There"s been a lot of furor in the industry recently over Matt Cutts" blog post about hunting down paid links. While neither Matt nor Google have been forthcoming about what exactly they plan to do with that data, folks like Marketing Pilgrim"s Jeremy Luebke are stepping up to offer some suggestions on how to keep your competitors from tracking down your incoming links.
From Jeremy"s post:
There are limited resources for webmasters to do competitive intelligence on another website’s link building activities, and of those resources, all of them return only limited results. Yahoo for example returns a maximum of 1,000 backlinks. You can pull a few tricks out of a hat and get maybe 2,000-3,000 backlinks if your lucky. That doesn’t help for a site with 20,000 backlinks.
They key to hiding your link profile is flooding. The goal is to flood your backlink search results with thousands of useless listings. An effective flood campaign can result in 95% of results showing only 1-2 sites designed specifically to throw off your competitors.
Jeremy goes on to offer two quick suggestions for accomplishing the suggested link flood.
In the meantime, you"ll have to continue to decide how you wish to play the game yourself. My gut says that these days Google tends to put more effort into discounting things instead of directly penalizing, but I can also understand the paranoia and fear of small businesses that are worried about dealing with penalties simply because they are selling or buying links as a form of advertising.
I can tell you that I haven"t changed the way I do business (which does include some buying and selling of links for the advertising value) but that doesn"t mean that I won"t somewhere down the line if Google"s intentions become known.
>>Source Link
>>Blog: Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing
>>Publish Date: 4/26/2007 8:03:39 AM
>>Keywords: your links
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