Best SEO Blog|Launch your site.

I recently jumped on Steve Wiideman about his name for SEO Standards. He came to my attention because I occasionally search on the term “SEO standards”. Of all the buzz expressions used by our industry, this one seems to me (along with “best practices”) to do us the most collective harm in an unintended way.

We are an industry without standards, as has oft been noted. It SHOULD — in my opinion — come as a surprise, therefore, that people mention standards. It’s okay for people like Wiideman to open a discussion about standards, even to propose standards. But is it okay for companies selling SEO, eCommerce, Web design, and search reputation management services to say they are complying with industry standards (or to suggest as much through similar if less specific language)?

To be honest, while writing this article I attempted to see what Visible Technologies says about standards with respect to our SEO and reputation management services. Some older content seems to have said something about (implied) internal standards but in one of our recent Web content consolidations that Web document was deleted.

There is a press release from last year about Visible joining the Online Reputation Management Association and working with them to establish professional standards. I don’t know what the current status of our involvement with ORMA is — I know that some of our staff have been working with the organization over the past few months.

Standards are important to me for quite a few reasons. I feel that standards confer a certain amount of accountability upon an industry or trade group. But too often I think people confuse standards with certifications and it needs to be said (perhaps more than once) that you can have standards without certifications but you cannot have credible certifications without standards.

Standards, of course, can be either industry-wide, group-wide, or singular. That is, you as a consultant or a service providing company can set your own standards. Publishing a personal or company standard helps set client expectations. I know from personal experience that client expectations can be fuzzy at best and specifically wrong at worst.

There have been a few attempts in the past to create some standards. For example, the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO) mentions a Metrics and Standards Task Force that appears to have no current members. Their first two initiatives were, perhaps, overreaching. The organization’s FAQ page even goes so far as to say: “SEMPO is not a standards body or a policing organization. Membership in or involvement with SEMPO is not a guarantee of a particular firm’s capabilities, nor does it signify industry approval or disapproval of their practices.”

Disavowing involvement with standards while proposing them is not, in my opinion, an optimal way to engage in the discussion. I think that politics (fear) prevented SEMPO from following the path it should have taken. It doesn’t have to become the SEO police force — it SHOULD be proposing standards for discussion and adoption.

We have the freedom to formally or informally adopt and support standards. I think the informal approach may be so low-key that few people will follow it — but a formal approach would demand much more time and effort than I can commit to (and SEMPO obviously failed to make it happen). So let’s try the informal approach.

The Informalist SEO Standard

Therefore, I offer the following informal standards for discussion. You can informally adopt them by publishing a Statement of Standards on your Website. But before you jump aboard the standards bandwagon (or try to run it off the road), make sure you really understand what standards mean and can do for our industry.

• Professional Services Website – An SEO firm or consultant should publish a Website that at the very least explains who the firm or consultant is, where they do business, how to contact them, and what services they offer.
• Statement of Standards – An SEO firm or consultant should publish a Statement of Standards on their Website to convey to their peers, customers, and industry observers the desire to establish, maintain, and honor a minimum professional level of accountability and performance. In the absence of an industry standard, a self-published Statement of Standards provides guidance on what others can expect.
• Professional Lexicon – An SEO firm or consultant should publish on their Website a concise glossary of SEO-related terms they use in their communications with clients and peers. This concise glossary of terms should acknowledge in a disclaimer that other terminology or alternative usage may be found throughout the industry.
• Professional Credit Courtesy – An SEO firm or consultant who rewrites, annotates, analyzes, or otherwise extensively uses the work of another SEO firm or consultant to represent their methods or ideas should acknowledge the direct and indirect significant contributions made by original authors and sources.
• Guarantees and Limitations of Performance – An SEO firm or consultant should publish a statement in clear language explaining or disclaiming any and all guarantees and limitations of performance. I don’t mean you should make promises (or decline to make promises). I mean you should make it clear that you do or do not make promises, commitments, and/or guarantees of performance. Don’t leave to everyone else to figure out whether you do (or do not).
• Statement of Unacceptable Practices – An SEO firm or consultant should publish a statement on their Website indicating what practices they will not use on behalf of clients. I would avoid use of subjective and provocative language like “black hat”, “white hat”, “ethical”, and “unethical”. Just say what you will NOT do.
• Statement of Work Practices – An SEO firm or consultant should use clear and concise language (including references to their Professional Lexicon where necessary) to explain specific work practices they employ in their work, in the event that they publish details about specific practices.
• List of Recommended Resources – An SEO firm or consultant should publish a list of resources (books, Websites, conferences, workshops, classes, etc.) they recommend to people for further study in the field of search engine optimization. This list should be disclaimed in some way to show that it is neither complete nor authoritative.
• Acknowledgement of Diversity of Opinion – An SEO firm or consultant should include a statement on their Website and in all work-related proposals that much of the work performed as “search engine optimization” is offered amid a diversity of opinion regarding the best practices, best resources, and best methods.

