they had over 600 links, amazing since we’ve only created about 60 for them, six months ago they had about 70, so something odd was going on. Close inspection of the sites linking to them revealed a heap, I’d be guessing at least 500 sites, were other Australian businesses with links pages.

And then it twigged. I’d remembered the client was involved in the Traffic Accelerator Program last year. They hadn’t created a links page themself, but every month they were emailed a list of websites to link to, including the anchor text and description.  So presumably, all the other companies involved in the program had also been emailed my clients details and asked to add them to their links pages.

That means about 500 sites are linking to my client with exactly the same anchor text and description. Clearly Google doesn’t like that, so they’ve updated the algorithm.

These pages are spammy, but more importantly they are just not useful – they add no value for anyone! The title on the pages is either links, resources, useful links, useful websites, or some other red flag that says to Google “I am spam” or something to that effect. They link to other websites that are completely unrelated to each other and provide no value to the user whatsoever. If you Google the URL of any of the sites in the Netregistry Traffic Accelerator video you will see the what I mean. Obviously for the companies that appear in the video their sites are strong enough to take take the penalty, which indicates they have a number of links that outweigh the spammy links, but for most in the program, these links would be all they had.

I’ve always maintained links pages and reciprocal linking are a waste of time. Now it seems they are detrimental.

Those mischievous chaps over at SEO Black Hat have written about Google’s black hole. A very real phenomena that happens frequently. It’s not what you think either, not about being page 1 one day and no-where to be found the next, although that too happens a lot. No, this is about the power of authority sites and how they dominate 70% of the top rankings.

Read the article here http://seoblackhat.com/2008/09/08/black-hole-seo/

Anyhow I notice today there is a new player when you Google SEO Services. Number one is a company called Web Dynamic. They have a really good looking professional site, but scratch the surface a little and it’s not so professional.

If you click the first link you’re taken to a page titled SEO Services, still looks good, you’re in the Search Engine Marketing group, you click the tab and you’re taken to an equally as nice page talking about search, you can’t see a link back to the page you just came from, but that doesn’t really matter does it? Well, yes.

This is a well designed site, it doesn’t look like the kind of site that forget about a link. So a bit of investigating discovers there are more than 13 orphan pages all dedicated to the same subject:

1. SEO
2. SEO Australia
3. SEO Services
4. SEO Services Company
5. Search Engine Optimisation Provider
6. Search Engine Optimistion Consultant
7. Search Engine Optimisation Strategy
8. Search Engine Optimisation Company
9. Search Engine Optimization
10. Search Engine Optimization Services
11. Search Engine Optimisation Australia
12. Search Engine Optimization Australia
13. Search Engine Optimization Specialist

See them all live on Google and on their page, www.business-directory-online.com.au, where the SEO person obviously just got bored and posted everything. They all contain pretty much the same content, just re-written in different ways and prominent use of the keyword.

I hear what you’re saying – it’s not spam and it’s not against Google webmaster policy to write the same page more than 13 different ways (I got bored of counting all of them). But, wait – there’s more!

These pages all have inbound links. From crappy domains. The spammy domains:

http://search-engine-optimisation.org.au/

http://web-designer.org.au/

http://online-marketing.org.au/

http://website-optimisation.org.au/ etc – there’s rather an impressive collection of .org.au’s.

All of these domains are registered to the same guy who has registered the webdynamic.com.au domain.

Whilst they may not have breached any guidelines what they are doing is filling the web with spam, actually no, they have breached, just looking at the Google Quality Guidelines – basic principles:

“Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

Mmm…I think not.

p.s. I’m not being narky – it’s all part of learning what makes a quality page one result. This ain’t it.