With Google taking a hard stance against paid links, some SEOs are getting creative with workarounds. One such "workaround" is the "pre-sell page."

First of all, what is a pre-sell page? Basically, it is a page that you craft with the titles/descriptions/text and most importantly - links to your site with the exact anchor text that you want. You then take this page and pay a site in a similar industry/niche to put it up on their domain and link to it from one of their pages (generally somewhere on their home page) and on their XML sitemap.

Are these paid links? Well... yeah! However, proponents of this tactic argue that no one except spiders generally find these pages so it's not as likely to get reported, particularly if you are sure to link out from this pre-sell page to some other similar pages within your niche (such as Wikipedia articles or some .gov’s or.edu’s or other authoritative sites). Often times the pre-sell pages will hide the links to the owner's page in the text, and despite this link-hiding, supposedly the spiders will see the links to the owner's page with the same trust as the others. Apparently these pre-sell page links will continue to give you link love for as long as it is up and linked to. I have heard some folks getting pretty dramatic results using this tactic, particularly when they secure highly trusted domains to host these pages.

Personally though, as a white hat SEO, this tactic scares me. I've never done it and I don't have plans to start. It still runs afoul of Google's Guidelines, and as such, you run the risk of Google smacking you at some later date for the supposedly under-the-radar-tactics you employ today.

I always enjoy ranting about the dangers of black hat SEO. Gray hat SEO too, for that matter. But what I enjoy most is the challenge of disecting sites that are using black or grey hat SEO techniques (Fresh Pair, for example) and peeling away the layers of the onion. I feel like a detective... like Robert Langdon (from the Da Vinci Code) trying to piece together a complex puzzle. The part of the sleuthing that I find the most challenging and the most satisfying is uncovering sophisticated link schemes -- from aggressive link buying like what Fresh Pair and H&R Block are doing, to the most egregious spammers who obscure their ill-gotten links through cloaking and sneaky redirects. I recall back in 2004 figuring out that Findgiftcards.com was funneling link gain to their network of sites from legit sites using their free hit counter hosted at 123counters.com as the vector. That hit counter spread their spam by embedding keyword-rich links underneath the hit counter in the HTML code that the webmaster was supposed to copy-and-paste. Wow, that was like a scavenger hunt! I wrote about that one in Catalog Age. Funny, it wasn't long after that they disappeared from Google. ;-) Immediately prior to that they were #1 for "gift certificates." Oops, sorry guys! :-D

If "deconstructing" sophisticated search engine spam doesn't sound like fun to you, then you probably won't appreciate the blast I had reverse engineering As-Seen-on-TV-Store-1.com last year in my sixth installment of my SEO Report Card column for Practical Ecommerce magazine. This black hatter had no idea my published critique was coming; I'm sure they didn't appreciate me airing their dirty laundry in public! But the sins of others can serve as a great teacher.

That affiliate site was a house of cards ready to fall. Here are a couple of the reasons why (I elaborate more in my full article)...

These guys have inbound links and link text -- in spades! Yahoo! Site Explorer reveals over 6,500 inlinks to the site, excluding internal links. These links include some very reputable sites such as unesco.org/wfeo. Often times the link text is great too -- full of keywords. But the linking sites aren't relevant. Upon closer inspection, the links have been obtained by duping webmasters into posting a hit counter (e.g. from freestatscounter.com, freehitcounters.net, etc.) that contains links to doorway pages. (Hmm... sounds familiar, eh!)

"But wait, there's more!" (I'm using my infomercial voice while saying that!) -- a veritable minefield of bogus feedbacks, link farming, spam blogs (splogs), and doorway pages that have lost link popularity. 

For the rest of the findings, read the full article. Now. I promise you'll like it!

If you are an SEO and you are not aware of Matt Cutts' strong opposition to buying links, you must have been living under a rock. However, my hunch is that most businesspeople (at least those who don't live and breathe SEO) are naive to Google's tough stance -- and to the risks!

My SEO How-To article in the January/February issue of Practical Ecommerce was meant to give ecommerce business professionals a (hopefully) balanced view of the risks and the opportunities of link buying. Before you have a go at link buying or selling you might want to give it a read.

