SEO Backlinks That Google Loves.. But Shouldn’t

I was contacted out of the blue last Saturday by an old mate that I met 10 years ago in an Internet Marketing forum called Ewealth. It’s where I learned a lot about SEO and some of the darker Internet techniques. I learned about adwords and also made some good coin doing affiliate marketing from techniques I learned there. I ended up doing SEO for others from a lot of the skills I gained at Ewealth, so it was good to hear from my old mate Biff whose posts I used to enjoy. I’m sure at one time or another he and I argued about various things because it was that sort of forum. No holds barred, a free and frank exchange of ideas. I even got my positioning statement from the forum. Back then believe it or not most people didn’t know what SEO was or even how to spell it. I asked the group at the time for suggestions, my idea at the time was “If they can’t find you they can’t buy from you”. Just rolled off the toungue eh? Miles Baker one of the users there said “Be Searched. Be Found” BAM! Would have cost me thousands for a consultant to come up with that but getting involved with the community delivered it to me for free. No Miles there is no cheque in the mail 🙂 BTW Hi to Lev, Chris, ColinSick Boogooloodude and the rest of you blokes.

Back To Biff & SEO

It turned out Biff had continued following the blog after I left the forum many years ago after it had been beaten to death by spammers. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never done forum spam for backlinks because I know first hand the damage it can cause to these communities. Biff told me via email he had a big story.

I knew Biff would not make the claim lightly that the story was big and indeed it was. Over 7 million backlinks big. He gave me just enough clues to do some digging. I didn’t want too much info from him as I did not want it to influence my investigation.  He told me that a site that ranked pretty high in Google US for phrases like “Web hosting reviews”, “Best Web Hosting” etc had only appeared recently so he did more digging and looked at it’s backlink profile. It wasn’t hard to find. A site webhostshield, ranks really well for these highly competitive phrases has over 7 million backlinks since November last year. It looks like Google is ranking them high because of these backlinks. How they got them though, is that have been placed secretly within plugins that site owners are installing. These backlinks are coming from GOV, EDU, ORG sites worldwide and Google is rewarding them for it! I even tested plugins from the site that is distributing them and already contain the hidden backlinks totally unrelated to the plugin. Watch this week’s show to see how they are achieving this. If you are from Google or an SEO I’d love to know why you think Google is rewarding these hidden backlinks for a very valuable search term.  This technique makes a content is what we should be focusing on as site owners. Why has Penguin not punished this technique? My guess is because the links come from such a random, diverse range of sites.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.