Blackhat and Branding
February 7th, 2006 by Michael Gray in Grayhat SEO, SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
For all of those aspiring blackhat and greyhay SEO’s out there, there are some lessons to learn. Pushing, prodding and poking the ranking algo’s is a good thing, and is something I highly encourage. However deciding where to push, prod, and poke is something you really need to consider. Yes you will get more mileage and see faster results on more powerful, more authoritative domains. However you are also taking a bigger risk. For major brands such as BMW and Porsche, this just seems foolish and incredibly short sighted. So please lets use our heads out there and don’t spam on websites you aren’t prepared to lose, and don’t spam on websites with high brand recognition OK?
Sphere It
February 7th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
I agree that it’s kinda crazy. What kinda weirds me out more than anything though is DaveN publically doin’ spam reports. *shrugs* guess all’s fair in love and SEO.
Really though, are they going to lose that much? Yes, it would have been easier to design a legit campaign, but A. they’ve been getting away with it and reaping the traffic for 2 years. B. They’ll probably only be out for 30 days. C. They’re other domain is still getting away with it. D. They’re probably scrambling to clean up all their OTHER sites that it’s been working on for years.
With big brands, the punishment rarely fits the crime anyhow imho. Dollars to donuts they’ll be out 3 months max.
February 7th, 2006 at 2:41 pm
Big boys will always get out however little folks get busted forever. For example look at digits.com who got busted in the hotnacho-wordpress fiasco, still gone with no hope in site (and by the way they were a PR8 or PR9 when it happened)
February 8th, 2006 at 3:08 am
You gotta laugh when a company as huge as BMW who will get so many natural links just gets greedy.
I only wish Google had the b**ls to keep them out a little longer,
February 8th, 2006 at 7:57 am
What would really be clever of Google is to keep them in for BMW but knock them out for everything else.
February 8th, 2006 at 8:13 am
It used to be the case that big brands getting banned from Google didn’t really make much difference to them as:
1. They would usually end up back in the index after a couple of days once they’d dropped the spam
2. Nobody outside of our industry ever found out about it
Now with Google in the mainstream news every day, stuff like this is getting out into the mainstream and can’t be doing the brands concerned any good.