This is a guest post by Michal on Link spams.You can read the guidelines for guest posting at our guest posting guidelines page.
1) They will never catch every paid link, but the Google algorithm and robots are all programmatically operated and so are predisposed to recognise bulk buying/selling. Links that come from the same sources (even if they are mixed frequently) will be identified and penalised. When Google recognise a buying/selling pattern, they come down hard now all involved.
2) Fake blogs being used as a way to get links pointing to a site are hated by the Google admins. They will take anywhere between two days and two months to pick up on them, but they always do. If your blogs and guest posts are poor quality then it will be marked as blog spam and penalised. Genuine posts will not bother about word count, so consider this if you are paying for blog posts.
3) Domain cleansing is where a website avoids losing ground through black hat SEO sanctions and redirects traffic from cleaner websites onto their spammed site. So instead of cleaning up their spam, they simply redirect traffic. Redirecting is an easy misdeed to catch.
4) Poor quality article spam is not as guarded against as blogging spam, but it is still under the microscope. Article spam links are routinely scanned for; searching for things such as poor grammar, spelling and sentence syntax. If you are buying cheap articles, then their links to your website may buy you a ranking penalisation.
5) Web 2.0 Blogs are infused with links within a social media platform. Again the links are seated within what could be sloppy editorial and creative work, which exists for no other reason than to link to other sites. They are never usually updated or attract much attention, so will tend to die off organically.
6) Putting links in the footer is a cheeky little bit of link spam and Google have come down on it like a ton of bricks because of how many times people have gotten away with it.
7) Links from social bookmarking and sharing sites have no real value. The goal of social networking within marketing is to enhance and promote an image. Social media links will not produce ranking points and are often lost in the sea of social media chatter.
8) Link wheels are a little more difficult for Google to catch, as it often involves a few websites linking to another, whom link to another (in a circular fashion), which means that catching people linking and back linking through the same sites is harder to catch. On the downside, if one site is flagged as a link spammer, then it has the potential to bring down all the others connected to it.
9) Low quality press syndication is a medium through which to spam links, however its editorial guidelines and proclivity towards not getting indexed via Google will often scare off most spammers.
10) Linkbait will create genuine credible links towards a piece of interesting news. This is then turned to spam when this highly Google rated web page with hundreds of links is replaced by a financially beneficial web page.
11) A link directory with no real value is going to be devalued by Google to the point where if you are adding your URL to an unrelated directory, then it will probably cause you more harm than good in your manual link building strategy.
12) Link farms and link networks are easy to spot as they will use the same websites and web strategies to link to the buying party. The more customers the link farms get then the higher the chances of detection, at which point all of the link farms customers suffer whilst the link farm owner walks off with the cash and sets up shop elsewhere.
13) Buying domains will allow you to siphon off the traffic it still draws and the rank credit it has built up through being around a long time, but as a long term strategy it is pretty flimsy. It is a poor Website Optimisation choice.
14) Forum spam will simply kill the forum. As soon as the link spammers move in, the chatter stops and the Google rating plummets.
15) Profile spam is harder to isolate and remove, but takes so much time and maintenance that legitimate Website Optimisation and manual link building efforts would pay off better than the time spent profile link spamming. Many sites are also catching on to the fact that many profiles pointing to one place is very suspicious.
16) Comment spam is similar to forum spam, except for that the poster is usually removed or banned from the site, or the comments are simply deleted. On occasions where this does not happen, then the comment sections quickly become crowded with link spam and simply die off.
17) Image spam is where links are placed on pictures which are indexed, so that they are clicked and then redirect elsewhere. Ironically this is such an annoying link spam method that the damage to a websites reputation is often far more severe than any gain the link may have hoped to achieve.
About the Author:
Michal Jorge has spent his career as a program tester who has spent the last few years picking apart the Google algorithm and has gained a good idea in Website Optimisation and on manual link building. He is often many companies first port of call when Google update.