In the World Wide Web, link popularity or gathering quality back links is an imperative SEO strategy to higher ranks among SERPS. Web Masters have a strong desire for commercial success but are faced with equally austere competition from peers. The phenomena has been paving way for exploration of all kinds of means and ways to garner high quality backlinks – both legitimate and not so legitimate from the point of view of Google Search Engine spiders.
Link spam is one of the illegitimate methods of achieving quick and easy link popularity. Under the purview, a webmaster links to a Link farm or a website with no other business but to provide web pages full of irrelevant links on various communities. Link Spam may also imply other miscellaneous methods viz. hidden links, Sybil attack, Wiki spam, spam in blogs, spam blogs, page hijacking, referrer log spamming and buying expired domains.
All these methods basically intend to fool the Google’s link-based ranking algorithms (including HITS algorithm) into believing that the webmaster’s website enjoys substantial number of favorable votes. The votes in turn explicate to the search engine spiders that the website is informative, useful, unique and popular, which in turn means better creditability. The objective behind Link spam is absolutely and solely to increase link popularity and never to enrich the content of the website or better the user experience.
As the saying goes, “prevention is better than cure” – Link spam can be avoided by having the knowledge of it and preventing it then and there. Understanding the underlying logic behind the illegal nature of link spamming sheds a good amount of light on what can be a link spam, even if not described here in the text.
Some examples of Link spamming include
(1) Putting links where visitors cannot find them – Hidden Links
(2) Forging multiple identities or creating multiple websites at different domain names and linking them all to each other, thus indulging in fake link popularity - “Sybil attack”
(3) Misusing the open edit-ability feature of wiki system to place links from Wiki to the spam site – Wiki spam
(4) Irrelevant and unwanted nonsense post received from an automated software - Spam in blogs
(5) A fake blog created solely for link spamming, also known as spam blogs
(6) Creating a rogue copy of a popular site that shows contents similar to the original website to a web crawler but in effect diverts the traffic to irrelevant and spiteful websites
All link spam based propagation of text links visible on the face are bogus and barely a fallacy. In gist, these methods simply overlook the very purpose of Google’s algorithms – that is to ensure popular and informative sites appear in the SERPs in descending order for the benefit of the user. Therefore, as soon as one of these practices is detected, the relevant website is removed (either temporarily or permanently) from the Google’s search engine index, as a penalty