This is a pretty short list for several reasons. First, I think people need to see that creating and complying with standards is not the hypertensive organizational nightmare it has sometimes been made out to be.

Second, I think we can easily recognize the fact that most reputable SEO firms and consultants already do many of these things. By getting everyone to agree that we’re already following some “standard practices” (for the most part), we can move the conversation forward.

Third, I feel it’s important to illustrate that standards don’t recommend specific training programs. There will hopefully come a time when we can look at SEO training programs and see which ones offer the best, most well-rounded opportunities for acquiring or advancing search optimization skill and knowledge.

We can easily suggest standards for training classes, such as providing concise guidelines what to expect (nearly every training program I have looked at does this), providing verifiable background information on trainers (many but not all programs I have looked at do this), and covering a minimum of topics that are generally agreed upon as important for basic search engine optimization (keyword research, content creation, link building, analytics and analysis).

But suggesting a standard is easier than persuading people to adopt it. Some of the most ardent opponents of creating SEO standards have helped to set the tacit standards that I am documenting in this proposal.

If you want to help support this initiative, there are several things you can do:

1. Tweet, Sphinn, Stumble, and otherwise blog about or link to this article (using redirects and nofollows is okay with me)
2. Adopt the term “Informalist SEO Standard” and use it in your advocacy
3. Publish a Statement of Standards on your Website and make reference to the Informalist SEO Standard. You can say something like, “This Statement of Standards was modeled upon the Informalist SEO Standard proposed by Michael Martinez on Best SEO Blog.”
4. Write a response offering your thoughtful rebuttal on your own blog. At the very least, keep the conversation going.
5. Mention the Informalist SEO Standard at conferences and workshops. Don’t assume people know about it. TELL them about it.
6. Volunteer if you have the time and the passion. You can try to work through SEMPO or just go straight to the International Standards Organization or American National Standards Institute to study their recommendations for developing or proposing new standards.

Creating standards is a long, long process. It won’t happen overnight. There is way too much fear in our industry. I think that fear undermines people’s professional development. Some people would argue they aren’t so much afraid as apathetic — they just don’t care about standards.

But if that’s the case, then are these really the people upon whom you want part of your professional credibility to rest?

We’ll always be viewed with some suspicion and disbelief, criticized, and otherwise taken to task by people who don’t believe in search engine optimization. But we can weaken their arguments against our work by showing everyone that we can come together to create and maintain at least a minimal set of professional standards.

Written by Michael Martinez

UPDATE: Please review the comments. It appears I was confusing behavior from Thesis and other themes with at least one SEO plugin. I don’t have time to revise this article sensibly to reflect my error.

The All In One SEO Plug-in for Wordpress and similar add-ons for blogs are some of the most popular tools people rely upon when optimizing their blog-based sites.

Over the past year I have found more and more Websites suffering from lost search visibility that I have traced back to or suspected could be traced back to use of the “All In One” SEO Plug-in or other so-called “SEO-friendly” plug-ins.

And there are a lot of them.

These tools are proving to be a real disaster for the general Web population because most people don’t know enough about administering a Website or blog to understand how to control the stupid assumptions that the SEO plug-ins make.

