Sebastian’s Pamphlets

After the recent toolbar PageRank massacre link brokers are in the spotlight. One of them, TNX beta¹, asked me to post a paid review of their service. It took a while to explain that nobody can buy a sales pitch here. I offered to write a pitiless honest review for a low hourly fee, provided a sample on their request, but got no order or payment yet. Never mind. Since the topic is hot, here’s my review, paid or not.

So what does TNX offer? Basically it’s a semi-automated link exchange where everybody can sign up to sell and/or purchase text links. TNX takes 25% commission, 12.5% from the publisher, and 12.5% from the advertiser. They calculate the prices based on Google’s toolbar PageRank and link popularity pulled from Yahoo. For example a site putting five blocks of four links each on one page with toolbar PageRank 4/10 and four pages with a toolbar PR 3/10 will earn $46.80 monthly.

TNX provides a tool to vary the links, so that when an advertiser purchases for example 100 links it’s possible to output those in 100 variations of anchor text as well as surrounding text before and after the A element, on possibly 100 different sites. Also TNX has a solution to increase the number of links slowly, so that search engines can’t find a gazillion of uniformed links to a (new) site all of a sudden. Whether or not that’s sufficient to simulate natural link growth remains an unanswered question, because I’ve no access to their algorithm.

Links as well as participating sites are reviewed by TNX staff, and frequently checked with bots. Links shouldn’t appear on pages which aren’t indexed by search engines or viewed by humans, or on 404 pages, pages with long and ugly URLs and such. They don’t accept PPC links or offensive ads.

All links are outputted server sided, what requires PHP or Perl (ASP/ASPX coming soon). There is a cache option, so it’s not necessary to download the links from the TNX servers for each page view. TNX recommends renaming the /cache/ directory to avoid an easily detectable sign for the occurence of TNX paid links on a Web site. Links are stored as plain HTML, besides the target="_blank" attribute there is no obvious footprint or pattern on link level. Example:
Have a website? See this <a href="http://www.example.com" target="_blank">free affiliate program</a>.
Have a blog? Check this <a href="http://www.example.com" target="_blank">affiliate program with high comissions</a> for publishers.
Webmasters can enter any string as delimiter, for example <br /> or “•”:

Have a website? See this free affiliate program. • Have a blog? Check this affiliate program with high comissions for publishers.

Publishers can choose from 17 niches, 7 languages, 5 linkpop levels, and 7 toolbar PageRank values to target their ads.

From the system stats in the members area the service is widely used:

• As of today [2007-11-06] we have 31,802 users (daily growth: +0.62%)
• Links in the system: 31,431,380
• Links created in last hour: 1,616
• Number of pages indexed by TNX: 37,221,398

Long story short, TNX jumped through many hoops to develop a system which is supposed to trade paid links that are undetectable by search engines. Is that so?

The major weak point is the system’s growth and that its users are humans. Even if such a system would be perfect, users will make mistakes and reveal the whole network to search engines. Here is how Google has identified most if not all of the TNX paid links:

Some Webmasters put their TNX links in sidebars under a label that identifies them as paid links. Google crawled those pages, and stored the link destinations in its paid links database. Also, they devalued at least the labelled links, if not the whole page or even the complete site lost its ability to pass link juice because the few paid links aren’t condomized.

Many Webmasters implemented their TNX links in templates, so that they appear on a large number of pages. Actually, that’s recommended by TNX. Even if the advertisers have used the text variation tool, their URLs appeared multiple times on each site. Google can detect site wide links, even if not each and every link appears on all pages, and flags them accordingly.

Maybe even a few Googlers have signed up and served the TNX links on their personal sites to gather examples, although that wasn’t neccessary because so many Webmasters with URLs in their signatures have told Google in this DP thread that they’ve signed up and at least tested TNX links on their pages.

