back-junk and cream

I was a little puzzled as to why my comments about backlink promotion in the forums seemed to anger some folks. The only reason I can imagine us that they think I am casting aspersions at them for spammy practices.

The old "if the shoe fits" saying comes to mind, but that's a bit harsh and easily misinterpreted, so let me explain.

If you and a bunch of your pals are churning up votes at Digg and every other currently favorite site like it by cross-promotion of each others content, yeah, I think you are playing dirty pool and helping to pollute the Internet. You and your pals are class A jerks and I don't mind saying so.

If you are putting out the best content you can and are adding links to more of your content where you feel it helps your reader, I think you are doing exactly what you should be doing. If you announce your new content in Twitter, Facebook or anywhere like that, again you are doing legitimate promotion.

If you are compiling short little capsules of your content and putting those at the sites that allow such things, I think you are starting to get into grey areas, but mostly I think you are wasting your time because Google surely doesn't give much credit to those sites. If you are bundling up those sites in turn and posting third and fourth level links, you may have passed into spammish territory, but I am even more certain you are wasting your time. You can still fool Google with your own links, but that kind of silliness isn't going to do it.

If you own dozens upon dozens of domains and spend your days stuffing them with MFA junk, and/or using these for cross-linking, you are plainly a spammer. You are littering, plain and simple, and the sooner Google finds you and revokes your Adsense account, the better.

If you are begging other sites for links because their content matches the post you are pitching, that's fine. If you are sending out shotgun blasts, you are a spammer. In either case, you are usually wasting your time because the sites that have juice will ignore you. Even small glasses of juice like me won't even bother with the courtesy of a reply because we just get way too much mail that starts with 'Dear webmaster, I noticed your site and am very impressed.."

Dear spammer, I noticed your email and give you zero points for originality.

Some people just don't believe that you can get good SERP without lots of backlinking effort. I and others can testify that is not the case. Cream floats all by itself. Cream doesn't need third level self created back-junk.

Turds generally sink, but Internet turds can be made to float. Floating turds are nothing to be proud of.

If you look at the content of those who heavily promote these grayish activities, it is sometimes immediately obvious that it isn't cream. They have crappy little me-too posts that offer nothing new. MFA junk promoted by back-junk, replete with poor vocabulary, egregious misspellings and every other composition sin imaginable. It's just Internet turds.

We have some of that here. We have more of it than I have time to vote down. I'd rather spend my time voting stuff up. That is a much more satisfying activity.

But what of the argument that cream can get lost in the noise? Or the sentiment that a little grayish promotion can't hurt? If you have some cream, is it so awful to wave it in the air and say "Hey, here is some cream"?

Maybe. Do it clumsily enough and Google will punish you for your cheekiness. As Google is constantly redefining clumsy, I think it pays to be careful. Some of the folks promoting backlinks are promoting cream. I'm not sure that's smart, but I'm not going to complain about their content.

I got in trouble with Google over clumsiness. It cost me some PageRank. What it had to do with was paid links and no-follow. You can read about it at More thoughts on the Google Slap. I dropped from a PR6 to a PR3 overnight. Over time, I crawled back to a 5, but believe me, I learned a hard lesson.

Back-junk linking and small time collusion isn't all that easy to detect. You can probably get away with quite a bit and even benefit from it. If it's cream that you are advertising, I obviously will have mixed feelings, but if it's turds, you know what I think of you.

Sooner or later, turds go where they belong.

Post-Panda update

There has been a massive change in attitude around here. Most people now eschew fakery and those who do not are much quieter about it. That's not to imply that they aren't still doing it - they are just more careful and far less boastful.

I got damaged by Panda myself. That wasn't because of any fakery, and I'm not entirely clear on everything, but it seems to be a domino effect that hurt me. As I explain at that link, my downward slide at that site was inevitable with or without Panda, so I can't cry over it too much.