The people who write these plug-ins may think they know SEO but you can tell them I’m on the record as saying they don’t know nearly enough to justify what they are doing. These guys have absolutely no business writing SEO plug-ins for blogs.

The basic SEO plug-in mentality has become almost ubiquitous. I see people refer to these plug-ins frequently and liberally as “must have” options. When I ask why they think the plug-ins are so important, they almost universally give me three reasons:

1. The (SEO) plug-in lets you change your page title
2. The (SEO) plug-in lets you write a meta description
3. The (SEO) plug-in lets you create a custom page URL

When these plug-ins first hit the market a few years ago the SEO community jumped on them because Wordpress and other blog platforms did not let you customize your page structures.

That’s no longer the case. Wordpress, for sure, lets you set custom titles, meta descriptions, and page URLs. It’s very easy to do this. Just look at the form where you type in your blog post.

Of course, fans devoted to these plug-ins will be quick to point out that they provide other features. Sure they do. Some of those features may actually even provide some value.

But the real problem with “All-In-One” and other SEO plug-ins is that they are attempting to hide pages, hide links, and otherwise sculpt PageRank.

And in case you didn’t get the memo, GOOGLE SAYS THIS IS A STUPID THING TO ATTEMPT. They don’t use those words — those are my words, but the message is the same.

Google told people they changed how PageRank was flowing on pages that include nofollowed links about two years ago because people were screwing up their search results trying to sculpt PageRank.

That’s right, all the genius PageRank sculptors didn’t know what they were doing.

So here we are in 2010 and people are coming out of the woodwork claiming their copy is not being indexed by Google for as much as 7 days. I’ve been following these complaints in volume since January. I have responded to very few of them.

In every case where I have examined a Website in question I found one of two (or two of two) problems: the sites were either using “rel=’nofollow’” on their internal links and/or they were using “noindex,nofollow” on their tag and category pages.

These HTML directives were all embedded by SEO plug-ins like “All-In-One” (and there are more out there — they are all guilty).

People are flabbergasted when I suggest to them that they turn off or remove these plug-ins. Why? Because they want to be able to change their page titles, meta descriptions, and page URLs. Not because they want to sculpt PageRank, but because they want to perform very basic functions that Wordpress now lets you perform (not that these bloggers have enough knowledge of SEO to be doing this anyway — but that’s beside the point).

On the rare occasion where I’ve persuaded people to disable the plug-ins and they’ve gotten back to me, they’ve told me their sites were suddenly being indexed.

Frankly, too many people are trying to optimize for search through plug-ins. Technically, there is no technical reason to use any of these plug-ins. I would fire any SEO technician working for me who insisted on using a plug-in — I don’t need that kind of incompetence on my team.

It’s okay to experiment with plug-ins. We do it all the time. We’ve tried “All-In-One” and trust me, I was NOT happy in any way with the way it impeded our search optimization efforts. This plug-in couldn’t optimize a 1-page Website that only had one word, a word that occurred nowhere else on the Web.

In case I haven’t made myself clear, you’re not helping yourself in any way by installing an SEO plug-in on your Wordpress blog. If you don’t know enough about SEO to do it yourself, you don’t know enough about SEO to disable the stupid features these plug-ins turn on by default.

I even found a site where an SEO firm blogged last year about how it stopped monitoring the SEO plug-in through upgrades and they learned to their chagrin how an automated upgrade of all plug-ins turned on a feature they didn’t want activated. Even experienced SEOs are being undermined by the incredibly stupid default choices that are made by “All In One” and other SEO plug-ins.

Now, people might think I’m being a little harsh here. Perhaps I am. I am sure the Web design firms behind these plug-ins feel they have a lot of good feedback from their users (more than 1 million people have apparently installed “All In One” to date). To that I say: Feedback from the ignorant masses isn’t going to help you fix the royal screwups you’re tossing around the Web.

Many sites manage to rank in search results in spite of bad optimization. Many people in the SEO field have to work with stubborn customers who refuse to change their immaculate works of art on the Interwebs — so we find other ways (links) to optimize.