Next Google compared the anchor text as well as the surrounding text of all flagged links, and found some patterns. Of course putting text before and after the linked anchor text seems to be a smart way to fake a natural link, but in fact Webmasters applied a bullet-proof procedure to outsmart themselves, because with multiple occurences of the same text constellations pointing to an URL, especially when found on unrelated sites (different owners, hosts etc., topically irrelevancy plays no role in this context), paid link detection is a breeze. Linkage like that may be “natural” with regard to patterns like site wide advertising or navigation, but a lookup in Google’s links database revealed that the same text constellations and URLs were found on n  other sites too.

Now that Google had compiled the seed, each and every instance of Googlebot delivered more evidence. It took Google only one crawl cycle to identify most sites carrying TNX links, and all TNX advertisers. Paid link flags from pages on sites with a low crawling frequency were delivered in addition. Meanwhile Google has drawed a comprehensive picture of the whole TNX network.

I’ve developed such a link network many years ago (it’s defunct now). It was successful because only very experienced Webmasters controlling a fair amount of squeaky clean sites were invited. Allowing newbies to participate in such an organized link swindle is the kiss of death, because newbies do make newbie mistakes, and Google makes use of newbie mistakes to catch all participants. By the way, with the capabilities Google has today, my former approach to manipulate rankings with artificial linkage would be detectable with statistical methods similar to the algo outlined above, despite the closed circle of savvy participants.

From reading the various DP threads about TNX as well as their sales pitches, I’ve recognized a very popular misunderstanding of Google’s mentality. Folks are worrying whether an algo can detect the intention of links or not, usually focusing on particular links or linking methods. Google on the other hand looks at the whole crawlable Web. When they develop a paid link detection algo, they have a copy of the known universe to play with, as well as a complete history of each and every hyperlink crawled by Ms. Googlebot since 1998 or so. Naturally, their statistical methods will catch massive artificial linkage first, but fine tuning the sensitivity of paid link sniffers respectively creating variants to cover different linking patterns is no big deal. Of course there is always a way to hide a paid link, but nobody can hide millions of them.

Unfortunately, the unique selling point of the TNX service –that goes for all link brokers by the way– is manipulation of search engine rankings, hence even if they would offer nofollow’ed links to trade traffic instead of PageRank, most probably they would be forced to reduce the prices. Since TNX links are rather cheap, I’m not sure that will pay. It would be a shame when they decide to change the business model but it doesn’t pay for TNX, because the underlying concept is great. It just shouldn’t be used to exchange clean links. All the tricks developed to outsmart Google, like the text variation tool or not putting links on not exactly trafficked pages, are suitable to serve non-repetitive ads (coming with attractive CTRs) to humans.

I’ve asked TNX: I’ve decided to review your service on my blog, regardless whether you pay me or not. The result of my research is that I can’t recommend TNX in its current shape. If you still want a paid review, and/or a quote in the article, I’ve a question: Provided Google has drawn a detailed picture of your complete network, are you ready to switch to nofollow’ed links in order to trade traffic instead of PageRank, possibly with slightly reduced prices? Their answer:

We would be glad to accept your offer of a free review, because we don’t want to pay for a negative review.
Nobody can draw a detailed picture of our network - it’s impossible for one advertiser to buy links from all or a majority sites of our network. Many webmasters choose only relevant advertisers.
We will not switch to nofollow’ed links, but we are planning not to use Google PR for link pricing in the near future - we plan to use our own real-time page-value rank.

Well, it’s not necessary to find one or more links on all sites to identify a network.

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What a brilliant marketing stunt. Click here! Err… click: Brilliant. Marketing. Stunt.

Best of luck John

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Yesterday Fantomaster via Threadwatcher pointed me to this page of Google’s Webmaster help system. The cache was a few days old and didn’t show a difference, I don’t archive each and every change of the guidelines, so I asked and a friendly and helpful Googler told me that this item was around for a while now. Today this page made it on Sphinn and probably a few other Webmaster hangouts too.

So what the heck is the scandal all about? When you ask Google for help on “link exchange“, the help machine rattles for a second, sighs, coughs, clears its throat and then yells out the answer in bold letters: “Link schemes“, bah!

