June 28, 2005
Unclear on the Concept Department
Don't Touch That!
I got some interesting email today. It was titled "Link exchange proposal," which I assumed was some other blogger who wanted to swap links with me. But as I was clicking on it, I realized that this had to be some kind of link scam. Bloggers don't make agreements to link to each other. If someone really likes my site, they'd just link to me.
Sure enough:
Hello I propose you link exchange between my Casino sites and http://www.windypundit.com. If you agree to be my link partner please add my links to your resource pages and send me your information: Title, Description, URL and preferred Category. We would add your link to our sites shortly. Our information is the next: URL: http://www.0-casinos.org/ TITLE: Casino DESCRIPTION: 0 Casinos.org - Online Casino. URL: http://www.0-gambling.us/ TITLE: Gambling DESCRIPTION: Best Gambling Online! URL: http://www.1-video-poker.us/ TITLE: Video Poker DESCRIPTION: 1 Video Poker.us - Online Video Poker! URL: http://www.777-keno.com/ TITLE: Keno DESCRIPTION: 777 Keno - Keno Online URL: http://www.baccaratonline.us/ TITLE: Baccarat Online DESCRIPTION: Baccarat Online. Play Baccarat Online! URL: http://www.baccarats.us/ TITLE: Baccarat DESCRIPTION: Baccarat.us - Online Baccarat For You!!! URL: http://www.casino-4-gambling.us/ TITLE: Casino DESCRIPTION: Casino For Gambling Online!
Oh yeah. Like that's going to happen.
When you search on Google, it figures out the order to show the results based on a score that Google calculates. Google is secretive about the details of this process, but a big part of that score is something called "page rank." Basically, sites are rated by the number of links to them from other sites. In general, the more inbound links a site gets, the higher its page rank. The inbound links themselves are weighted by the page rank of web page they're coming from.
If you make real money off of website traffic (I don't) your location in the Google search results is real important to you, so it can seem like a good idea to try to manipulate Google. Given the importance of links in determining page rank, it soon occurs to people to set up a few dozen fake websites—or if they have the budget, a few hundred or a few thousand fake websites—that all link to each other to drive up the page rank. Sometimes a company that does this will sell outbound links to other sites that want to raise their page rank, or several companies will get together and build a pool of these fake websites.
This arrangement is called a link farm, and that's what I was being invited to join. The idea is that we can all raise our page ranks by linking to each other.
For Windypundit, that's a really bad idea on so many levels.
First of all, if you have a content-oriented site like a blog, it's just generally a bad idea to change the site in order to try to game the search engines. People visit your site and link to your site because of what you have on it, not because of search scores. Content is king.
(Things are different for commerce sites, because they need to do well in search engines. But things aren't that different. I bought my Tivo upgrade kit from this guy. He works out of his house, and he's got the top spot at Google for the phrase "tivo upgrade". How? Because his site is full of useful information about how Tivo works and how to upgrade it. You can do the entire upgrade yourself based on his detailed instructions, without buying a thing. He won the search engine battle by giving away great content.)
The second reason to avoid link farms is that Google and other big search engines have somehow learned to recognize them. If the Google page ranking algorithms decide to flag your site as part of a link farm they will bury you. This apparently happened to SEOInc, one of the big search engine companies. Try to Google "SEOInc" and see if they show up in the results.
Third, www.windypundit.com has a page rank of 4 (on a scale of 0 to 10) according to Rankwhere.com. (You can also view a site's page rank on the Google Toolbar if you have it installed.) That's not a terribly high rank, but it's not bad for a small-time blog like mine. On the other hand, every page on the list above has a page rank of ZERO. Why would I want to link to them? I'm bigger than they are!
Heck, my friend Gary's new blog—gary on tv (and stuff)—also has a page rank of zero because he's just starting out, but at least he's got real content.
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