What's Going On - Do I smell a RAT?

Hi Andee,

There are a number of possibilities for what you are seeing. It could be, as yukon suggested, faked PR via a 302 Google Hijack, in which case the PR will disappear after 30 days, though you won't know that until the next toolbar update. It might also be buffer sites that gather un-targeted PR and then pass it through relevant pages from the buffer sites, and there are a few other possibilities. It would be hard to say without a little more detail.

Hi everyone.

Wow! I didn't think this would have been such a lively thread in just 18 hrs or posting. Thanks to one and all for your comments.

Perhaps I should explain a bit more details as to why I'm even bothering to look through someone else's off page optimisation campaign.

I've always been strictly White Hat myself for no other reason than I didn't want to become part of the scammer and spammer community that I detest so much. As far as I'm concerned these types are pond life and the virtual leaches of cyberspace.

I've tried to teach my mate over the years the importance of good clean organic growth which comes about by adding valuable content, on a well designed site, and has easy navigation for visitors. But he neglected his site for years, and then all of a sudden decided he wanted it to be live and popular ASAP.

Once again, I explained what he needed to do with regards to on page optimisation, suggestions for careful link building, and a lot of grunt work. I also tried to emphasise that because the project is to offer a service, then a name and face needs to be put behind it so that the visitors can build up some kind of rapport with the man behind the domain.

He told me he had no patience for this kind of approach and needed a more aggressive method to skyrocket the site into top SERPs and gain regional popularity. He then went ahead and employed the services of some self-proclaimed SEO gurus who promised to deliver what he asked for.

SO WHY SHOULD I CARE?

You might be wondering why I should care, right? After all, I freely gave him advice, tips and suggestions that he chose to reject, so if his on and off page SEO falls flat, then it's none of my business. Well, it might be and it might not be. Please keep reading...

The reason it concerns me is because he and his company is in partnership with a 6 year old popular project that I've built up with blood, sweat, tears, 1000's of man hours, and lots of TLC over those years.

I understand that Google and the other major SE's do not penalise a site by any back-links that point to its pages, even if they come from iffy neighbourhoods. But they may penalise a site that links heavily from its own pages to risky neighbourhoods. In other words, we can't be responsible for those who link to us, but as webmasters, we are responsible for those sites that we link to. The latter is in our control whereas the former is not.

I noticed he was getting a lot of back links very quickly. Nothing wrong with this per se, as I'm sure that a popular event or news story could also send thousands of links overnight to certain websites after very little previous activity (depending on the website of course). The point is that all kinds of sites can get a surge of back links for all kinds of reasons, and not just because of a frenzied back-link campaign.

So anyway, I also noticed that he had added a link exchange directory setup on an inside page. This directory has a link to it from the home page and although it's been there a while now, it's not yet indexed by Google despite being only 1 link in from the home page. This directory has a multitude of categories, almost all of which were totally unrelated to his site's theme.

I've since become concerned about all the links from the well established 6 year old project that are linking directly to his site. If his project does get delisted because it gets branded as Spammy by the SE's and also because it starts to link to dodgy neighbourhoods that hide Trojans and other suspect scripts, then the website I'm concerned about might, just might, also get punished by its high profile association.

So I've been keeping an eye on it over the past couple of months or so, and this is what I've found:

Quite a few blog comments posted for simple nonreciprocal link-backs are what I would deem as SPAM comments, i.e, 'Thanks for your post. It was interesting.' Such comments make no reference to the article, or offer any value, and that means they could be posted anywhere. Already, it makes the project look like it is after links and cares nothing about the website that gives them. I've found a bunch like this so far.

Secondly, I found that the link directory (btw, this project is not a directory but has a page set aside as a directory. Not a link partner's page, or 'friends of the site' type of page, but a Directory that will reciprocate a link back to anyone who links to it).

This means that potentially, his site could link back to dubious neighbourhoods. Soon after the directory was set up, I found links being reciprocated to gaming sites and pharmaceutical pages.

I also noticed a plethora of links that were 'nofollow'. Now Ken Durham above said that these still count as 'votes' but I'm not sure how they could if they are not followed? I thought that Page Rank was an indicator of a site's link popularity, and if Google is not including them in the count, then that would not count as vote and be added to the overall link popularity score, surely? If it did, then we could all get a zillion votes from twitter and the like with very little effort.

I then went to look at some of the links with PR, and it was then that I discovered a handful of empty blog pages that had Page Rank. These were empty pages that when run through Market Samurai showed zero back links. I checked 2 of these using Google's info: operator and both of them returned URLs that were totally unrelated to their own.

I haven't done an extensive check on this campaign as yet, and I doubt I will, but when you consider the few checks that I have done, one can only assume the whole thing is a mishmash of good mixed with bad, and done as quickly as possible (most likely on the request of the site owner).

Just to finish on, the last Google PR update reduced the home page of this site from a PR3 to a PR2, and although these PR updates are behind real time, it kind of shows that despite the linking frenzy (which has a bunch of PR4,3,2, and 1 back links), a drop from PR3 to PR2 seems like the algorithisms are detecting some activity that they might view as potentially distrustful, but it will take the next update to see if they are getting any real credit for this campaign or not.

So should I be concerned about having high profile hyperlinks all over my 6 year old project pointing to the site mentioned? There certainly seems to be some tacky practices going on in an attempt to boost its online presence.

The 6 year old project I'm talking about has a lot of PR on its inside pages, yet has only one quarter of the back-links the friend's website now has. The 6 year old site has also recently been accepted into the DMOZ Directory, and we all know how hard that is these days right! It took me 5 years and 3 attempts to get into there.

I am quite switched on with SEO, both on and off page, but I'm less familiar with the potential consequences of punishment by association, if indeed it really exists.

I control a bunch of my own websites, meaning I never link to anything but authority or well established projects, if at all, but this is the only one that I have a partner agreement to honour, which is why I don't want to come down too hard if there are no real 'guilty by association' type consequences should this project get slammed by the SE's.

I could think of nothing worse than getting the 6 year old project dragged down simply because it has a tight relationship to a broken project. So if anyone has ever had any experience of their websites getting wiped off the SERP, or worse still, de-listed, simply because of who they linked to, then I'd love to hear about it.

Thanks in advance folks

Andee