Ok I am being petty again, but I have decided that I am going to create a page dedicated to all the crap SEO spam emails we get. If I remember correctly another SEO company was listing them on their own site, so if anyone remembers the site let me know and I will give them some link love for the idea.

My main reason behind this is because it is funny how stupid SEOs make themselves look when they spam other SEOs with SEO services. I assume they are automated requests so I guess they can’t help it, but then using an automated technique is pretty stupid too.

Today WebSearchPR.Com were kind enough to take some time out of their day to send me an email. Apparently my site only has 155 links in Google, and that they used the Google link count because that is the most important.

“A higher number of links will help me achieve far higher rankings on Google.”

Really? Links are important? Why did no one tell me?

Apparently they have achieved excellent results for their clients and they have increased profits for 100’s of their clients.

Strangely enough they do not seem to have any links in Google themselves, Yahoo shows seven and MSN (+link:) shows none. Maybe they should spend more time building their own links rather than spamming other SEO companies.

Well it has been a few weeks now since Microsoft opened the Webmaster tools and also made the Link command work again and I have been trying out both of them.

Firstly the Live Search Link commands, this now works by using + in front of the command then the URL you want to check. Therefore instead of link:dolphinpromotions.co.uk it is now +link:dolphinpromotions.co.uk. Joost de Valk pointed out that Live Search appears to obey NoFollows which is pretty useful as Yahoo is quite frustrating when showing all the NoFollow links. It also groups together the sitewide links well and the tool is usable through the API. Overall it is quite good news, it appears to be more accurate than Yahoo and obviously the Google one is not very accurate.

Next up is Live Webmaster, the equivalent to Google Webmaster Tools or the Yahoo Site Explorer. At the moment I think it is still in Beta, while I could sign in and try to add a site the tool kept creating a validation error. On further research I had to email lswmp@microsoft.com to request my account to be activated. My first thoughts were that it is defiantly more advanced than Site Explorer. Some of the features include:

• Top 5 Pages - Not entirely sure how it evaluates the pages but it assigns a rank to them, it shows the Language, Region, Last Crawled and whether it is blocked.

• Indexed Pages - The total number of indexed pages.

• Profile - You can add your sitemap.xml etc

• Keywords - Check how well a page performs in the search results for the specific keyword

• Top Links From - Top 10 performing outbound links in Live Search.

• Top Links to - Top 10 performing inbound links in Live Search.

While there are more functions than Site Explorer, it definitely seems buggy (it is beta though). The main things I noticed were:

• Rank - Every single page it showed was ranked 5, so I am not sure if this is even working at al.

• Country/Region - All my pages apart from the home page was classed as GB, the homepage is classed as US. Though I presume this is related to which country the majority of users visit. So more people from US have visited the homepage of this blog.

• Indexed Pages - It reports 701 pages for this blog, which is defiantly not accurate, Google reports 190. The +Site command also reports 701 pages.

• Keyword Function - I am not entirely sure what this is supposed to do, the description says “Review how this page performs in search results against specific keywords.” which I would of expected to show me the position of my site in Live. However it just shows a list of my pages, I assume it shows which page performs best compared to the other pages in your site for that keyword, rather than the actually SERPs.

• Validation - Our main site www.dolphinpromotions.co.uk is still HTML 4.01 (We will change it one day!) so when I added the meta validation it created an validation warning due to the forward slash, when I removed this the site failed the validation. Granted the slash doesn’t actually create an error so I could just leave it in, and you can also authenticate the site through and XML file so it is a bit of a moot point, but the site should not really fail authentication because of that.

Overall I think there is plenty of potential there, though to be honest I do not use Site Explorer or Webmaster tools a lot. I find Site Explorer a bit crap and it does not seem to provide much benefit to my sites. Webmaster tools is definitely the best of the bunch but it has been around for quite a while now so hopefully Live will develop plenty of useful feature in the future.

So there has been a lot of mention about linkbait over the past few months. Some SEOs seem to treat it as the be all and end all when it comes to promoting a site. While I have no doubt it can be superb for a promoting a site by generating incoming links and, in my opinion more importantly, increasing a blogs subscription level it has also generated a huge spam issue.

There are plenty of linkbait techniques while most of them fall under a handful or methods including:

1. Tools – Examples include Business Opportunities Blog Worth with 1.5 Million links in Yahoo Site Explorer , or perhaps Digpagerank 12k Links.

2. Quizzes – Diggtest was Dugg 2843 times, though it does only have 766 links that’s not bad for one easy bit of linkbait.

3. Lists – Top Ten Reasons Marijuana Should be Legal (5,520 Links, 2018 Diggs) The Ten Most Obnoxiously over-quoted movies (1,090 Links, 2592 Diggs)

4. Statistics/Research – Top 100 Digg Users (655 Diggs, 434 Links)

5. Controversy – George W “Atheists Neither Citizens nor Patriots” (4973 Diggs, 1,140 Links), or What Should You Do if You Find an Atheist? (3750 Diggs, 547 Links, for an image). I didn’t really know what to use for controversial so just searched for atheists as religion always causes a stir.

Problogger has a nice LIST of linkbait techniques to use if you want some other ideas.

I am sure there are some Elitist Digg members may say all linkbait is spam but while many/most of the above were designed as linkbait they were all original (as far as I know) and they were all fun or informative so therefore surely they are could not be spam.

Unfortunately with every good piece of good linkbait comes along dozens of pieces of spammy linkbait. We already know how to become a Digg power user in 48 hours, and DigitalPoint has several Digg services to help get you higher in Digg or even guarantee you getting to the front page of Digg.

This has led to posts like these:

1. Armoured cars: Essential kit for presidents. A word for word copy of the BBC News item with the same title that received 455 Diggs and has 412 links in Yahoo.
2. Stretch Limousine + San Francisco Hills = Disaster. Now this one is a bit more interesting as the website is for a Fort Lauderdale Limo Service, that blatantly linkbaited by creating a page of grounded limos. While that may of been unique or not they now seem to of removed that page and forwarded it to a page advertising a Miami Limo Service, I assume its 301′d to try and keep the influence of the old page. The old images are available here.
3. Btunnel - Free website blocker. Hat Tip to Blogstom. This one doesn’t even try and hide the fact it is spam!

So what ways are there to stop this spam? Digg bans the site or the users? So what we can create a new user and I if you get your site banned from Digg then there is always reddit etc.

The main concerns are what is Google etc going to do about it, after all isn’t that what linkbaiting all about? Blogstorm, SEOBook, and EMarketingPerformance have all posted about Google looking in to a sites natural link growth and discounting links that grow in spikes, therefore devaluing linkbaitng unless you keep launching successful linkbait one after another. As BlogStorm suggests the best possible technique to follow would be long term link bait such as “how to’s” which will gather links constantly over a long period of time.

Unfortunately if Google does go down the route of penalising sites that grow large numbers of links during a short period of time I imagine they will penalise many sites that have hit Digg/Reddit/etc naturally rather than on purpose, and possibly creating even more controversy than the recent PageRank update where many innocent sites had their PR dropped.