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PUBLISHED: Feb 22, 2013 5 min read

“Spammy” Links: Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO

Ruben Quinones and Avinash Conda from Amsive, a NYC-based Digital Marketing Agency, talk link spam, or spammy” links and how they could be hurting your site in the long run.

What is a “spammy link”? Spammy links are unnatural backlinks to websites that are believed to be beneficial for SEO purposes. In this scenario, the spammer will lplaces links in every possible place they can, such as comment threads. The spammy links are usually irrelevance to whatever content they are appearing under and will unveil their guise of a natural link. Anything that looks like it was manufactured will most likely be a spammy link.  While some may believe this tactic to be a form of search engine optimization, this method may lead Google to penalize the website.

Google can also recognize spam when it’s spread through the method of creating personal profiles, such as Twitter pages, that are all linking to the same site. Google can pick up on and penalize those who are mass spamming on the web. So in turn, the black-hat method of spam links can actually hurt the brand’s ability to rank. All in all,it’s best to stick to white-hat methods of SEO when it comes to content distribution and trying to optimize your brands online visibility.

Looking to develop strategic, white hat SEO tactics for your site? Contact a Amsive Digital Search Marketing Professional to explore opportunities for your company.

Transcription

Host: Ruben Quinones.
Co-Host: Avinash Conda.

0:13 Ruben Quinones – Hey there welcome to another episode of AmsiveDigital TV. I am your host, your true host for AmsiveDigital TV Ruben Quinones because sometimes they do this video’s without me but I am back.
0:24 Avinash Conda, welcome back again and we are talking about link spam today or spammy links. First of all what are link spam? Or spammy links?
0:40 Avinash Conda – The thing is, everyone knows the big fact that having back links to your website helps SEO.
0:48 Ruben Quinones – Yeah the factor of the algorithm that linking back to your site helps in ranking. That been over for the last decade.
0:53 Avinash CondaYeah and obviously people will want to rank better or building on natural links. Unnatural links, obviously the meaning goes they are not natural links.
1:08 What they do is that they try to put a link at every possible places they can by, which I mean, grey and  Black hat techniques like you have pinterest profile for example.
1:18 Ruben QuinonesSo grey and black hat techniques are just basically techniques that are utilize usually for short term gains. So a firm that goes rogue, in the industry we called would Black hat or grey hat technique.
White hat would obviously would doing your client best practices and really waning up.
1:39 Avinash Conda Like Pinterest came up, you can put a picture, you can put a  back link, you can put a back link on the description too. People started putting random pictures of screenshot of their websites trying to get back links, that’s one way of spamming.
1:52 Links spam on the other way is blog commenting, is a big way of spamming links. You go to every random blog, comment on it with your back link.
2:02 Ruben QuinonesAnd the typical one would be, beside the vulgar ones, is you go in their “Hey, I read your article” and then you link back with really no relevance to the article.
2:15 Anything that looks like you manufactured or done in different volume, you are risking possibly…
2:25 Avinash CondaPenalized by search engine. That’s one way, having fake profiles. To create hundred follow profiles with different names but same backing to your website. Like I just gave tiller as an example but you can take any other profile. Creating profiles, blog commenting, forum submission like participated in a discussion in forum and randomly paste a link like a software discussion and you go there and put a link back to your site which is selling umbrella’s maybe.
2:54 Doing something which looks unnatural like you are doing that in bulk, putting links in unwanted places is nothing but link spam.
3:03 Ruben Quinones – Ok, to summarize it to guest, who typically come across with these surprises, they hear link building and they think “Oh it’s all about links back to your site and gallery.” It’s not because not all links are created equal.
3:15 Well thank you Avinash for stopping here again even though you work here. And I will see you next time. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening whenever you are watching this and I will see you next time. Take Care. Bye.

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