- Googlebowling
- a term used to describe a method of maliciously removing a page from the Google search results
I’ve posted before on malicious SEO techniques - or, I suppose, "anti-optimization", referring to a story related by Nick Lewis.
Recently, the subject has arisen once more after Rand Fishkin returned from SES London with a tale of horror. Well, more an interesting proposition of how such a thing could be accomplished, but you get the picture.
The basic story is this: if you link to a set of perfectly reasonable sites, who are then pointed at by spammy sites, you may receive a penalty by association - once the formerly respectable sites are damned, your own site may be sent in the handbasket alongsides. This can hypothetically happen in any number of ways - but the end result can be very unfortunate. It’s unclear whether this is actually true - I haven’t seen any confirmation.
Google’s Sitemaps team claims it’s not possible for inbound links to damage a site’s rankings, so perhaps this technique is not actually possible.
The point of the whole exercise however is to emphasize that ranking is never entirely the product of the quality of your own site. The better the actual quality of your site, the more secure you are - but there are many external factors which could have a dangerous effect. If you’ve suddenly lost your presence in Google, but can’t identify anything wrong with your site, perhaps you’ve been targeted by some kind of internet espionage.
The single most common piece of advice for search engine marketing is to build inbound links. And that’s exactly what it is - a piece of advice. There can be no question that building inbound links (also known as "inlinks") is a crucial part of developing your website marketing strategy. But this advice is very much incomplete.
Today, Aaron Wall posted a great blog entry discussing the evolution of SEO. The meat of the entry is from a post on Webmaster World which describes the development of real and synthetic authority in the form of a parable.
One fundamental point is that a link building strategy is inevitably long-term. It takes time to build industry trust and to demonstrate that your site deserves appropriate links.
After reading this article, and along with several articles by Jim Boykin, Rand Fishkin, and others, I’ve been prompted to write an article discussing link building, posted in the articles section of this site.
Once again I’ve crossed the boundaries between my two blogs - Bill Slawski and Gray Wolf have recently published articles discussing "inline linking". Gray Wolf’s original article spawning Bill’s response (not exactly a response, but an article prompted by Gray Wolf’s comments).
I felt the need to respond, but rather than addressing this from an SEO perspective, I thought of it as an accessibility issue, so I’ve posted on this at my Accessible Web Design blog. Since the subject definitely pokes around in the area of search engine optimization, I thought it worth mentioning here, as well.