Link building is one of the most important things a business owner or SEO could do for their website. The more quality backlinks you can have pointing to your website, the better Google will look upon your site and the better your search results will be. The problem is, like with most things in life, there are some people that will try to take short cuts. In the long run, it never really pays off. Matt Cutts and the folks over at Google have done a great job taking care of spammy link building sites and link farms. As new forms of Black Hat SEO link building popped up, they’ve stayed on top of it. Matt Cutts latest crackdown is penalizing SEO companies and bloggers that are practice a technique known as Bribing Bloggers.
SEO companies that are taking shortcuts are now trying to target bloggers with under the table bribes. Requesting that the blogger simply add a backlink with a certain keyword into one of their blogs, and the blogger will receive a payment without their manager or boss knowing. The Internet really started to catch a buzz about it earlier this December when an article was published on Gawker about a company that tried to bribe a blogger at Gawker to add some links and keywords for their client’s sites. Once the article outing the SEO firm went viral, more and more bloggers start to comment about how frequently it happened to them. Finally, last Friday, December 20th, Matt Cutts sent out a tweet with the Gawker article stating “we’re taking action on hundreds of buyers, dozens of sites, & dozens of spammy writers.”
It still remains unclear if Google has already taken action against these sites, or if not, when they will. Regardless, the moral of the story is the importance of being patient and following proper White Hat SEO tactics to achieve higher results. Google will continue to crack down on spammy links and spammy bloggers to make sure websites practicing the right tactics are rewarded. Cutts even went on to quip “we try to avoid major algorithm updates near the holidays. But spamfighting always continues.” Not exactly a superhero but he’s done great job protecting the integrity of Google’s search results and their quest to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience.
By Mike Fedotowsky