Some Websites manage to stumble through the basic reverse optimization process by churning out enough content that they just get a lot of links pointing at their deep content.

If you think your site is doing fine with your SEO plug-in, don’t get upset because I’m telling you it’s hurting you. Just continue enjoying the limited search visibility you’ve subjected yourself too but please stop telling your friends to use these stupid plug-ins.

If search engine optimization were really so easy that all you had to do was install a damn plug-in, no one would do it faster or more often than me.

It’s NOT that easy. Any professional SEO who believes in and/or trusts these plug-ins enough to recommend them to anyone is, in my opinion, a complete moron who needs to get out of the industry.

You don’t hand a gun to someone and tell them to look down the barrel and pull the trigger, do you? So why would you hand a plug-in whose SEO shortcomings have been well-documented to someone who doesn’t understand SEO and tell them to use it?

If people start listening to me now, it will take about 2 years for the SEO industry to rally to the cause and advise everyone to NOT use these stupid SEO plug-ins. Maybe — it would be wonderful if they did — the plug-in writers will update their offerings to NOT do anything by default and to remove the stupid PageRank sculpting nonsense.

There is absolutely no reason for any SEO plug-in to use “rel=’nofollow’” on post-embedded links, to embed “nofollow,noindex” on any public-facing page, or to allow the user to override the page title, meta description, or URL.

If you want to experiment with other functions, do so. But understand that they might in the end turn out to be bad ideas, too.

A lot of people in the SEO community — including some pretty darned good SEOs (in my opinion) — still fuss over duplicate content. My position has for a very, very long time been: leave it alone. Let the blog do what blogs are designed to do.

If you don’t like how blog software organizes content on your site, then the best thing you can do for SEO is find another platform that organizes content the way you like.

You should be using category and tag pages to enhance your SEO, not hiding them out of some misguided fear that search engines will forget you exist because they find tag and category pages.

There are other options that Wordpress and other modern blogging platforms give you for handling how often and where content appears on your site. Learn to use the blog platform first before you start plugging in crap that knows even less about SEO than you.

Written by Michael Martinez

We’re receiving a lot of traffic for link building keywords lately. I am sure there are many reasons for why people are searching so keenly for good link building advice. Quite probably many people are over-emphasizing link building because they still read second-rate SEO blogs that tell you SEO is all about links. But I think there are some people out there who are wondering why their links don’t seem to be working.

Of course, before you get started on figuring out how to build good links for any site you should read through Why Link Building May Not Work, an article I wrote last year that addresses some of the problems Websites that depend on link building for SEO may encounter.

There is no perfect system for search optimization. Every site has its own special needs and a good SEO technician will balance well-managed link building with solid on-site content optimization, good site structure (internal navigation and cross-promotional linking), continual keyword research, and performance monitoring using analytics to evaluate search visibility and conversions.

Link building is an important part of the search optimization process but without good content to link to the links are rather pointless. Good content has to be interesting to someone, if not everyone (nothing is interesting to everyone). With that in mind, here is a quick rundown of what you should include (at a minimum) in your “SEO link building kit”.

1. A list of reasons for why the site should have inbound links
   This list has to make sense to a reasonable person who knows nothing about search engine optimization and doesn’t care about nonsense like PageRank, anchor text, backlink reports, and useless SEO fluffery.

   If you cannot enumerate for yourself why a given site should have links there is a serious problem with the site. Your reasons don’t have to convince or persuade anyone but you. Some people will agree with your opinion. Many will not. That’s just the way it is.

2. A link analytic method
   Put away your browser plug-ins. Spare me the promotional hype about your favorite link research tool or service. Those are meaningless wastes of electrons. You need a method, not someone else’s idea of how links should be assessed and organization. You should be doing your own assessing and organizing. You don’t need Yahoo! to tell you how many links you have built, where they are, whether they are visible to search engines, or whether they pass value. In fact, there are no link tools out there that will give you this information.

   If you’re working with a site that already has a backllink profile then you should try to determine where its links are coming from. Break out the tools. Go to town. Get as many URLs as you can. Then divide your data into probable natural links and probable artificial links. Is there any particular reason why the site earned those seeming natural links? Do they make sense? If you can figure that out, your link building efforts should improve.

