Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog

How much Link Spam can you eat before you choke?

Aaron Wall posts about Link Spam Detection (how much link spam can you have and still do ok?) based on his analysis of the paper Link spam Detection Based on Mass Estimation (pdf).

The biggest things Aaron points out are:

  • .edu and .gov love is the real deal, and then some
  • Don’t be scared of getting a few spammy links (everyone has some).
  • TrustRank may deweight the effects of some spammy links, but since most spammy links have a low authority score they do not comprise a high percentage of your link popularity if you have some good quality links.
  • If you can get a few well known trusted links you can get away with having a large number of spammy links.
  • These types of algorithms work on a relative basis. If you can get more traditional media coverage than the competition you can get away with having a bunch more junk links as well.
  • Following up on that last point, some sites may be doing well in spite of some of the things they are doing. If you aim to replicate the linkage profile of a competitor make sure you spend some time building up some serious quality linkage data before going after too many spammy or semi spammy links.
  • Human review is here to stay in search algorithms. Humans are only going to get more important. Inside workers, remote quality raters, and user feedback and tagging gives search engines another layer to build upon beyond link analysis.
  • Only a few quality links are needed to rank in Google in many fields.
  • If you can get the right resources to be interested in linking your way (directly or indirectly) a quality on topic high PageRank .edu link can be worth some serious cash.
  • Sometimes the cheapest way to get those kinds of links will be creating causes or linkbait, which may be external to your main site.

Again, read Aarons longer review here.

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3 Responses

  1. I have the opportunity to get site-wide links on an .edu site….

    I don’t know whether I should pursue it, since site-wide is bad, .edu is good!

    What are your thoughts on this?

  2. It’s hard to make a decision without knowing the details of the specific case.

    On balance, I’d say the .edu link outweighs the site-wide. We all have some site-wides, for the most part. Check most blog’s blogrolls, for instance. They’re not great, but they also don’t seem to necessarily be the kiss of death.

    .edu link = Google gold. I go for it.

    However, there also must be some way to avoid that sitewide. Might as well make an effort, as it would be preferable.

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