16th April 2007

I submitted my spam report

posted in Google, Matt Cutts |

As all good Cuttlets should do, I submitted my spam report to Google pointing out a site that was blatantly selling links and millions of sites that have bought these links. As proof I offer a partial screen shot of the acknowledgement.

Spam Report


After reading Matt’s post, I thought I should refresh my memory of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. After-all, the whole point of this exercise is to help Google more effectively identify the shady sites that are skirting these guidelines by deceiving the search engines with unnatural links. Though we are assured that Google can, “…distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines….” we must assume that they are constantly upgrading this system to find unnatural paid links as well.

In my perusing of the Webmaster Guidelines I ran across this statement: “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites”

So I, being a good Google-user, Googled the phrase: yahoo directory submit. Following the #1 result sent me to the Yahoo! Directory Listings page(*). Upon reading the page I was shocked, shocked I say, shocked to find this paragraph halfway down the page:

Getting answers fast is important to your business. With Yahoo! Directory Submit, your request to be listed in the Directory will be reviewed and the Yahoo! editorial team will respond to you within 7 business days, for a review fee of only $299 ($600 for adult sites). If your listing is accepted into the Directory, there will be a $299 recurring annual fee in subsequent years ($600 for adult sites) to maintain the listing.

They try to be a bit sneaky and mask their link-selling-blackhat-ways by saying that the $299 is for a “Review fee” , but that is quickly dismissed as being just a paid link after the comma when the $299 fee becomes a recurring fee to “maintain the listing” Anyone with any bit of web experience knows that maintaining a link is really not much work, so I would say it’s safe to assume what you are really buying is the link, and of course any of the link juice that goes with it.

Armed with this overt attempt at selling links, I thought I’d take it one step further and see what kind of sites are buying these links. So I browsed the Yahoo! Directory (**). This is rampant, there are thousands if not millions of sites listed there. No less than 53 sites are listed in the PageRank 6 directory Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Resources(**).

Just sickening, the top three sites listed are all trusted were trusted SEO resources, but now that I’ve determined that they’ve been spamming the index by paying for their links with Yahoo! I’ll have to rethink my stance on those sites.

Upon even further review, I found the Web Search and Navigation Services (**)category. Right there at the top is Google (**) I’m sorry Adam, but with this new development I’ll have to keep your signature link nofollowed as I guess Google has paid for links.

I’m sure the obvious sites like Text Link Ads or ReviewMe will be receiving their fair share of spam reports regarding their link selling ways, but I doubt the implications will be even remotely close to the thud heard around the world when Google deindexes the yahoo directory and all of the sites listed in it.

In the interest of full disclosure I must admit that I really don’t have a dog in this fight. I’ve never paid or nor been paid for a link and have never even submitted a site for the Yahoo! spam directory.

(*) Nofollow added to the link, I don’t want to be associated with this blatant link selling spammer, but the link is provided as a service to the reader to be able to see live examples of these link selling schemes.

(**) Nofollow added to the link, again I don’t want to be associated with these sites who have obviously paid for their links, but I also thought it was important to the reader to see how rampant this link buying has been.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 2:00 am and is filed under Google, Matt Cutts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. All comments are subject to my NoFollow policy. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There are currently 15 responses to “I submitted my spam report”

Why not let me know what you think by adding your own comment! All the cool kids are doing it.

  1. 1 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 16th, 2007, Harvey said:

    I find most paid directories send me exactly one visitor - presumably the person who reviews my site before listing it.

    Anyone who says they buy directory links for traffic reasons are kidding themselves. Directory links are for juice, and any traffic you get is a bonus.

    I’d like to hear Google’s official stance on paid directories - as clear cut an example of “link selling for PR” as you could find anywhere.

    Nice post. How about some unpaid link juice, huh, huh.

  2. 2 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 16th, 2007, haiender said:

    good shot - nice and clean…

  3. 3 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 16th, 2007, JLH said:

    Harvey, take a look at my NOFOLLOW policy linked to at the top of the blog. All commenters that contribute to the discussion and sites check out to not being spam, have their site link get followed automatically after they time out.

    Thanks for the comment, I think the real point I was trying to drive home is the duality of these kinds of stances with Google. It’s not as cut and dry as Matt would like us to believe. I could have as easily used a church or a disaster relief site as an example, but there are instances where money transfers hands and a link is produced that are not as evil as buying a link.

    The Yahoo! directory of course had the added benefit of being endorsed by Google :)

  4. 4 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 16th, 2007, Sebastian said:

    Since you’ve reported me as a pays-for-links-spammer will you now nofollow my URL drops in comments?

    Ok, the real question is “how the heck shall a Google user, I mean a searcher, distinguish artificial paid links (spammy) from natural paid links (fine)?”. Are there “fine” paid links besides Yahoo!’s directory? SEOs reading Matt’s blog know the difference and some of them will add paidlinks-spam-reports to their toolset. Is that really what Google wants? Is getting massively spammed with abusive spam reports worth the efforts to find a few more patterns and footsteps? And what about the side effects smelling a bit like FUD? Or is the call for paid-links-spam-reports just link bait?