Ok, we already knew what Google thinks about artificial linkage: “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank”. Honestly, what is the intent when I suggest that you link to me and concurrently I link to you? Yup, it means I boost your PageRank and you boost mine, also we chose some nice anchor text and that makes the link deal perfect. In the eyes of Google even such a tiny deal is a link scheme, because both links weren’t put up for users but for search engines.

Pre-Google this kind of link deal was business as usual and considered natural, but frankly back then the links were exchanged for traffic and not for search engine love. We can rant and argue as much as we want, that will not revert the changed character of link swaps nor Google’s take on manipulative links.

Consequently Google has devalued artificial reciprocal links for ages. Pretty much simplified these links nullify each other in Google’s search index. That goes for tiny sins. Folks raising the concept onto larger link networks got caught too but penalized or even banned for link farming.

Obviously all kinds of link swaps are easy to detect algorithmically, even triangular link deals, three way link exchanges and whatnot. I called that plain vanilla link ’swindles’, but only just recently Google has caught up with a scalable solution and seems to detect and penalize most if not all variants covering the whole search index, thanks to the search quality folks in Dublin and Zurich even overseas in whatever languages.

The knowledge that the days of free link trading are numbered was out for years before the exodus. Artificial reciprocal links as well as other linkage considered link spam by Google was and is a pet peeve of Matt’s team. Google sent lots of warnings, and many sane SEOs and Webmasters heard their traffic master’s voice and acted accordingly. Successful link trading just went underground leaving the great unwashed alone with their obsession about exchanging reciprocal links in the public.

Also old news is, that Google does not penalize reciprocal links in general. Google almost never penalizes a pattern or a technique. Instead they try to figure out the Webmaster’s intent and judge case by case based on their findings. And yes, that’s doable with algos, perhaps sometimes with a little help from humans to compile the seed, but we don’t know how perfect the algo is when it comes to evaluations of intent. Natural reciprocal links are perfectly fine with Google. That applies to well maintained blogrolls too, despite the often reciprocal character of these links. Reading the link schemes page completely should make that clear.

Google defines link scheme as “[…] Link exchange and reciprocal links schemes (’Link to me and I’ll link to you.’) […]”. The “I link to you and vice versa” part literally addresses link trading of any kind, not a situation where I link to your compelling contents because I like a particular page, and you return the favour later on because you find my stuff somewhat useful. As Perkiset puts it “linking is now supposed to be like that well known sex act, ‘68? - or, you do me and I’ll owe you one’” and there is truth in this analogy. Sometimes a favor will not be returned. That’s the way the cookie crumbles when you’re keen on Google traffic.

The fact that Google openly said that link exchange schemes designed “exclusively for the sake of cross-linking” of any kind violate their guidelines indicates that first they were sure to have invented the catchall algo, and second that they felt safe to launch it without too much collateral damage. Not everybody agrees, I quote Fantomaster’s critique not only because I like his inimitably parlance:

This is essentially a theological debate: Attempting to determine any given action’s (and by inference: actor’s) “intention” (as in “sinning”) is always bound to open a can of worms or two.

It will always have to work by conjecture, however plausible, which makes it a fundamentally tacky, unreliable and arbitrary process.

The delusion that such a task, error prone as it is even when you set the most intelligent and well informed human experts to it (vide e.g. criminal law where “intention” can make all the difference between an indictment for second or first degree murder…) can be handled definitively by mechanistic computer algorithms is arguably the most scary aspect of this inane orgy of technological hubris and naivety the likes of Google are pressing onto us.

I’ve seen some collateral damage already, but pragmatic Webmasters will find –respectively have found long ago– their way to build inbound links under Google’s regime.

And here is the context of Google’s definition link exchanges = link schemes which makes clear that not each and every reciprocal link is evil:

[…] However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Link exchange and reciprocal links schemes (’Link to me and I’ll link to you.’)
• Buying or selling links […]

Again, please read the whole page.

Bear in mind that all this is Internet history, it just boiled up yesterday as the help page was discovered.

Related article: Eric Ward on reciprocal links, why they do good, and where they do bad.

