An interesting debate broke out on Digital point last week that seems
to have continued gathering interest as it moves on. Someone provided a “tip” for “seo newbies” to help build up links for free using appropriate anchor text descriptions.

The tip was, to quote:

“When you’re commenting on other people’s blogs it will usually ask you for 4 things, your name, email, URL and a comment. Be sure to use your keyword anchor text as your name. When your comment is posted, the url you enter will be attached to whatever text you entered in the “Name” field. So instead of putting John in the name field, put My Widgets Rule, or whatever your site’s keywords are. Oh, and try to say something that’s somewhat useful in the comment section, so it doesn’t look like 100% blatant spam.”

Now I must own up and say in the past I have used such techniques but this was before starting this SeoUnique blog. Since then my opinion on this subject has changed. Because the blog world relies so heavily on the community “vibe” I don’t think it’s ethical to use such methods. Of course a lot of blogs carry the NoFollow tag which renders such methods useless anyway but my point is that at the end of the day it’s just rude. Unless a comment that I regard to be of epic standards I will not approve messages from people that use anchor text in their posts.

I’m not a spoil sport and I want everyone to do well in life but if you want to make a comment about a good/bad article you should not expect anything in return.

I have setup a poll to get your opinion on the subject to whether or not you consider this kind of technique ethically right? The results will be interesting, remember be honest!

So by this point everyone knows that Google has indeed penalized sites that sell links on their site. If you didn’t know that – “welcome to earth” (as in Independence Day the film – for you film buff’s). So you would assume that if you sell links directly from your site under a “advertise here” and you display your advertising rates online this should have gone against you? Well for most people they don’t have the time or resources to fiddle around with creating all the necessary HTML/PHP whatever to cater for this service so they use Text Link Ads.

I’ve used them on some of my early creations and to be frank, have made a little money from them (they take half your much needed money for their troubles). So after the update you would think that a site that “Sells Links” should in fact be punished like the rest? Well this is where it all gets a bit strange – and un-Google like.

If you do a search on Google for “Buy Text Links” or “Text Link Ads” by Google’s own standards they “should” provide the most relevant content to the user who makes the search. Text Link Ads is their name so by all accounts they should be positioned number one for that term. They are not, in fact they don’t appear in the index at all…strange? Very! What’s even stranger to me is that if you log on to the site it remains, or possibly they have increased their PR to PR7.

Search Results for “Text Link Ads“:

Notice the Page Rank:

Getting confused?

So Google have removed Text Link Ads from their Index but have ranked the website a PR 7. I have to be honest but it seems a bit strange, if Google are going to punish websites that sell links surely a site devoted to selling other website’s link positions should also have its Page Rank reduced? I would have thought so, obviously being removed from the index is worse but this should be explained. This could support some theories that PR is being phased out all together? Perhaps, but this is certainly a strange situation, watch this space I say.