Seen over the comment threads on some blogs lately:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you (posted verbatim)

Classic social engineering attempt. Straight out of the Social Engineering for Dummies handbook (if there was ever one).

Do you really think people would fall for this one?

Okay, maybe a couple of dummies or so will contact you and link to your site in the hopes of lessening the spam comments they get.

The moment you write these people, they’ll have your email address and include it in their ever-growing list of harvested emails. They’ll sell these for a few bucks to other spammers or to shady companies that use not-so-nice marketing techniques (like spam).

Quite a crafty and creative way of doing things, if I might say so. Spammers are getting creative these days. But I’m not falling for it.

To everyone who felt the need to add something to Hugh McLeod’s whine about the A-List (link condom out of principle), let me tell you that the reason behind the entry not falling traffic was, but a blog eons old strategy. If twitter is so March 07, this strategy was so Fall 06. We call it linkbaiting.

When do you linkbait?
If you’re not as whorish as our bestest friend [tag]Scoble[/tag] and prefer not to loose time on every new network platform, gathering exactly the same list of friends you already have in your other 2 months old profile, or if you’re a member of … lets say a popular blog directory which has more than quadrupled the number of rulers. Add to that almost 20 times as much of members to the newest and designographically [sic] most elitist network and your shortage of time to write note after note in their community… then you whine linkbait.

And over the next days you admire the sudden flux of new readers. Readers who just discovered a graying A-Lister, a blogger trying to cope with the cruel reality of not being discovered anymore like in the old days, not having found a Blue Monster Sequel^TM and who’s still waiting for the next PR gig to go viral.

All those conditions combined, bring out the best blogging techniques in any A-Lister, and suddenly they remember that every columnist lurks.

Now Whine is the device!
Whine, sit back… and enjoy how everyone falls into the trap.

I guess exactly that is what makes an A-Lister. Knowing how to play the audience, the lurkers.
Well done, Hugh

Just as I thought linkbaiting schemes were a thing of the past, I come across yet another link whoring scheme that I think is all wrong. Do a search on viraltags and viralinks and you will come across this post instructing you to add a matrix of links under any post on your blog, and adding any blog that pings back to your post into the matrix.

So basically it’s link exchange. You get links from people who wish to pingback from your site, and you add their links in return.

Pretty interesting idea, I would say. However, if this concept were to be as successful as the promoters would say, why aren’t they on top of the search results for the keywords viraltags, and even viralinks?

Maybe they used a name of an already existing service (there are sites called viraltags.com and viralinks.com)? Maybe it’s really a fluke?

Here’s what I think. The concept is indeed interesting, as it takes advantage of blogs’ automatic pinging/linking back mechanism in order to “notify” other viralink bloggers that there are people asking for a link back. And we know the value of inbound links in terms of search optimization. However, there might be misplaced enthusiasm about such “viralinking” schemes.

• Link farms? The way the links are set up—which are in matrix form—might be thought of as link farming by Google. Come on, we know Google likes links that are interspersed into text naturally. There’s probably more value in a single link coming from a blog post of substance rather than a long list of hundreds of links. Jampacking your post with links would just dilute its link-love value.


• Anchor text. The original viralinks post tells of linking using a matrix of dots or stars. Where’s the SEO value there? Aren’t you aware that the anchor text plays a big part in optimization. If you used asterisks as anchor text, then you would just be optimizing the site linked to for the “*” keyword (if there is such a thing). You should use something more descriptive.


• It’s artificial. I read some bloggers claiming this would enhance your popularity on technorati. I’m thinking otherwise. I would say the guys over at technorati would think of such schemes as unnatural ways of jacking up link popularity, and hence would eventually filter them out. So whatever popularity you get will likely be short lived.

I guess there may be some merits to getting into link-exchange schemes. But one thing I really hate, and would like to highlight here as such, is how these things uglify your site. I’m not about to add a hundred or so links below my posts (or even just one) just for a link exchange program. I would rather write interesting, substantial, link-able material that everyone would blog about and link to.