   The point about using a link analytic method is that you need to determine what the quality of your own links should be and how to ensure they are placed in advantageous places. No decent, self-respecting link building should be worrying about what competitive sites are doing for their links. If you keep looking at backlink reports, you’re not focusing on link building.

3. A social media criteria checklist
   You should not be looking at social media link placement as a means of obtaining link anchor text and improving search results. Chances are pretty good that a linking page that receives no real visitors won’t be given much value by search engines. Sure, everyone can find examples of cheap, low-quality pages that provide pretty good links. But if you’re a link specialist you want your links to provide as much value as possible.

   So evaluate the social media resources you know about and determine which ones help create visibility and drive traffic. Search engine optimization should not be the only way a site obtains traffic. If you’re going to use social media sites for link building, then learn how to use social media the right way.

   Your checklist may change from client to client. You should understand the demographics of each social media resource you use and how they match up with the site you’re building links for. It takes about as long to place a really good, powerful link that creates visibility and drives traffic as it does to just place a link on some random page. Use that time well. Get the most bang for your client’s buck.

   Unless you’re a social media link building specialist (and, believe it or not, there are some out there) you should not be focusing solely on social media. Build the links you deem to be appropriate and move on.

4. A blog criteria checklist
   You should not be dropping links in blog comments but you may want to engage with bloggers who have a passion for the topic your client site addresses. If the client site is mediocre at best you’re not going to get much help from the really good blogger community but you may still be able to find bloggers who will link to the site.

   Of course, a good SEO technician works with the client to improve the quality of the site as much as possible, but ultimately a site that is just another cookie-cutter affiliate link farm or ecommerce-in-a-box inventory sheet of generic merchandise is going to earn very few (if any) really good blog links. So design a checklist that matches the quality of the site. If the client doesn’t like the quality of the links you’re getting from blogs, try to encourage him to improve the site.

   Don’t be confrontational with a client. You can emphasize the value that is required and the rewards that value brings. As the link builder it’s your responsibility to create visibility for that value in the right places.

5. A list of your personal resources
   If you’ve been building links for any length of time you should have your own inventory of Websites to work with. I’m not talking about a blog farm you built with the latest black hat script. I mean you should have your own Websites for which you create content, value, visibility, and links. Those sites can and should be used to help clients.

   If you have a large enough network you might be able to tailor fit some of your resources to a specific link building campaign. The more appropriate the content for your link placements, the better. And don’t make excuses about not having your own sites. You build them one site at a time. Do not EVER commit to building 50-60 Websites (unless you know how to do that without burning out). The faster you are at building a site, the less time time it takes to build it, the less likely the site will provide much value. Sure, some people will be better than others, but your sites should be credible, useful, and helpful. Build them as you go, not all at once.

6. One or more reserve link placement networks
   I’m not talking about anything in particular. I just mean you should have access to a network of sites where you can place helpful, interesting, and contributory links that offer their own value to the user experience. You don’t control this network. It’s not a list of social media sites. Your client doesn’t control this network.

   Here are a few examples of reserve link placement networks. I don’t necessarily recommend any of them and the list is far from exhaustive:

   1. Paid links (highly risky)
   2. Article directories (somewhat risky)
   3. Press release services
   4. Subscription blogging services
   5. Groups of friendly linking sites (NOT link farms, link circles, link wheels, etc.)
   6. Reciprocal link management services (somewhat risky)
   7. Mailing lists, forums, or blogs where you can post announcements about Websites and share some information without people getting all huffy

   A forum is NOT a network. A forum community where people respect your recommendations and may share a link you suggest on their own site IS a network. If you’re a stranger just dumping links on other people’s sites, you’re doing it wrong.

   Use this list as inspiration for creativity and resourcefulness. It’s not intended to guide you in link placement. I’m just using some very well-known examples that people can relate to.

