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If you have trackbacks enabled on your blog you have most probably had to deal with trackback spam at some point.

Most of the time I just delete the spam trackbacks and move on, but this morning I received one from what appeared to be a very legitimate web design company.

Surely these guys are not blackhats I am thinking, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

The email I sent to the web design company:

“Hi,

My blog was just spammed by someone pointing a text link to your URL – using trackback spam:

https://www.seoco.co.uk/blog/2008/01/03/
the-magic-seo-beans/#comment-1023

I wouldn’t normally contact the people who spam me but you look like a genuine company so I will give you the benefit of the doubt.

Trackback spamming is against the search engine guidelines and it is a very fast way to get your site banned from Google.

If you know nothing about this, then let me know and I will see if I can find out some more info for you. If you are paying a company to do this for you, drop them and drop them fast. If you are using some software to do this, stop using it.

Plenty of people who are a lot less forgiving then me would just forward this straight on to Google’s webspam team.

Best Regards

David Eaves”

The web design company’ response:

“Dear David,

I would like to thank you for taking the time to email me and bringing this to my attention.

I have started using a search engine company who I will be getting rid of as I received a similar email to the one you sent yesterday.

May I ask what your company charges for SEO services, we would like to do well for the phrase ‘Web Design’

Kind Regards,

Colin”

So as it turns out I may be getting an SEO or link building contract, thanks to trackback spam.

I was checking up on my competition yesterday on Google, as I do pretty regularly, and I came across a website, ranked in the #12 position for the phrase ‘SEO’. Because I had never seen the site before it aroused my curiosity and I began doing a bit of investigating.

I checked the back-links and the site had around 20,000 going to the homepage, which is a healthy amount, but when I started checking the sites that were linking to it I could not find any links on the pages, almost as if the sites linking to it were cloaked. I continued my investigation, Googled the URL and came across this really funny thread started by a Mr David McSweeney. Now, make sure that you don’t have any drinks near your keyboard for this. The thread is basically a copy of a discussion that David had with one of the companies sales girls. It is possibly one of the funniest SEO sales pitches I have ever heard and being a former employee of Iomart, I have heard a lot.

Sales Girl – “A couple of years ago we identified the magic 4 points which google uses to rank sites. We approached google about this and they said to us”

Google – “Oh, you are right. There is nothing we can do about this for 15-20 years and we’ll let you away with it, as long as you only do it for one company for each key phrase.”

Sales Girl – “Because of this magic formula we can guarantee you a top 10 position for the keyphrase ‘straighteners’ on the main google index.”

David – “I am assuming what you are offering is a link building service? Not really that impressive, considering that we are already 22nd for the keyword ‘straighteners’ and there are only 176,000 results. Surely a few good quality links would get us up there?”

Sales Girl – “No, we do things that you have never even heard of. Only we can guarantee you this ranking.”

David – “I targeted the keyphrase ‘hair products’, which has 2,860,000 results (276,000 with the quotes) and we are 6th in the Google index. I did not employ the use of any magic beans or potions for this ranking.”

Sales Girl – “No, only ourselves and 4 other companies in the world know how to manipulate the rankings.”

David – “Manipulate? So what you are doing is black hat then? Google don’t allow anyone to manipulate their rankings.”

Sales Girl – “Yes, but they told us they couldn’t do anything about it and as long as we don’t saturate the market, it’s OK.”

David – “But surely if you told them what you do, the first thing they would do is make sure Mr Cutts and his web spam team gets right on to it to fix the problem?”

Sales Girl – “No, they won’t have the technology for 15/20 years.”

You have got to give her 10/10 for effort, but the company’s magic formula appears to be using hundreds, if not thousands of cloaked sites for links. Now, I am not saying that there is anything wrong with this and I do not have any problem with black hat SEO, just so long as the clients know what they are getting into and the risks involved. This however does not seem to be the case.

Around 3 hours after I started my investigation the site completely disappeared from Google for the phrase ‘SEO’ (you will have to take my word for it that is was there), however it is still rocking Yahoo! and in position 5.

I may have some of my facts wrong about the link building techniques that this company is using, but I am pretty sure that they are well outside of the search engine guidelines. Perhaps one of you blackhats could let me know if I am right.

Kevin has just tagged me in the following post: 5 wishs for Google AdWords Editor, the meme was originally started here: If there was an SEO Genie my one wish would be by Kelvin Shuffle and now I have got to wish for something SEO related.

So here goes, I wish that the Google sandbox/no trust period or whatever you want to call it was less harsh. I understand why it is there and all, it is just that it seems to be taking longer and longer for sites to come out. I know the older a site is the more trust it will have and the higher it will be able to rank but there is definitely a fair bit of feeling like you are banging your head against a brick wall before you even see anything.

Using traditional link building techniques I would say it takes 8 months before you get any real results, I know that if you linkbait on a regular basis you can see results much sooner but this isn’t always possible. I think that 4-5 months would be a lot more reasonable.

I would like to know what the following people would wish for: Nowsourcing, aimClear, Sebastian and OnReact.

When I first started this blog a couple of people warned me about the duplicate content issues with WordPress. I sort of put it on the backburner because I was busy and then just never got around to doing it. I was checking my rankings the other day for certain phrases related to some of the recent blog posts that I have done and half of them are getting duped out by either the category pages or the archive pages due to them pages having more PageRank. Also the fact that this blog does not get posted on too often has probably been a factor.

The easiest way to fix this issue would be to add the more tag to my posts so that you would have to click onto a post to see the entire article, but I tried that and I did not like it, I didn’t know where to put the tag and when I tested it, it looked funny.

Here are the two main things that I have done to this blog to try and solve the duplicate content issues without sacrificing functionality:

Replaced the old WordPress archives with a new handmade monthly archive. The new archive simply offers links to the posts that I have done for each month. This means that searchers can find the posts for each month, extra PageRank gets passed passed to the posts because they are not a million miles from the blog homepage and that there should be no archive duplicate content.

Nofollowed all of the links to the category pages. I really wanted to keep the category pages because I think they are useful so I decided that nofollow was the best road to go down. I couldn’t find any plugin for this so I just did it by hand. This should eventually cause the category pages to disappear from the search engines so that they will just be there for my visitors.

Hopefully once the search engines pick up on these things all of my posts will start to rank properly.

There are a few other things that I have done as well, three of them have nothing to do with SEO but may help my traffic:

Validated the homepage; this will almost definitely not have any impact on my rankings but there where about 50 errors and it is better to be safe then sorry. I have still not been able to completely validate the posts but I am sure I will get my head around it eventually.

Nofollowed the links to all of the subscribe buttons and the feed. This may mean I have a bit more PageRank for the posts, it was basically a waste of link juice.

Added a MyBlogLog widget; mainly because it will be nice to see who some of the people are who are visiting my blog. Please feel free to join my community.

Added a subscribe to the feed link to the bottom of every post. I got this idea off Patrick who I consider to be an expert blogger.

Added a button showing how many subscribers I have. Hopefully people will feel sorry for me and subscribe out of pity.