  5. 5 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 16th, 2007, JLH said:

    Not sure if it’s link bait, but he sure has raised the level of discussion which can only be a good thing. I, you, and others have pointed out the obsurdity in a global all paid links is bad philosophy the best way I know how, by example.

    It’s debates like this that help one realize how difficult it is to manage a search engine. You end up with so many If…then..else statements that nothing fits anymore.

  6. 6 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 16th, 2007, Sebastian said:

    Old fart always cryptic. Never puts clear statements. Everything clear as mud. Read “… linkbait well knowing that it will raise a heated discussion which will spread the message: ‘folks, be aware that we’ve improved our distinguishing of your link intent so please justify before the shit hits the fan’”.

    If-then-else is evil. Ok, at least outdated. Without nesting that’s handling two conditions, whilst many plain Ifs in a row plus a final return false is way more flexible, and better readable.

  7. 7 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 16th, 2007, JohnMu said:

    If we mark links with rel=dofollow would that tell the Googlebot that we tested the links and can confirm that they were placed in good faith, as a free man?

    I think we’re reading too much into this, it’s not like anything gigantic has changed. But it’s fun to discuss :-) (especially when you aren’t dependent on paid links)

  8. 8 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 16th, 2007, Sebastian said:

    Especially when you know that Google’s scoring of paid links goes back to 2003 or even earlier. That’s at least five years to fine tune this corner of link analysis, so we should expect kinda sledgehammer when the new stuff Matt has mentioned goes life. Warnings are out since 2005, so that’s not even “unfair” ;)

    Matt Cutts [08.24.05 09:31 AM]
    http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/08/search_engine_s_2.html
    “Tim points out that these these links have been sold for over two years. That’s true. I’ve known about these O’Reilly links since at least 9/3/2003, and parts of perl.com, xml.com, etc. have not been trusted in terms of linkage for months and months. Remember that just because a site shows up for a “link:” command on Google does not mean that it passes PageRank, reputation, or anchortext.”

  9. 9 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 16th, 2007, JLH said:

    JohnMu, some interesting sites you’re linking to today. I really like the “targeted” adsense.

    Sebastian, a new wave of “i’ve done nothing wrong” but been banned will hit webmasterworld after that. They can talk about that for 6 months since no-one actually knows what sites they are talking about. Come on over to the Google Webmaster Help group and the same site will get dismissed as spam in about 3 minutes. Since they don’t name updates anymore, maybe Brett could start naming the next WMW diagnosed penalty syndrom.

    I doubt that they will just discount a billion links in one day, as I’m sure the practice is well established and ongoing as you’ve pointed out. But it would be interesting to watch if all of a sudden a ton of purchased links went impotent. Anchor Text boost would immediately be gone so site would stop ranking for that, then if they did have some PageRank from that loosing it may cause more pages to go supplemental-only, then as the final symptom 4 months later their visible PageRank would go down. WMW would have several thousand pages of speculation on duplicate content, length of titles, keyword density, the q-factor etc.

  10. 10 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 17th, 2007, Halfdeck said:

    Google’s stance on Yahoo! Directory is shaky, even in the eyes of a Cutlet. So why does Google bend over backwards to defend a defenseless position?

    IMO Google’s algorithm needs high quality directory sites as seeds for their topical algorithms like Hilltop. Without being able to rely on the links listed on those directories, Google can’t calculate topic-dependent authority scores. In that case, Google would have to sort results based on PageRank, which would decrease the quality of search results.

  11. 11 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 17th, 2007, johny said:

    couldn’t help my self, had to submit too :D

  12. 12 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 17th, 2007, ASHnatko said:

    But how does Google differentiate between “spam” paid links and, say a link given to members of a professional or community organization? I just joined the Cortland County Cultural Council and one of (many) benefits is a member page with a link to my web site. So how can this be separated from another type of “paid” link?

  13. 13 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 19th, 2007, 10000 directories said:

    Funny post. Nice :)

    Firstly they can’t control click fraud on adsense without a “Report Abuse” link, now they can’t control links without a “Report Abuse” link.
    Great! They are doing really well.
    Google Earth has bombed and they introduce stupid things that only get abused by cunning webmasters (eg:Google base) when 99% of internet users have never heard of it.

    it’s all gone crazy… off for a lie down.

  14. 14 MyAvatars 0.2 On May 3rd, 2007, Terabanito said:

    Hello
    You are The Best!!!
    Bye

  15. 15 MyAvatars 0.2 On May 18th, 2007, S E O dot com » JLH Design Blog said:

    [...] an effort to justify defend the existence of paid directories he wrote: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When [...]

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