TechCrunch featured a company called InLinks.com yesterday and referred to it as “hard to detect”, as in the world of blackhat SEO. I’m not so sure about that one. Let’s face it, the folks at Google are pretty smart. It took me a few minutes and I quickly discovered some of the publishers by performing a few simple Google searches. Here are just a few of the publishers I discovered: The Hunters Mark, Krimson News, TheRandToday.com, Stephan Miller and Peer1. Michael Arrington, are you telling us Google can’t do this?
I think that building a business model based on what is considered a violation of Google’s terms wasn’t the smartest idea by New York-based advertising firm MediaWhiz. Matt Cutts, Google’s SEO guru, specifically states on his blog, “Google has been very clear that selling such links that pass PageRank is a violation of our quality guidelines.”
There’s a lot of talk about this in the new media industry. Olgivy commented that appearing on TechCrunch is normally a good thing - but not this time.
My advice, stay away! Don’t touch this one with a ten foot pole whether your an advertiser or a publisher!
UPDATE: The Hunters Mark posted a comment below today in regards to this post. InLinks.com had an excerpt from their blog which when searched on Google was the only result which lead me to believe that either InLinks.com is using thier blog as an example or the Hunters Mark actually did act as a publisher on their behalf. Either way, our agency tries to encourage best seo practices and found Inlinks.com business model unethical on many levels. If the Hunters Mark was never a part of it, I apologize for the inacuracy, however, I can assure you that we did research this thoroughly.
As the owner of a site you specifically mention in this article as being a publisher using this software (or whatever it is), I’d like to know how you verified these findings. Personally, I’ve never heard of InLinks and I’m curious to know how my site came up under a search for it.
Furthermore, I never received an email from you asking me to verify (or deny) that I use the software, so saying that I do without confirming it (and the implications that go along with such an affiliation) is rude, if not libelous.
If nothing else, it would be nice if you would check your facts first.
December 17th, 2008 at 2:50 am