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In why it is a good thing to link out loud LZZR explains a nicely designed method to accelerate the power of inbound links. Unfortunately this technique involves Yahoo! Pipes, which is evil. Certainly that’s a nice tool to compose feeds, but Yahoo! Pipes automatically inserts the evil nofollow crap. Hence using Pipes’ feed output to amplify links faults caused by the auto-nofollow. I’m sure LZZR can replace this component with ease, if that’s not done already.

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Old news, pros move on educating the great unlinked.

A tremendous amount of businesses maintaining a Web site still swap links in masses with every dog and his fleas. Serious sites join link exchange scams to gain links from every gambling spammer out there. Unscrupulous Web designers and low-life advisors put gazillions of businesses at risk. Eventually the site owners pop up in Google’s help forum wondering why the heck they lost their rankings despite their emboldening toolbar PageRank. Told to dump all their links pages and to file a reinclusion request they may do so, but cutting one’s loss short term is not the way the cookie crumbles with Google. Consequences of listening to bad SEO advice are often layoffs or even bust.

In this context a thread titled “Do the companies need to hire a SEO to get in top position?” asks the somewhat right question but may irritate site owners even more. Their amateurish Web designer offering SEO services obviously got their site banned or at least heavily penalized by Google. Asking for help in forums they get contradictory SEO advice. Google’s take on SEO firms is more or less a plain warning. Too many scams sailing under the SEO flag and it seems there’s no such thing as reliable SEO advice for free on the net.

However, the answer to the question is truly “yes“. It’s better to see a SEO before the rankings crash out. Unfortunately, SEO is not a yellow pages category, and every clown can offer crappy SEO services. Places like SEO Consultants and honest recommendations get you the top notch SEOs, but usually the small business owner can’t afford their services. Asking fellow online businesses for their SEO partner may lead to a scammer who is still beloved because Google has not yet spotted and delisted his work. Kinda dilemma, huh?

Possible loophole: once you’ve got a recommendation for a SEO skilled Webmaster or SEO expert from somebody attending a meeting at the local chamber of commerce, post that fellow’s site to the forums and ask for signs of destructive SEO work. Should give you an indication of trustworthiness.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Google Linkage Bans & Penalties

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Natural Search Blog has a nice piece reporting that Matt’s team makes use of a proprietary tool to identify webspam trying to manipulate Google’s PageRank.

Ever wondered why Google catches PR-boosting services scams in no time?

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Michael Martinez over at SEO-Theory (moved!) has a nice write-up on how to get crawled and indexed. The post titled “Search engine love: now they crawl me, now they don’t” discusses the importance of internal linkage, PageRank distribution, and Google’s recent architectural changes — topics which are “hot” in Google’s Webmaster Help Center, where I hang out every now and then. I thought I blog Michael’s nice essay as sort of multi-link-bookmark making link drops easier, so here is some of my stuff related to crawling and indexing:

About Google’s Toolbar-PageRank
High PageRank leads to frequent crawling, but nonetheless ignore green pixels.

The Top-5 Methods to Attract Search Engine Spiders
Get deep links to great content.

Supporting search engine crawling
The syntax of a search engine friendly Web site.

Web Site Structuring
Do’s and don’ts on information architectures.

Optimizing Web Site Navigation
Tweak your UI for users to make it crawler friendly.

Linking is All About Popularity and Authority
LOL: Link out loud.

Related information

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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Today I give up on answering emails like this one:

Hello,

First of all I would like to introduce my company as one of the best web hosting service provider from [country] named [link]. We are in the hosting business since 2004 and have more than 3000 satisfied customers.

We are having PR -6 and an alexa ranking of 63,697

We are interested to purchase a link at your site, please provide us with a suitable quotation.

Waiting for your kind reply.

Regards,
[Name, Company …]

Besides the fact that a page claiming a PageRank of minus six most probably is not that kind of neighborhood I’d tend to link out to, it’s a kinda stupid attempt.

Not only the page where the contact link was clicked is in no way related to web hosting services (it just triggers a few green pixels in the Google toolbar). Each and every page on this topic has a link leading to my take on paid links, which does not encourage link monkey business, so to say.

