Google shooting themselves in the foot: Blog-farms raise to the top

Hey there,

you’ll LOVE this one.

In February 2011 or thereabouts Google “updated” their algorithm, in an effort to stamp out spammy, scammy and overly “made for adsense” oriented behaviour.

As part of this they did punish websites such as ezinearticles and other article directories, which kinda makes sense in some sense, because they are really just about making adsense revenue for the guys running the sites (well, ok, and getting some backlinks to our sites;-)

Well, overall Google does NOT like artifical backlinking, especially when they’re built using automated internet marketing tools like SENuke or SEO Link Robot.

Or super-duper especially when they’re built on something called blog-farms like e.g. SEO Linkvine.

Basically, blog-farms are large collections of blogs run by one person or one company, and they provide a central interface from which you can submit articles to all of the blogs in the network in one go.

This gives you superb backlinks, because typically all or most of the blogs are on different servers with different IP addresses etc. So: Google can’t tell that all the blogs really belong to the same person and thinks you’ve got a really “natural” backlinking profile.

And consequently rewards your site with better rankings.

And this is where the latest update to Google’s algorithm really kicks in:

So far we know that Google does NOT like blog-farms because really, it’s very UNnatural backlinking (I’m trying to avoid the term “backlink spamming”, but that’s pretty close to what it is).

We also know that they updated their algorithm to punish anything spammy or scammy.

Here’s a GREAT example of how they got it completely wrong:

You may have heard of the WordPress plugin KeywordLuv.

What this allows you to do is find blogs that will give you a backlink in exchange for a high quality comment.

Which is the perfect solution for everybody involved: in order to leave a high quality comment, people have to interact with your blog, they have to leave an on-topic comment which means that future visitors find your blog even more interesting etc.

End-result: Google can show your site more often, as it is clearly relevant, on topic and interesting.

So, in order to find these blogs where you can leave a *high quality* comment, you simply search for the term “yourname@yourkeywords”, optionally followed by your main keyword as in the following picture:

here I’ve searched for “yourname@yourkeywords” followed by my main keyword “tattoos” (incidentally, I’ve FINALLY figured out the real reason why it’s so darn difficult to sell anything tattoo related online, but that’s a story for another time)

Google then returns a long list of blogs which have the plugin installed.

Why?

Because when you install the plugin, it leaves a so-called “footprint” on your website, in this case “yourname@yourkeywords”.

Now, up until their last update, this returned a GREAT list of blogs where you could leave a high quality comment, and everybody was happy.

This incidentally was (note the use of past-tense) my #1 strategy for ranking new sites quickly: just get 5-10 of such comment backlinks a day for about a fortnight, and depending on the level of competition you’d then find yourself on page 1 or 2 of Google.

However, use of past-tense:

in the Google “Farmer” update of Feb (or so) 2011, something went horribly wrong with the results that are shown when you search for “yourname@yourkeywords”.

Rather than showing you tons of LOVELY, on-topic blogs which give you a backlink in exchange for your high quality comment, you now find mostly …. drumroll, are you ready for it? ….

… blogs that are part of blog-farms.

Now, they have no interest whatsoever to give you a backlink, because that’s what they’re getting paid for by their paid users.

And that’s ok, they got a membership, you pay for the backlinks and you get great backlinks.

But from Google’s perspective, this is horrible:

They really, really (I mean REALLY) want to stamp out spammy stuff and they’ll do everything they can to reward high quality “real” backlinks (instead of the bought) stuff, and unfortunately for them and for us, now all the return is the blogs in the blog-farms.

On the one hand you can argue that this is great even for us, because we can figure out which blog-network those blogs belong to and then join them (because they appear to rank and “be liked by Google” which is always a good thing).

But really I think everybody involved in leaving high quality comments (as opposed to the really spammy stuff) is losing access to one of the greatest internet marketing tools (keywordluv):

we can’t find them anymore (easily) using Google, meaning people don’t leave high quality comments, meaning those blogs which were really interested in a high quality conversation on the Internet may well lose rankings and Google is showing rubbish results.

Which is the exact opposite of what they want to achieve with their algorithm updates.

Ah well, with yourname@yourkeywords no longer a viable and easy option, what’s YOUR strategy for kickstarting a new site (in terms of backlinking?)

Cheers

Veit