What's tricky, even for seasoned SEOs, is figuring out if a site that's selling links has been made, and its voting power taken away by Google -- particularly if you aren't already advertising with the site. You can glean valuable clues by sizing up the existing advertisers and past advertisers (perusing previous versions of the site in The Wayback Machine). You can't tell by the PageRank score, or from the link: SERPs -- that would be too easy, and Google doesn't want to be that easy.

Of course, just because Google is talking tough about link buying/selling, the tactic isn't going to go away any time soon. It is a tactic that works. At least for as long as you stay under the radar!

And if you aren't convinced how well it works on Google, have a look at my SEO Report Card of Freshpair.com in the current issue of Practical Ecommerce, where I critique some of the backlinks purchased by aggressive link buyer Freshpair.com. It is always fun to reverse engineer an aggressive link buying campaign and this one was no exception. Hopefully I won't get too much hate mail from Freshpair for airing this in public! :-)

Following on from yesterday's post on link buying and how it's a legitimate practice in many circumstances...

I found a blog comment posted just a few days ago by Google engineer Matt Cutts (yes, I've been blogging a lot about him lately... honestly, I'm not a groupie!). Matt chimed in on a lively debate happening on Tim O'Reilly's blog about the controversy surrounding the selling of link ads on the O'Reilly Network. Matt had this to say:

As others have noted, if you're going to sell text links that pass reputation/PageRank, the way to do it is to add rel=nofollow to those links.

Tim points out that these these links have been sold for over two years. That's true. I've known about these O'Reilly links since at least 9/3/2003, and parts of perl.com, xml.com, etc. have not been trusted in terms of linkage for months and months. Remember that just because a site shows up for a "link:" command on Google does not mean that it passes PageRank, reputation, or anchortext.

Google's view on this is quite close to Phil Ringnalda's. Selling links muddies the quality of the web and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results. The rel=nofollow attribute is the correct answer: any site can sell links, but a search engine will be able to tell that the source site is not vouching for the destination page.

So here's Google coming out and admitting that they decreased the voting power of O'Reilly sites like perl.com and xml.com and downgraded the reputation value of some of their outbound links. And if you don't want your site to suffer the same fate, you'd better tag your link ads with rel=nofollow so they don't gain any PageRank. How do you like them eggs!

To me, that doesn't seem quite fair to website owners. They work hard to build a content-rich destination site with good PageRank score. Google is diminishing their earning ability by insisting they cut off the flow of PageRank with a nofollow, thus decreasing the value of the link ads to the advertiser and ultimately the revenue likely to realized from that advertiser. Granted, you don't buy links merely for PageRank, but of course it figures into the equation.

The problem lies in which link ads to vouch for. If I were the advertising manager for DailyItem.com, I certainly would not vouch for the advertiser of "Discount Vacations", as the link points to a "doorway page" operated by Orbitz that links to a whole pile of other doorway pages (tsk tsk! Google warns against using doorway pages); on the other hand, I would vouch for the "Dancewear" advertiser, since that's the company's name and the link points to the home page of their ecommerce site.

Google, please give the website owner the option of vouching for some of their advertisers without demoting their site. A black-or-white approach just isn't practical here. Signed, a devoted Google fan.

A pet peeve among panelists in a recent SEO Thought Leaders Summit was the engines' opposition to the tactic of link buying. Christine Churchill had some wise words to share about link buying:

Search engines like to take the hard line and categorize things as either black or white. In some cases, they are actually grey.

Say you are an artist and have a local frame shop you like to recommend. In turn, the frame shop might give you a small referral fee for sending all your wonderful clients their way. The online version of this is a link from the artist’s website to the frame shop’s website. It makes sense. It’s good marketing. It’s good business and that is what link-building and link buying is all about.

Many times, a link is a great lead generator. Let’s take the artist and the frame shop example again. You might get tons of traffic from that artist’s shop. It is a great business link.

You might buy links for credibility. Taken to the extreme, your link from the local Chamber of Commerce could be considered link buying.

Personally, I think link buying is a perfectly legitimate practice. I don't see the difference between a banner ad and a text link ad, as long as you're not intentionally trying to game the search engines and you expect to get traffic and brand visibility from those ads appearing on the websites you are advertising on, irrespective of the SEO effect.

As you may know, a key component to search engine optimization is links from important (i.e. highly PageRank endowed) web pages. I think buying links for PageRank is just plain slimy... the lazy man's approach to SEO. Here's one such hawker. Yuch!