In 2005 link farms were all the rage. They worked extremely well on MSN and Yahoo and even partially worked on Google back then. Essentially you’d sign up for this service past some code and you’d have a massive directory of everyone else who signed up. You could filter things somewhat but not a whole lot. This is a great idea but here’s a list of the problems and why Google can detect these and hates these.
1. They’re full of spammy sites that steal your authority.
2. They used to have direct links back to the stinking originating site which was a huge idiotic giveaway.
3. They used to let you host your freaking link directory on their server which is another huge red flag.
4. You can never really filter the directories well enough to make it worthwhile.
Ok so being the idiot that I was I signed up for a few of these and threw them up and voila I was tops in MSN and Yahoo for my targeted keywords.
I watched carefully as I jimmied up and down between around the top 30 and top 70 on Google anxiously awaiting the day when I would be #1!
And then a few weeks later I disappeared completely. I was still fully indexed but I didn’t rank for anything, not even long tail keywords. You had to, and still have to, type in the word Gamebrink with your search to get the appropriate search result back from Google. Thanks to my idiotic link spamming Google had just penalized me in a big way and unfortunately 2 1/2 years later I still feel the effect. Who knows if I’ll ever break free. I receive 99% of my traffic to Gamebrink from referalls, most of all in the form of link baiting which I’ve come to be quite good at for the gaming industry. As I just started migrating the site to a new design I threw up some stories and sent them to my tips mailing list and voila there we go.
http://www.gamebrink.com/blog/2007/08/28/ds-save-game-transfer-system-for-windows
This went from Engadget to Gizmodo to Gonintendo to Bluesnews and to thousands of smaller blogs and spam blogs underneath.
I’m mentioning this now because this is what I should have focused on from the beginning and not going along with the “easy” route to high rankings from deceptive link farms.
I would go so far as to say never ever have a reciprocal link directory on your site and never ever reciprocal link if you can help it.
Link baiting is viral, it’s natural to Google, it gets you high PR links, and there is absolutely no down side to it.
So to sum things up:
If you reciprocal link with crap sites you will be massively penalized by Google for an indefinite amount of time.
If you link bait Google will love you and your rankings will fly.
Find an area of expertise you like, find out all of the popular sites around the subject, search every day for a topic that hasn’t been covered and is a front page story, post it to your blog, let your tip list know and pray. Do this repeatedly daily for better results. While that’s the gist of link baiting I’ll do another post later that goes more indepth.
Next time on the Gamebrink case study I’ll take a look at link massacre phase two.
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seodude :: Aug.29.2007 ::
Case Study - GameBrink.Com ::
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