Link Spam - The Seedy Underbelly of Web Marketing - page 2

by Darren McLaughlin, 2/14/2006

Search engines introduced the rel nofollow tag in order to deal with the rising tide of link spam. All popular blog software comes with the nofollow in place, so the main risk of Webspam is to legacy blogs installed prior to 2005. Nofollow essentially tells the search engine that the link is untrusted. In essence it says this link was entered by a person other than the website owner, so treat it with a grain of salt. Forum software makers have also been quick to add nofollow to their core technology. The fact of the introduction of nofollow gives great insight into how much trouble search engines were having with the enormous load of link spam. Basically they threw their hands up and admitted defeat. Nofollow has had an enormous impact on Webspam, but there are still an awful lot of blogs and forums out there that haven't been patched.

Link spam appeals to certain web marketers for obvious reasons. It's a scalable and free solution to building link popularity. Web marketers who automate the process can quickly vary their anchor text between 'runs'. This will give them a wide variety of links from a broad spectrum of websites located on diverse IP addresses. This is normally a sure-fire recipe for success for virtually any website. By simulating the link popularity of a popular website, the link spammer is able to fool the search engines into assigning it higher rankings. The manipulation of link popularity has become a major issue to all of the search engines. Each will offer more and more attempts at reducing this threat, but unless search engine rankings are based only on on-page variables, it will always exist.

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