It’s all about the secondary links silly

Time and time again I see folks in the SEO world talking about getting links from social media websites. Many times this advice will include finding ‘followed’ links and even lists of ‘dofollow’ social media sites. This is quite strange and bewildering to me as the holy grail of link building in SM isn’t getting a link from the actual site…. but getting the secondary links that follow viral content.

You see, one shouldn’t be using the state of the links on the site as the measure… and such approaches are often even frowned upon by many in the biz as noted in this recent Sphinn thread. Regardless of the emotional reaction, the whole concept is flawed. I could give a rat’s ass if the links on a given site (including social and blogs) are followed because that was never the consideration in the first place.

Stay away from bad neighbourhoods!

For starters, what is web spam and what’s its function? In the patents we’re looking at today, they describe spam as websites constructed with random or targeted content and links in order to, “to trick the analysis algorithms used by search engines” into ranking the pages higher than they should (bit of an oxy moron play there). The end game of course being to monetize said traffic with varying forms of advertising… yada yada… we know the deal - And the fly in the ointment?

“However, achieving this is complicated because it can be difficult to identify spam hosts without manually reviewing the content of each host and classifying it as a spam or non-spam host.”

So what’s a search engine to do? Welcome to the world of rare AIR (Adversarial Information Retrieval). Last time out CJ was walking us through some methods of Paid Link detection and in the past we’ve covered link spam, phrase based and temporal spam detection methods ( to name a few) – this time we’re going to look at Host Level Spam Detection.

The other day I was thinking about what signals we consider when trying to understand search engines and how they rank pages. There have been more than a few folks that have taken a stab at the elusive ‘over 200’ ranking factors the last few years (not to mention local rankings); why not give it a go? For me, it is likely a utopian fantasy, a journey into supposition, more than it is any real insight… but let’s have a go at it anyway.

Now let me start by saying I am not a fan, as many of you know, of making definitive statements about search algos as... well... we just don't know. We're all used to the catch phrases ‘Google’ and ‘Algorithm’ - but let's not go there. The main reason is that there are likely a multitude of algorithms that serve different purposes; so this isn't about any single algo.. Furthermore, I am not talking specifics such as Google per se, but more of an amalgam of the Big 3 and various approaches that may be employed by search engines in 2009 and beyond. OK? With me?

Let's give it a go… we’re here to have some fun right?

(...don't mind me, it's been a strange week)

I have generally stayed away from all the pretty hats that SEOs get to wear. While I do look smashing in them, it mucks up my hair, ya know? But lately, I am finding it harder. To me we’ve always been search manipulators to varying degrees. While we may truly encourage search engineers to have to dig deeper, or facilitate content ingestion, it cannot be doubted that SEOs are the thorn in the IR world’s side. Ok, that I can take.

Why? Because SEO could as easily stand for ‘Search Engine Opportunist’ as anything else. That is until now… more and more I am seeing websites that are hacked for a variety of SEO purposes including link building and SERP destruction. It is one thing when people take advantage of an algorithm and quite another when it poisons honest people’s best intentions.