3 spammy backlink techniques that work
A couple of months ago I was looking into how Interflora had risen so quickly in a particular category. Well they keep rising like a jewish carpenter in all their old categories. Their rankings originally got smashed in the Penguin 2012 update and then further obliterated in the update we discovered just over a year ago. They weren’t the only one in the flowers category that got caught up in the Google penalty tsunami though. Just about every well know national florist brand got hit. Now Interflora is back.. but none of the others seem to be. The only thing that seems like it maybe working for Interflora is their backlinks. It shouldn’t though.
Interflora Backlink Type 1 – spam
These are the backlinks I reported on that were fake authors names from basically junk cookie cutter sites. The sites that are publishing the content look like they are real magazines there for their readers but with a bit of digging you can see they are just junk sites that purely exist as backlink farms.
Interflora Backlink Type 2 – sponsored
These are interesting backlinks as they are recent ones for Interflora and from highly reputable sites. They have backlinks from the Melbourne flowershow, The Tour Downunder site and a few others. I think it is these that has really helped them get back to the no.1 spot nationally for flowers as their on site content is, shall we say um cheap? For instance their latest post has an image of a happy employee which is actually a photograph of the Chief Talent & Culture Officer at the Wikimedia foundation, Gayle Karen Young. It looks as though someone just did an image search of happy employee and decided to use that one.
You can see quite clearly where the photo was grabbed from here http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gayle_Karen_Young.jpg . I only mention this because I don’t think this content could be helping them much as it is low quality. The backlinks however are fantastic. Recent, high quality & relevant. There’s one problem though, they’re sponsored links. So according to Google they should be clearly labelled as advertising but they are not. There’s an opportunity for your local business though. Start sponsoring all the local sporting, comunity groups you can find and ask for a backlink. Google doesn’t seem to care.
Interflora Backlink Type 3 – network
I don’t think these would be helping much with the ranking of interflora.com.au. These are other sites owned by Interflora such as florist.com.au that link back to the main site. I can’t find any other reason for Interflora’s ranking which is pretty much against Google’s TOS. Try the above techniques at your own risk. Or you could just create great content and fix up your site and you should rank pretty well as we show in this week’s SEO case study.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
