Link Spam

Link Spam

• Forums - The most common link building techniques using forums are to create a profile page and a signature link. Signature links allow links to be created at the bottom of posts or comments you leave in a forum. Signature links are at best very low quality and although they may send you some traffic are unlikely to have any long lasting impact on the pages you link to. This is because these links are not merit based, as is the case with all link spam methods, and it's accepted the search engines are getting better at ignoring these links and assigning them no value.
• Link farms - These are employed by many link building companies. A link farm can often have a vast number of websites and web pages within it, all under the control of the link building company. By building a link farm link building companies are able to offer a set number of links for a set fee as they have plenty of web real estate on which to build the links. The problem with link farms is they can be discovered by the search engines and when they are, the links within them will cease to have any positive impact on the sites they link to. There are a number of variations on this theme including a technique where link building companies buy pages within legitimate websites in an attempt to appear credible.
• Directories - These are useful and can create links carrying some value in the sense of attracting traffic to your website. But, in another sense, they are a form of spam; and, as with other spam techniques, links from directories are generally not merit based and as such rarely carry any weight in terms of helping to increase your ranking. There are, however, some notable exceptions such as the DMOZ directory and Yahoo.
• Hubs - These are pages created on services such as Squidoo. In theory Squidoo hub pages or lenses as they are called by this particular service are a great idea and allow people to create pages about something they care about. Sadly the spammers have also realised it's an easy way to create pages for link building so it's a fair assumption using hubs such as this won't have any lasting or hugely positive impact on your website.
• Blogs - Often referred to as SPLOGS (spam blogs) blogs are a favourite haunt of link spammers. They seek out blogs in the hope of leaving a comment and associated link to their client's website. Again these are not merit based unless the blog is actively managed by its owner and popular blog software such as Wordpress automatically nofollow links in comments anyway. This makes the links of little value other than the small amount of web traffic they can generate unless your comment is accepted on a high traffic popular blog.
• Social bookmarks - In their early days social bookmarking sites may have been a source of valuable links but the link spammers have put an end to that. Most of the credible bookmarking sites (Digg, Sphinn etc) recognised their platforms were being abused by link spammers and as a result they nofollow links to deter them.