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I was browsing through the search engine results for the word "copywriter" recently and came across a site ranked more highly than mine. "Great!" I thought, "What can I model from this site to make mine better?"
I looked at it, though, and couldn’t figure out how it got such a good result. It seemed to be just a one-page site, albeit that one page was a long one. Not much content, no real sign as to why the search engine (Google, in this case) rated it. And then I clicked on the "copywriting links" button at the bottom of the page. That’s when I knew what the guy running the site had done.
The "copywriting links" consisted of several hundred links to sites that had nothing to do with his business. Kayak holidays in New Zealand. Real estate in Florida. These are not links you’d associate with copywriting, right? So why was he doing it?
This is how the system works:
He joins a website links chain.
There are thousands of websites in the chain, all doing the same thing as him.
He puts up several hundred links to sites in the chain, regardless of whether they have anything to do with his business or not.
The sites he links to don’t link back to him (reciprocal linking is not greatly liked by the search engines).
Instead, several hundred other sites in the chain that he hasn’t linked to put links to him. It’s a circle, you see?
In this way, he gets hundreds of one-way links.
Search engines love one-way links and see them as votes of confidence in your site.
They reward sites with those links appropriately and give them good rankings.
And that’s how he ended up above me!
So, no problem, right? What’s wrong with that? If I’m serious about SEO, isn’t this something I should consider?
Well…. No. To me, this is just another version of black hat (meaning "evil") SEO. It’s spam. Why on earth would I want to see a link to Florida real estate when I’m looking for a copywriter? It’s irrelevant.
But can I say that he did the wrong thing? He got a better position than me, didn’t he? Isn’t it just a case of swallowing my principles and doing it, because "it’s what everyone else does"? I can’t honestly say.
All self-righteousness aside, my feeling is that although these tactics will get you a good results position (assuming the search engines don’t notice what you’ve done and punish you for it), more often than not the people who come to your site will take one look, think "huh?" and click away. More relevant, content-rich sites will, in the end, get the rewards they deserve. In other words, the good guys win.
As a Google spokesperson recently said, "Trust and reputation help to reduce spam".
You’re very welcome to reprint any of the Good Business articles on your website and/or newsletters free of charge, provided:
Daniel O'Connor is a website copywriter, advertising copywriter and marketing copywriter using the name Daniboy. He can be contacted in the UK on +44-1892-518269 or at mail@daniboy.com. Visit http://www.daniboy.com for further details of his services, including bespoke article writing, and more free reprint articles.
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© Daniboy 2008 Marketing Copywriter
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