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Dangers of unnatural link building

Bernd has not let me go. Not only do I have to defend myself from some comments that, in simply stating that all spam generated by “Bernd Sonnensegel” and “Jens Markise” originated in eastern Germany, I am not showing enough interest in the living reunification. More importantly though, to me, is the search-engine-ranking, which should not come as a surprise. Yesterdays Site-Clinic at seoFM was motivation for me to comment on the back-link structure of some Websites.

Back in the day, Google started with the revolutionary concept of ranking websites by means of back-link-data into the search engine market. They did this, considering todays market share, not without a certain degree of success. In the beginning Google could assume that links were placed because they meant a recommendation for the linked website, this however changed drastically in recent years. Many links now exist, not to be a recommendation but to change the Google-Ranking in the websites' favor. Besides the areas of link-purchase and -sale, there are a large quantity of links which are set by webmasters themselves that degrade the quality of the Index: Web catalogs, article directories, social-bookmarking systems and blog comments. Whoever believes that this strengthens their domains in the long run, is mistaken.

I did a little experiment to demonstrate that even I, with my modest possibilities, can find domains that rely heavily on such links. To do this I have taken all domains that SEO-United kindly provided (though probably not mainly for this reason) as lists of article directories, press distribution lists, social-bookmarking-systems and web catalogs and examined the outgoing links. For each source domain I counted only one end domain (as a sort of domain-pop), and the results were then sorted in descending order. Not all links in this area are a problem, as can be seen with the front-runners, Google and Wordpress.org. The problem arises when we take the number of links in these “unattractive” areas in relationship to the sum of the back-links for the domain. An exercise that Google should have no problem implementing and should prove to have a surprisingly high hit rate.