Keeping Under the Radar

At every PubCon there is at least one bloke who asks me what my sites are then gets miffed when I decline to tell him, taking it personal. Nothing personal, it's just that I have my niches and don't want anyone coming near them. It's so important to keep stealthy that I don't even outsource link dev for my meaningful websites. The last thing I want is an army of aggressive SEO's stomping all over my hunting grounds. Ack!

Keeping your link buys under the radar
Text link buying is a case where discretion is of the essence. Websites with a high PageRank are conspicous and potentially puts a bullseye on the text link buy. Unless you're selling PageRank yourself through a directory it's a waste of money, if you ask me. If you've been paying attention to the serps then you'll have noticed that it's not the website with the highest PR that's been walking away with the serps. More and more it's quantity that is playing a role.

No less than WebGuerrilla has been cautioning about staying under the radar with your text link buys for a long time- at JupiterMedia/Internet.com's Search Engine Strategies conference no less (hehe).

So I was surprised when someone who I thought was knowledgable asked me if I could turn him onto any PR 9 links. I said, "Um, you mean to be like with a ROS from a high PR site and that's it?" and he answered affirmatively. Now you see, if people can count your link buys on the hands they were born with then you seriously need to reconsider how high above the radar is safe.

I was talking to somebody else who does link text buying, and he said he only sticks to high profile high PR pages. I knew he was doing these buys- the whole SEO world knows he is doing it.

What surprised me was that he was putting zero emphasis on quantity of links from lower PR websites. And from the looks of it, the high PR campaign seems to be doing zilch for his website.

Repetitive Link Syndrome
Talking about a handful of high PR links and that's all. They positively scream for attention. And it looks bad in your backlinks. Seems to me it's a better idea to mix up the inbound sources as much as possible. And if it's a link from a pr 1-3 then that's even better. I'll take one hundred pr 2's over a few pr sevens or eights any day. With a few exceptions, for many websites, I'll generally walk away from a PR 8 or 9 unless it's a totally natural link.

Is Ask Jeeves Behind Browser Hijackers?

AJ Pushing Nasty Pests onto your Desktop? Geez... I mean, Jeeves!
Ask Jeeves last year acquired a company called myway and mywebsearch. Their toolbar products are referred to by many as spyware. In fact, if you search on Google for MywebSearch, most of the results are websites telling you how to remove the mywebsearch toolbar.

Is Ask Jeeves Aggressively Pushing Viagra Advertising?
What brought this to my attention was that a colleague said he found what appeared to him as log spam. When he clicked on the referral string it took him to a fully branded MyWay website with tacky adboxes advertising Viagra, sexual health products, dieting products, etc.

What is log spam?
Log spam is when a referral is left on a server log indicating that a visitor came from a specific website to your website. People have devised ways to fake a referral and leave it on thousands of websites across the internet. The idea is that many log statistics are available online and can be viewed by the public, and more importantly, by the Search Engines.

What this means is that these referrals that are out in the wild can serve as inbound links to websites that are log spamming. An email from the My Way Customer service team states "It may be that your log has recorded multiple users who have our toolbar installed."

Can you make sense of that?

Does Ask Jeeves Profit from Annoying Pest Products?
Well, the answer depends on how you define the word pest. In addition to the MyWay and MyWebSearch products, Ask Jeeves is also profiting from the Smiley Central and Cursor Mania products. According to the PC Hell website, these products are identified as pests by the AdAware and SpyBot Search & Destroy anti-spyware products and are reported to be removed, along with browser hijackers and known spyware programs. If you read the removal instructions on the PC Hell website it will become very clear that they are extremely difficult to get rid of.

Smiley Central can be downloaded from Download.com, but if you read the user reviews, it shows that 94% of Cnet Users have given the Smiley Central program a thumbsdown. A recent review stated,

"Downloaded Smiley Centeral and it hijacked my Google search engine, poisioned my network printer... and I can't remove it! DONT DownLoad This Program!!!! Worse than Bad, terrible!!!"

You can view the complete list of what some people regard as annoying products at Ask Jeeves' website.