Nearly everyone interested in building links should be able to follow this advice. If you’re contracting with a link building service ask them what the basic work entails. If they are secretive be skeptical. Anyone can show you search results where their links have made a difference. If they are ethical and responsible they will engage in honest discussion with you. If they don’t care about the consequences of their work, you should have a sinking feeling in your stomach as they dodge your direct questions over and over again.

If you’re an in-house SEO you may find some of the options on this list don’t match the company’s priorities. For example, an agency is more likely to have an inventory of 100-200 linking Websites (although some larger corporations may operate hundreds of sites, they usually don’t want to use those sites for link building).

The less you cringe at the idea of someone stumbling across one of your links, the more likely the link is going to be a good one. You cannot guarantee that every link will pass Pagerank or anchor text, but if you hold yourself to a high standard that should not matter in the long run.

Link building is not search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is not link building.

Link building is part of the process for creating visibility and driving traffic to Websites. That goes so far beyond SEO it should not even have to be said.

Unfortunately, too many people still don’t get it.

Written by Michael Martinez

The market for essay writing seems to be heating up, judging by the spam comments that we’re blocking at Best SEO Blog and SEO Theory. For a few weeks I have found myself marking various off-topic comments as spam on both blogs.

Many of the email accounts associated with these comments are from Gmail.com, one of the worst sources of forum and blog spam at the present time. Google, of course, claims it works hard to find these accounts and disable them but they apparently are being created by contractors and/or firms in India, Pakistan, and Malaysia (and probably a few other countries where labor is inexpensive by U.S. and European standards).

The powers behind this particular essay campaign appear to be based in Canada, although I cannot be 100% certain of that. The domain receiving the links is quality-papers.com, which appears to be using a standard Wordpress template that would have been quick to set up.

Terms the comment spammers are targeting include “classification essay writing”, “essay writing service”, and other variations on “essay writing”. These essay writing spam links don’t see the light of day on our blogs but I am sure they have slammed past many bloggers’ defenses (assuming they all have defenses).

A quick check of quality-papers.com’s link profile as reported by Yahoo! Site Explorer indicates there may be as many as 91,000 links pointing to the domain (many of them appear to be site-wide links). I have no interest in validating that link data. I’m pretty sure someone is conducting a huge, massive link spam campaign on behalf of the domain.

When I look at the various queries that quality-papers.com is being targeted for, it doesn’t rank all that well. Take “classification essay writing”, for example. It appears that quality-papers.com is ranking around the 10th position.

The top-ranked site for “classification essay writing”, essayinfo.com, appears to have fewer than 2,000 reported inbound links. Like many of the sites involved in this query space, essayinfo.com appears to be anonymously registered, so tracking down the owner would be a challenge (although you might be surprised to learn there are ways to track down some of these anonymous registrants).

Essayinfo.com is a made-for-advertising site. Quality-papers.com appears to have neither advertising nor outbound links. For a site that has been online since at least December 2008, that’s a very suspicious signal.

The articles you’ll find on quality-papers.com are the nondescript kind which are commonly found in the affiliate marketing industry. They appear to have been written by low-quality overseas contract writers. I could be wrong. They could be scraped or original content written by the owner.

Normally, I would not care about a site like this. The fact it keeps popping into our comment streams, however, is annoying. Besides, I needed to write an article today and this seemed like a good topic.

If I had to guess what its purpose is, I would suggest that quality-papers.com is trying to get in someone’s way. I would guess that the owner probably wants to position the site highly enough that one of the major competitors in the industry will make a bid for it.

In some affiliate marketing verticals Websites can change hands for as much as several million dollars (US). It depends on whether the real money-makers — the people selling the goods or services — conclude that it would be cheaper to take possession of the domain than to pay the affiliate marketer commissions.

When there is no advertising on a site that gets in a marketer’s way, the site may be looking for bidders, as any marketer who fails to capture significant market share in these highly competitive verticals stands to lose a lot of potential revenue.

Of course, quality-papers.com could be serving other purposes. For example, it could be a spam test site. The spammer might be trying to see how effective his linking resources are. If we assume for the sake of discussion that all the “essay writing” queries resemble those I have given a cursory examination, then it would seem that high numbers of links are not winning the game.

