Will Spam-ish Link Building Get Devalued?

I was reading a forum thread the other day about spam linking and profile linking and once again there was this arrogant, hypocritical, know-it-all windbag sounding authoritative and mis-leading the masses there.

Basically what he said was this:

Spam linking will soon become devalued, especially profiles linking, since unattended forums or blogs tends to get over run by spam very quickly, thus reducing their overall SEO quality, and if the overall SEO quality of a web entity is reduced, then so won’t the value of those links, in general and on a site specific basis.

But this is theory, therefore he’s not wrong, yet….

Despite being someone who’d I ‘d dearly love to practice some of my Aikido/BJJ/Muay Thai/Kickboxing reflexes on, he does raise some valid points about the long term value of Spam Linking, in that it might not be forever.

At some point in the discussion he claimed that mega outbound DoFolllow links on a url will make that url’s Page Rank drop because it’s linking out to spam-ish sites and will eventually drop its PR and the links there will lose their effectiveness.

But this isn’t true yet either, hence all those blog finder tools find plenty of high PR blog urls to comment on, still, and those urls have already been hit pretty hard with comments already, so how are they maintaining their PR still after all this time and after all those OBLS (outbound links)?

So does SPAM linking work?

Yes, absolutely it does however here’s where Mr. Windbag who used-to-sell-profile-links memberships might be right, in theory only so far….

Look at what’s happened in the past, especially with Social Bookmarking sites and other Social Media Platforms…  Once they become super-popular they changed from DoFollow to NoFollow to avoid being over run by SPAM and put up some countermeasures to try and crack down on SPAM, but despite all that bookmarking links whether they be Dofollow or NoFollow just aren’t that effective anymore.

… and the same holds true for reciprocal links, they work to a certain extent but aren’t that valuable anymore…

So the historical precedent has been that when links from QUALITY authority sites are becoming too easy to come by, then they get devalued (social links), they count for less even if Dofollow…

 

What’s Google telling us they value these days, or in recent past?

Site activity (discussion) , LSI stuff, inbound links, on page optimization, links from relevant sites, naturally acquired links.

However none of those things by themselves get you ranked, but SPAM linking in and of itself when done properly can get you ranked….

What’s Google saying they’re devaluing or already have devalued?

Blog comments, for one, but no evidence saying this is the case.

Social bookmarking - either those sites got contacted to switch to NoFollow or their links just don’t matter to Google anymore, but still do to other search engines.

Links from bad neighborhoods - Yes, they’ve done this but not in the way you’d think since Guestbook spam linking is almost the lowest of the low when it comes to spam linking and those links are practically worthless, but reside on sites  still maintaining their good standing in the SERPs, just not giving out valuable links via guest book link spam…is the point here.

It used to be that the simple maxim of ” if a link is hard to come by, then it’s valuable” held a lot of truth to it…

Another maxim, “low number of  Quality links can do more for you than massive spam linking” is still probably true, BUT…. those links are harder to come by and when you’re doing SEO and link building you have to realize that ROI is important.

So what’s the freaking point of all my bloviation and what can you take away from this meandering post?

SEO is an ever changing landscape, different things work at different times and it does you no good whatsoever to listen to the pro-SEOs pontificating about what they were told at SEO conventions or from reading Cutts’ blog.

Do you wanna know what works RIGHT NOW, or what might not work in the future?

SPAM linking works well right now, and always has…. just ask the Viagra guys, they’re not doing directory submissions and submitting things to Digg.

• They’re exploring each and every new easily available link source they can.
• They know the footprints that are under exploited,
• They know about link wheels, tiered linking and layered linking (which Mr. Windbag probably discounts as a soon-to-be-discovered-and-discounted linking “schemes”).

Don’t let self-important pontificating windbags (like me) strike fear into you when discussing what MIGHT happen, instead listen to self-important pontificating windbags (like me) who reveal case studies of THEIR own, and don’t rely on selectively hand-picked 3d party resources that back up their arguments wherever and whenever it’s appropriate (for their argument), while discounting other case studies and opinions.

What any good SEO Advisor would tell you, and I am stating as well.

Get a variety of link types from a variety of sources and practice solid, if not perfect on page optimization (which also means having unique content).

Since I’m not a writer for SEO Moz or other mostly white hat places, I don’t have to be married to any one method or philosophy about SEO.  As mentioned earlier in this post, I have taken some martial arts classes over the last 20 years and one of them was Jeet Kune Do, the way of no way…and the point there is to do whatever works to accomplish your goals an don’t listen to anything anyone tells you that hasn’t been definitely proven yet, and even if so… prove it to yourself first, since your REAL knowledge is knowledge gained from personal experience not hearsay from blogs and forums.

 

Last note: Yes, maybe someday, somewhere over the rainbow the profiles links will get devalued, but if you know what you’re doing then those increased SERPs from SPAM linking will allow you to earn extra income from those sites’ higher rankings and then you can divest some of those earnings into doing more high quality stuff that’s long-lasting by nature.

So once again, do what works right now forget about us windbags and save some of your increased earnings to put towards some old-school quality links like press-releases, or hitting the major article directories or whatever…

Sorry if this post isn’t properly organized, was really just a rant, but the last paragraph here is really all you need to focus on, (low level massive linking now, invest in high quality links later = long term results and good ROI from the get-go)