Visit counter spam
Like a lot of black hat SEO tactics, visit counter spam has been around for years. But, according to Rhea Drysdale, COO of Outspoken Media, the practice "still works" and is in common use.
Simply put, visit counter spam games the search engine by exploiting holes in free visit or hit counter meters many amateur bloggers install on their sites. Black hats use the compromised counters to dynamically create paid links to their clients' sites, Drysdale explains.
How do you spot it? "You'd have to analyze their back links," Drysdale says. "Do a link domain search in Yahoo [http://www.WebsiteInQuestion.com] and look through the results. If they're doing visit counter spam, you'll probably see some irrelevant titles and lots of site-wide links. Click through to those, and you'll see a little visit counter in the footer of the site or a sidebar. Somewhere next to the counter would be a text link with optimized anchor text back to the competitor's site."
Automated comments
One increasingly common tactic a lot of black hat SEOs are using to increase traffic to their clients' sites is comment spam on legitimate sites. While this has always been an issue, Michael Martinez, director of search strategies at Visible Technologies, says black hat SEOs are deploying increasingly more sophisticated tools to trick both human users and the search engines.
"Software is used to leave comments in forums and blogs," Martinez explains. "The comments may consist of up to four sentences and usually include one or more links. The screen names used by these accounts will usually look very different from those of your regular posters. Black hat SEO practitioners are hoping people will click on the links and that search engines will find them and follow them."
How do you spot it? Aside from being wary of posters that don't appear familiar, Martinez says you should be on the lookout for "vague compliments or ambiguous references to other sites" in the comments section of a compromised website. According to Martinez, black hats will often post several comments all at once in order to look like a new user.
Link farming
Simply put, Google and other search engines use inbound links as a proxy for a site's popularity. If lots of different sites link to it, people must think it's a good site and it's likely an authority on a given topic -- so the thinking at search engines goes.
But some SEOs game this system with link farms, which are really just a network of sites that do nothing to more than send links.
According to Greg DiMedio, principal at CSG Interactive, the tactic is a lot more common than many people realize.
How do you spot it? "This tactic can result in some short-term gains, but if Google sniffs out the fraud, then it's punishment time," DiMedio says. "You can see this abuse by looking at the inbound links for the website. If you see hundreds of new links appearing quickly, you know they are farming. Typically these links have little to do with their website content, too. For example, I have seen a cosmetic product website with link partners pushing vacations in Bali --unrelated and obviously farmed."
Michael Estrin is a freelance writer.
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