In other words, our spammer appears to be relying mostly on low-value or no-value links. The links may be easy to acquire but they don’t seem to be helping much.

And there could be other, more (or less) nefarious reasons for attempting to rank an unmonetized site in a competitive query space. For example, maybe someone just wants to showcase the “value” of their essay writing service (hosted on another domain) to prospective clients.

Showcase sites are useful but if someone is touting the search engine value of their custom essays, people who buy that content should be sure to do a little bit of research. Make sure you understand the queries in which the essays are being promoted. That means looking at who is ranking, what they seem to be trying to accomplish, and how they are ranking.

We don’t know how much of a factor backlinks are in the essay writing vertical (probably not nearly as much as many SEOs would assume). That is, people may be building (or stealing) links in huge volumes, but the majority of the links probably don’t pass value.

Still, the fact that someone would go to the trouble of acquiring almost 100,000 links to an unmonetized domain implies they don’t have much if any faith in the quality of their writing from an SEO perspective.

NOTE: The third-ranked site for “classification essay writing”, custom-essays.org, appears to be catering to the high school and college essay cheating market. Yahoo! reports fewer than 1,000 inbound links for that domain.

Keep in mind that Yahoo! only knows about the links it has found (or thinks it has found). Do not mistake the Yahoo! numbers as an indication of what Google or Bing have found or allow to pass value. Each search engine does its own crawling. Attempts to measure overlap in the major search engines in the past estimated that there is no more than 40-60% overlap in their data.

That means you cannot use any third-party tool (like Yahoo!, Linkscape, Majestic SEO, et. al.) to analyze how links affect the search results in Google (or bing). I used Yahoo! Site Explorer to get a rough idea of who is aggressively building links.

In my experience, the most aggressive link builders tend to be doing SEO the wrong way. That doesn’t mean every site that has 100,000 backlinks is doing SEO the wrong way. If all the players in a vertical have 6-digit backlink profiles, they may be attracting those links naturally or the query spaces may have become hyperoptimized (everyone is building links to compete with everyone — which is the only way to work in a hyperoptimized query).

When a site that cannot rank well has ten-to-fifty times as many links as the sites outranking it, you really have to ask which SEO book, blog, or forum the site promoter has been following.

It just seems to me that someone is going to a lot of trouble to create false value in a site that doesn’t achieve much.

Is that any way you want to optimize for search? Think about it.

Written by Michael Martinez

What is the difference between a Link Farm and a Blog Farm? Well, if you browse the SEO Theory SEO Glossary you find entries for both “link farms” and “blog farms”.

Blog Farm – Noun phrase. A group of blogs operated by a single person or group that are populated by software, usually RSS-feed scraping scripts. Used for link building, blog farms are created by special software that installs popular blogging software on multiple domains and hosting accounts. Sometimes confused with links farms (q.v.).

Link Farm – Noun phrase. Any group of Web sites where every member site in the group links to every other member site in the group.

Keeping in mind that there is no central authority for deciding which phrases actually mean what, we should accept that people are going to disagree on their definitions from time to time. In particular, academics who publish research on detecting and fighting Web spam often (in my experience, almost always) use terms that were developed by the Web spam community inappropriately. The academic community’s terminology is often adopted by search engineers at the major Websearch services.

Except for the fact that their blog posts may cause the rest of to feel puzzled, the search services are generally perceived as both authoritative and knowledgeable in these matters. For example, Bing search engineers sometimes share their views on Web spam. These posts are quite enlightening but as you can see from the comments I could not refrain from offering what I hope was a gently worded clarification in terminology.

My purpose is to ensure that people see both sides of the discussion, not to sway search engineers to use my terminology. They are dealing with abstractions most people never see. But the confusion over terminology is easily found around the Web. For example, a recent discussion at HighRankings concerned link wheels. Again, I offered a counter-example of how the phrase can be defined (and, in my opinion, how it is properly defined).

