Stupid links tricks

Just like there are many excellent places to look for links, there are a number of techniques to avoid. Many people attempt to fool the search engines, but they are getting harder and harder to fool with tricks like these:

• Blog spamming. Ablog (short for Web log) is an online personal journal-kind of a periodic column on the Web. Sometimes blogs are almost like reading someone's private diary, but others are more like magazine columns that tightly focus on a subject of interest. Many blogs are very popular and well written, and search engines treat them with the same importance as a well-crafted Web page, so links from these blogs are important to search marketers. Readers can subscribe to blogs to read the latest post and usually post comments themselves-which is where the trouble is. Blog spammers post unrelated messages containing links to URLs that the spammer wants to boost in the search rankings. Many bloggers now block readers from posting comments.

• Guest book spamming. This trick is similar to the blog trick. A guest book allows visitors to post their contact information and comments about a Web site. Unfortunately, spammers began to post their site's URLs in guest book comments to impress search engines. Both blog and guest book spammers actually use programs to automatically post their URLs, allowing them to add thousands of links with no manual effort.

• Link farms. Tricky search marketers set up dozens or hundreds of sites that can be crawled by search engines, just so they can put in thousands of links to sites they want to boost in search rankings. "free-for-all" sites allow anyone to post a link on any topic, and are similarly not recommended.

• Hidden links.  You can hide links using the same techniques. Hiding links allows your links to be seen by spiders but not by people, so you can load up lots of links on high-ranking pages to other pages that you are trying to boost.

As with content tricks, it is not very easy to fool the search engines, so tricks designed to fake out search engines usually do not work. You should also be aware of a couple of tricks designed to fool you:

• Link e-mail spamming. Rather then spamming the search indexes, this trick spams the inboxes of Webmasters, requesting links from their sites. Spammers even buy programs adept at unleashing this e-mail spam on unsuspecting Webmasters. If you are on the receiving end of a link request that does not look as though the person has ever seen your site, treat it like all spam and do not respond.

• Fake two-way links. Many sites will link to yours if you link to theirs in return, but some try to trick you by employing links that search engines cannot see. That way, you think you got the link back but the search engines fail to give you credit for it, allowing your "partner" to get credit for the more valuable one-way link from your site. Go to the linking site with JavaScript turned off and see whether the link to your site works.

My advice: Make sure you are not being fooled and do not be in the business of fooling search engines or anyone else.