Fused Nation – UK SEO Blog

I was reading an article over at SearchEngineLand just now and this thought occurred.  Where is the line drawn when a link on a page stops becoming a simple tool for user navigation and becomes a much more insidious spam-like concept?

At one end of the scale you can browse through the likes of the BBC website and each news item, which rather than including links within the articles, adds an “external resources” box with links to companies cited within the article.  I don’t think anyone would argue that this is anything but useful for users.

But this is dangerously similar to a sponsored links section.  Not I think that the BBC run any risk from being accidentally banned from Google, but I do think that many other sites using the same concept for presenting information may not be so fortunate.

The point is that there are different shades of link spam and I think we all know that the industry has moved / is in the process of moving away from obvious examples of this (eg site wide footers containing sponsored links), which is leading us onto a more subtle form of link spam.

I’d rank on page link spam in terms of obvious intentions (ie to aid SEO) vs danger of being dumped on by Google as follows:

• Site wide footer / header “sponsored” links.  The days of this being a “clever” approach to link building are long gone.  Search engines are more than capable of picking the footprint up site wide sponsored links.  Limited long term effectiveness.
• Limited “sponsored” links within a site (ie single pages or sections).  Not far off the first point – still susceptible to “footprint” identification, but a little more subtle.  In most cases it’s just managed badly at the template level, but could potentially be managed to extend the lifespan of the campaign.
• Mass article / PR distribution.  Duplicate content aside (which IMO dramatically lowers the link benefit of the technique, meaning the sole benefit arises from quantity not quality), this is a very easy technique for search engines to identify and take action against if they so wish – content distributed from a handful of central sources can easily be tracked.
• Paid reviews.  More subtle and relatively new concept – mixed in with real blog posts / articles these could potentially offer a much more long term solution.  However it is entirely within the realms of possibility that search engines could identify these networks and “client” sites in the future.  Perhaps not a full on ban in the pipeline, but certainly the possibility of minor penalties exist (and the kind of penalty that is difficult to notice, let alone remedy).  There is a quality issue to consider with this technique as well – personally I’ve stopped reading a few blogs recently that have gone from interesting SEO related commentary to a mix of self promotion and paid reviews. 
• Site wide / limited “sponsored” links using nofollow.  More acceptable for search engines, certainly and you lose the SEO benefit.  But I’m starting to warm to the concept simply because it brings traditional marketing more into play to harness the traffic benefits.  Hopefully this won’t encourage the use of phrases such as “reinventing the wheel”, but I would like to see BUSINESS becoming the centre of the SEO industry and not just search engine algorithms.
• Guest editorials.  Basically – write for another site, get links back to your own site (usually through an “author’s bio” type section at the end of your article).  I think this is a great approach – it brings useful content to a new market of users – it promotes your knowledge and skills – it increases the content coverage of the publishing site – it isn’t too direct or spammy (so search engines aren’t likely to care).

My reason for this post.  I’ve noticed more and more frequently that a lot of otherwise high quality news type sites are bring in what are effectively B / C / D list authors.  I loathe using the “B list” type phrase but I’m referring to relative unknowns within the industry (and should point out that this isn’t any reflection on their experience / knowledge / skills).  While this has relative benefits, I hate seeing keyword link drops to author’s sites within the articles.

SearchEngineWatch and SearchEngineLand are two of the obvious sites that are guilty of this recently (WebProNews to a certain extent as well, although some of their content is republished from blogs so that’s kind of a different issue).  It’s at the point now that I don’t bother reading most the content – I simply scan the headlines to see if there’s anything interesting.

For example, Alan over at SEL includes a few links to his company blog within his recent article.  Not a criticism of Alan or the article (which I otherwise enjoyed reading), but are those links really necessary on top of the bio links?  I’ve seen this loads of times over the past few months on both SEL and SEW.

OK so, a few examples of this aren’t exactly ground breaking news are they?  But where do we go from here?

Made for SEO networks.  Made for SEO websites.  Made for SEO pages.  Made for SEO news items.  Now made for SEO sentences hidden (figuratively) within otherwise high quality news sites? 

With the two examples of sites I gave, I completely understand why things ended up the way they did.  SEW faced an exodus of talent, so they recruitment some more.  SEL wanted to launch with a bang and they did (pretty awesome starting line up, quickly supported by a mix of old and new faces to contribute – although perhaps they went a little overboard in this respect).  And let’s face it – if either SEW or SEL approached any SEO in the business and asked them to write a regular column they would.

My point is (if I haven’t lost it by going off on a tangent too much) is that the industry (as always) is changing.  Subtle link whoring within quality news sites (especially within the SEO industry) does nothing but lower the quality of the site itself, and we all know that search engines can only be pushed so far before they take action.

From a business point of view, I can understand the argument for having more authors vs allowing a little self promotion – I make the same concessions on many sites myself.  But I still think it is important to avoid articles that are simply written as an excuse to embed self promoting links within then (especially if they don’t add value).  After all, quality authors write quality articles – and they get nice juicy links back from their bio. 

The SEO industry would quite literally have a hissy fit if a BBC journalist started dropping keyword links to their own sites.  No reason we shouldn’t expect the same standard from our own industry then?  Or perhaps we should just take it for granted that anything SEO comes hand in hand with an element of self promotion (guilty as charged here, for the most part)?

I’d be interested in hearing what everyone else has to say about paid reviews and their impact on the quality of the publisher’s blog, and link dropping within respected news sources.

MG