I don’t coin most of these expressions. I learn them from other people, watching how they use the terms. Take “link farms”, for example. The earliest link farm I know about would be Brett Tabke’s Buddy Links program, which he put together after I shared my findings on a forum about how I was able to improve my Inktomi stability by using crawl pages on different domains. Link farms became all the rage for several years and they morphed into different types of content.

Some people today ask what is the difference between a link farm and a directory, for example. Some link farms were designed to look and function just like Web directories. There was one popular program that would crawl the Web looking for Websites with reciprocal link pages, add those sites to a custom “directory”, and then send an email to the sites asking for a link back. Clever, right? It eventually led many sites down the golden path to search invisibility through bans and penalties.

Some — but not all — reciprocal link management programs were also link farms. Reciprocal link management services followed several different paths but the earliest one I know of (no longer in existence) grew out of the link farm concept. As the years passed reciprocal linking services became more selective and, according to some of the service providers, less interested in building links for SEO and more interested in building links for traffic and branding.

Search engineers in academia and industry hold an annual conference called AIR Web (AIR = Adversarial Information Retrieval). I am sure they feel they derive a great deal of value from the conferences so I don’t mean to belittle that perceived value.

I have no real idea of what goes on inside a search engineering organization. But I have noticed from the published papers that the research usually deals with spam techniques that are 2-3 years old, if not older. The apparent lag time between the widespread adoption of the latest Web spam techniques and the identification of those techniques by researchers is somewhat concerning to me, but then just because state-of-the-art spammers have moved on from 2007’s tactics doesn’t mean they are irrelevant to today’s Web.

What I find more troubling is that the AIRWeb papers (and other published research) often use definitions of Web spam tactics that are radically different from what the actual spammers use. That doesn’t mean these folks don’t know what they are talking about but it does imply they don’t know what the spammers are talking about — and vice versa. In other words, spam by any other name would still smell as foul (may the Shakespeareans in the audience forgive me for that). Web spam, however, seems to be staying ahead of search technology in part due to the differences in dialect between spammers and search engineers.

This plurality of technical definitions for the same concepts we all run into is very confusing, so it’s no wonder people often “discover” new ideas that are really old ideas. Still, one must also be careful not to judge too quickly.

For example, suppose what the Bing engineers identified as “link farms” in the post I commented on really are NOT blog farms (as I speculate)? The article did not provide enough information for me to be sure of what they were talking about — sure, that is, in terms with which I am familiar and comfortable. The distinctions between artificial Website paradigms blur very, very easily.

For example, you could easily set up a link farm using blog farm software, wherein all the blogs link to each other. You have both a link farm and a blog farm, but neither is the other — conceptually the blog farm should still be distinct (in your abstraction of definitive terminology) from the link farm, even though the instance of both is the same group of Websites.

Only someone as esoteric as I would care about that.

You might ask if the so-called “SEO friendly” Web directories that I have ranted against for years are link farms. Some of them are like link farms in that they required links back from listed sites, but they were still not link farms because they didn’t meet the technical definition of a link farm. That is, the listed sites don’t all link to each other. They just link to the faux Web directories.

People sometimes call these sites Spam Directories but I haven’t really see enough general usage for any one expression to feel justified in including such a term in the SEO Theory glossary. Dictionary editors sometimes wait several years before adding new words or expressions, to see if they really fit into general usage. I suspect we’ll never be able to document a widely used expression for “SEO friendly” spam directories (other than SEO friendly spam directory, but that is a pejorative term used by critics of the sites, not users of the sites).

The diff between link farm and blog farm expression arises from someone’s curiosity about link farms and blog farms. It is, to me, an indication of the widespread interest in Web spam. I am sure there are new faces appearing in the Web spam community all the time. I usually call those folks script kiddies because they often start out using the older tactics (and software) that hard core, experienced black hat spammers have moved on from or downgraded in their strategic arsenals of spam techniques.

This is a hard topic to write for because of all the different uses for common terms, as well as because of the plurality in terminology for common techniques and Web structures. I don’t expect academia and search engineers to suddenly change their vocabularies just to satisfy my ego but if you’re going to study Web spam then you should at the very least be aware that there are different dialects in the discussion.

Written by Michael Martinez