Internet Marketing Tycoon

**RichTC** · 12-08-2005, 12:59 PM

Hi all,

Recently i had two emails (spam) sent to me both on a similar theme relating to two different websites.

The email (from a hotmail ac) said that i could add my site details to two directory sites (hence gaining two links to my site) if i gave one outbound link on my site (which was an anchor link) to the parents main commercial site. The email gave the link details.

I noticed that in both cases the sites were PR7 sites and they both ranked very well in Google for these anchor link keywords.

Having looked at the two directory sites and clicked on a few listing i noticed the sites listed had the backlinks that were requested to the said parent site - so the concept obviously worked well.

Net result is that the site has loads of one way links as a result

Question: i could obviously do the same thing but i thought this kind of thing was against googles terms and conditions? Is this not classed as gaming google?

Thoughts anyone

**chrishirst** · 12-08-2005, 06:21 PM

It's still a linking scheme, Still has a footprint that is detectable and open to being penalised.

From a programming POV three way linking schemes are probably the easiest to detect by far, you would only need a relatively small sample of sites to design and perfect a detection algo.

**RichTC** · 12-08-2005, 07:38 PM

Thanks for the reply Chris,

So would you say, report them to Google? (who more than likely wont do a thing about it)

OR, build a directory site and join them. If you filled half the directory with genuine links and the other half with three ways - whos going to know?

You must admit its an interesting one and the sites doing it are cleaning up. Both PR7 and ranking for the anchor keywords! In this case crime is paying, so to speak!

Kind Regards

Rich

**chrishirst** · 12-09-2005, 04:57 AM

I rarely report anything other than p0rn sites appearing for a search that could not be construed as an "adult" phrase.

They are for now, the point being by all means go with it if that's your choice and it may help with something. But do not rely on it always helping as at some point these links are also going to get devalued. So for one update in the future there will be hundreds of threads from people who go in for this latest scheme asking "My site just disappeared! What did I do wrong? Am I banned".
Using the latest and greatest reciprocal link scheme and nothing else leaves your site wide open to every tweak and update the SEs do. Personally I have only had one site that ever lost ground in any update and this was through a deliberate action. The site had only backlinks from one forum in my signature and was ranking for all the various phrase and was always in the first 3 for the text in the sig, then in the Feb 2005 update it disappeared for any phrases where more than 3 - 4,000 results were returned or it wasn't a specific title phrase.
Anything you do as a deliberate attempt to make it "look natural" will be "footprinted" so has every chance of being devalued at some point.

Simply consider how you would go about setting links up (in and out) if the SEs didn't exist and you are purely linking for visitors (which of course you are aren't you) and do things the same way.