As part of our standard operating procedure around here we setup all of our sites with Google Analytics including goal tracking and funnel pages. Recently however I came across an anomaly on one of our client’s sites. I’m not at liberty to reveal the client so I can’t back up what I’m about to tell you with screenshots, however I am fairly confident that goal tracking via Analytics can play a large part in determining how Google calculates sitelinks. How? A form spammer recently spammed the hell out of one of our forms that was tied to a goal conversion. The site in question is little more than an SEO directory of states and the form spammer just happened to trip conversions in analytics on the South Dakota page. Now I can promise you we get very light traffic on the South Dakota page compared to some of the larger states like NY and California, however over the course of a week the spammer completed 100’s of conversions on the page before we were able to beef up countermeasures. A couple of weeks later I noticed a funny thing in my Google Webmaster Tools account: the South Dakota page had been picked up as a sitelink.

Some specifics for my blackhat readers:

All ip’s used by the spammer were from the same subnet, but were more or less unique ip’s.
The site typically has 50-100 conversions per day.

Copywriting is important and it seems search engines are giving it more and more weight. As the we all know the Internet is full of crappy information but if you know where to look you can find really valuable things too. Over the years some sites have made a living out of scraping the content of other sites, copying pictures or videos and posting them as their own content.

Although Google or other search engines are trying to keep this phenomenon under control by applying penalties like the duplicate content, the -30 or -950 they can’t really handle this completely. As the web continues to evolve even greater than some people would have anticipated, manual reviewing sites is simply a physical impossibility.

So the only way to fight against the big outlaws of the web is by working on the reviews they get for common abuses we see on the net like:

• duplicate content (counting site copying and redirecting) because even search engines can be tricked if the site has 30% of their content changed here and here.
• major examples of cloaking because the competition is always watching your move.
• paid links that seem to annoy everyone except the link building firm and the site who pays for them.
• owning illegal media.
• etc.

So don’t get surprised if you come across this while browsing the internet:

They started cleaning and this is a good thing overall because people should get credit for what they post on the internet. More changes will come, we just need to keep our eyes open and learn from others and their mistakes.

Not that anyone should be surprised but it looks like Google Local is being overrun by spam. I’ve come across many regional verticals loaded up with spam to the point of exclusion of legitimate businesses. The decision to use a place on a map as a point of interest instead of tying it to a third party URL may appear to be an error in hindsight. With Google cracking down on paid links you would think there would be an easy way to submit bogus local business listings but apparently Google hasn’t thought that far ahead.

I’ve now come across more than one local business vertical with 8 & 9 bogus listings all with the same phone number even. Why bother with SEO if Google will provide you with an easy shortcut to the top? Simply list all of your business lines as separate corporate locations and you can easily capture a lion’s share of the keyword’s search engine traffic. In theory it will probably also get you penalized, but how are they going to catch you if you don’t even have a website?

What Constitutes a Natural Link Profile?

When building links SEOs often take into consideration metrics that Google and other search engines might use to determine if a site is actively trying to manipulate their results. Avoiding detection, or creating a natural link profile is commonly overlooked in the SEO business. In truth the metrics SEO’s use are often arbitrary and rely on ‘best guess’ approaches. It’s difficult to know for sure whether Google tries to detect manipulation algorithmically or what metrics it might employ, however one can put on their Google hat and make an educated guess as to what might be reasonable yardsticks to measure by.

Link Building Basics

Vary Your Anchor Text

While pursuing links from all of the above site’s is a worthwhile endeavor, no amount of artificially trying to appear natural makes much sense if you put a giant bullseye on your back by building links that all have the same anchor text. Varying up your anchor text on links you build, buy or rent is the safest way to go.

Vary Blog/Forum Platforms

Sure you may have found the latest and greatest way to slip nofollow free links past wordpress or drupal, but exclusively building links on one or two platforms looks a little suspicious wouldn’t you say? Just because a link isn’t passing linkjuice or keyword rankings, don’t automatically assume it’s worthless. Every link has some value, even if its just to diversify your portfolio.

Deep Link Your Site

If your site has 5,000 pages it might raise a red flag if all of your good anchor text rich links point to the homepage. Get around this by creating multiple keyword landing pages and deep link to them with a mix of anchor text.

Solicit Links from 0 PR Pages

Not every link that a site acquires over time comes from a PR 6 page. Typically the vast majority of pages that link to you organically will have 0 PR. Once again if all the pages that link to yours are from high PR pages, a spotlight could shine on your site.

Build Links Over Time

Most of this article has dealt with who to acquire links from and where those links point. A third equally important metric is the time it takes to acquire your links. Most sites don’t go from 0-60 overnight. A good linkbait article CAN do this for your site, however building links over time is the safest way to approach things.

Link Profile Metrics

Existing Tools

Several popular seo tools already list possible metrics. Aaron Wall’s SEO tool for example lists a site’s Whois, Technorati index, Bloglines subscribers and del.icio.us bookmarks as potential metrics. SEO Quake lists only a site’s whois and del.icio.us bookmarks. As del.icio.us is the most popular social bookmarking tool it makes sense that if Google uses any sites as metrics, del.icio.us bookmarks would be first on the list. However with so many social media networks, if you are investing time and money in building links; spreading your eggs across several baskets is the wise move to avoid detection and possible penalty.

These are some sites that we at Indexed Content feel are good candidates to pursue links from to build a natural link profile for your site:

• Digg.com - a site that has made the front page of digg is likely to receive good backlinks on its own, however sites that don’t have multiple pages submitted are not likely to be worthy of keyword rankings for difficult to rank terms
• Stumbleupon - sites with several reviews by diverse users seem like a good fit to have naturally acquired good backlinks
• Del.icio.us - the first and most popular social bookmarking tool, all del.icio.us links are nofollowed making them of dubious SEO quality which makes them a natural fit as an organic metric
• Google Bookmarks - A bookmarking tool from Google, and since Google has access to all the data, using it as a metric would be exceedingly easy
• Technorati - the prominent blog search, ranking, and notifier of new blog posts, not a natural fit for certain sites that don’t run blogs
• Wikipedia - the worlds largest human edited encyclopedia, Wikipedia is free for anyone to edit but getting links to stick isn’t easy unless your site has expert quality content that qualifies.
• Faves.com (formerly bluedot) - Another popular social bookmarking site that adds nofollows to links.
• Furl - A social bookmarking site
• Blogmarks - A social bookmarking site
• Blinklist - A social bookmarking site
• Yahoo’s MyWeb - A social bookmarking/social media tool from Yahoo! When Yahoo controls the data why wouldn’t they use it as a metric and reward sites that score well on their products?