My usual reply to such emails was “Thanks for writing, you can buy a nofollow’ed link marked as advertising for a low as [tiny monthly fee] when you suggest a page on my site which is relevant to yours and I like what you provide to your visitors/users” plus an explanation of the link condom. No takers.

The message above is from a clown abusing my contact form today, so I guess it’s OK to quote it. It is however symptomatic, there are lots of folks out there who still believe that fooling the engines is that simple. I admit it can be done, but I’m with Eric Ward who says it’s not worth it.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Link-Condom rel=nofollow

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To answer the question above: Yes, selling links can be risky, buying links is quite safe, and I do recommend link brokers. I don’t want to fuel the heated “paid links evil or not” debate, but there is so much misinformation out there that I feel I’ve to step in. Two things pointed me to this topic today, TLA’s affiliate program and an article by Jill Whalen.

I got an email from Patrick Gavin from Text-Link-Ads.com (TLA) introducing his new affiliate program. I know he’s a nice guy, so I’ve signed up and placed his banner on all related pages of Smart IT Consulting Internet Services. Checking the link I found this statement on the landing page:

…our ads can … help your link popularity which is a top factor in search engine rankings.

Well, I disagree respectfully, so I wrote an article How to buy and sell (text) links and linked it as editorial note below the ads. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t promote TLA for ‘lousy’ $25 per signup. I do believe that traffic brokers like TLA provide extremely valuable services, and although I don’t use TLA’s service myself I got a few recommendations from trusted sources. So please consider TLA’s program recommended when you buy traffic.

Ok, next I stumbled upon Jill Whalen’s good article Buying Text Links - Is It Evil?. Jill does a terrific job in explaining why paid links confuse the hell out of the search engines and why they dislike selling link popularity. Basically she says that buying links isn’t evil and bought links will not get a site penalized by the engines:

It’s not a matter of if this [dropped rankings] will happen with paid text link ads, but when. It could be next week, next month, or next year. Regardless of when the engines decide to lower the boom, you can bet we’re going to hear a lot of crying in the forums about it! For now, if you’re buying text link ads, or have been thinking about it, I wouldn’t really worry about it. Just make a mental note to yourself that whatever boost to your rankings they may provide now could vanish at any time.

That’s right, the destination page may not get the PR boost, but the page carrying the link may get penalized, and unfortunately she doesn’t mention the latter fact.

If Google or another SE takes away a site’s ability to pass reputation in links that’s fatal. It may be not that big deal with outgoing links (although that’s pretty much questionable!), but internal links do lose their power too. If a site concentrates incoming links on the home page or few points of entry, the result may be that all the content pages attracting the money terms in lower link levels disappear from the search results.

So if you sell links, via broker or not, you really should make clear that your links will be castrated. Selling links with condom is fine with the engines. If you buy links, don’t worry but don’t expect an everlasting ranking boost, if any - just enjoy and convert the traffic.

Related links:
Sell and buy links via Text-Link-Ads.com (affiliate link to TLA)
Jill Whalen’s article “Buying Text Links - Is It Evil?”
My notes on buying and selling text link ads

UPDATE: Patrick’s statement: “We recommend only purchasing links on websites that have a good chance of sending you targeted traffic that converts for you. If you are getting your money’s worth in targeted traffic you don’t have to worry about how the search engines treat the link and any benefit will be a bonus.“

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Selling and buying text link ads

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Everybody is talking about link baiting, but it’s hard to create a good link bait when you have no noticed voice. I thought it might be useful to repeat some well established techniques of link acquisition, that is link building tips for small sites with a tiny marketing budget:

The value of links from a search engine’s perspective

Question: What is a link worth with regard to search engine rankings, what kind of links should I hunt for if I’m not the WSJ, and where do I have a realistic chance to get linked?

Answer (summary): Valuable links generate human traffic, trafficked sites do get a ranking boost. The article provides examples and explains why some inbound links are utterly useless.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Link Building Techniques

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