I do love receiving link exchange requests though – it’s great to see how people approach this technique. Here’s one I got today (the links on their link page were all marked as nofollow):

Subject: partnership with jamiedigi.com?

Hi,

John Stahl here. I just wanted to drop you a line and invite you to be a link partner for our website [sitedomain.com].

I’ve found your website with the “reverse google pagerank algorithm” which indicates that we both would get better google rankings, when we exchange links.

I’ve already gone ahead and added your site jamiedigi.com to our link directory, could you please verify the description before it will go life at: [link to customise your listing]

Talk soon,
John Stahl

If I had reverse-engineered Google’s PageRank algorithm then I think I would be doing something more interesting to promote it than a link exchange!

So this is a small test to find out – here’s my PDF file, Google. Do your worst.

My assumption will be that Google will follow the link. Unfortunately my test isn’t detailed or scientific enough to determine whether PageRank is passed.

Hi – I’m Richard Cridford from mobiles.co.uk. A wholly owned subsidiary of the Carphone Warehouse Group, we were the UK’s first retail mobile phone website (launched in 1995) and are now the largest web-only mobile phone store in the UK.

We have been working hard creating content on our own site and we wondered if you would be interested in some free of charge content written just for [some random blog]. This is a genuine offer that could help both [some random blog] and mobiles.co.uk so if you are interested, please read on . . .

We are working with a large team of professional writers in the UK who can cover almost any theme. We can quickly agree a subject with you and commission them to write specifically for you. There are absolutely no costs and you will have complete editorial control with no requirement to publish the content on [some random blog] unless you are entirely happy with it.

All we would ask is that you allow us to include one simple text link back to mobiles.co.uk towards the end of the content which will hopefully be found by the search engines in the longer term – which is how we would benefit.

Please let me know what you think.

Thanks and kind regards – Richard Cridford
Marketing Executive
www.mobiles.co.uk
Mobiles.co.uk Ltd is a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Carphone Warehouse Group PLC
Registered in England no. 3253714 at 1, Portal Way, London W3 6RS

REMOVAL
Removal is probably the wrong word – you are not on any kind of mailing list because we identify and approach sites individually. However, I really do not want to upset anyone by making contact and if I have done so, I`m really sorry. I am always trying to improve our approach. Given that we have other sites, if you could reply with any of the following in the subject line, I will ensure that I learn from it!

REMOVE (no further contact regardless as to reason)
NO INTEREST (no interest in mobiles.co.uk but you do sometimes link)
NO LINKS (you never link with other sites)

Thanks!

The blog that they enquired about was a random little WordPress site that I set up years ago, and that doesn’t generate any traffic, so they must have dug pretty deep to find it. I wonder where they’re getting their content from – somewhere like Adfero DirectNews perhaps? It’s also interesting that they didn’t request any sort of specific anchor text – maybe the keyword-relevant domain name is strong enough.

<a href="javascript:showNextPicture()" title="Show Next Photo">Next Photo</a>

The problem here is that users without JavaScript (and search engines) cannot follow the link to the next photo. Instead, a link like this works so much better:

<a href="link-to-next-photo.php" onClick="showNextPicture(); return false;" title="Show Next Photo">Next Photo</a>

In this case when the user has JavaScript enabled then their browser does the following when clicking on that link:

• See’s the onClick event, runs the showNextPicture() function.
• See’s return false, which tells it not to follow the href

If the user has JavaScript disabled (or is a search engine) then it does the following when clicking on that link:

• It doesn’t understand onClick, so it ignores the NextPicture() function
• Instead it just directly follows the href link

All users get a great user experience, and you end up with your pages properly indexed in the search engines.

These ads look alarmingly similar:

And they go to strangely similar looking URLs:

But of course the pages are completely different brands. That’s ok then:

Great user experience!

And thanks to Akismet I don’t have to think about any of it.

Working in the digital marketing industry you learn to take this sort of spam as the norm – it seems logical that some people would try anything to get a few backlinks and some Google rankings. We know how much some keywords are worth. But for the rest of the world it must seem a little odd: what does your average web user make of the sort of nonsense comments that end up on blogs around the web? Do they think that this is some bizarre form of brand advertising, or that they are expected to click on the links? Or are they completely blind to it?

By no means is that a popular search term, nor is it exactly real-time news, but I think it indicates how fast Google’s processes can be. This site would not be classed as an authority, and it doesn’t receive massive amounts of traffic. No-one has linked to that post yet. There’s no reason for Google to index that page so quickly.

Briefly, these are the reasons why this is a really bad idea:

• The URL never changes – when users go to the .com site they see “domainname.com” in the browser, and the contents of “domainname.co.uk” in the iFrame. If they click on any links, the browser URL stays as “domainname.com”. If the user bookmarks the page, or wants to send a link to a friend, they end up sending just “domainname.com”, and when they return to the site they’re right back at the beginning again.
• Secure encryption doesn’t work – when the user gets to a secure page to checkout page, the security is all messed up because they’re still accessing the page within an insecure iFrame, so they’ll get all sorts of warning about incorrect certificates. This causes trust issues and could stop the user buying, or even returning to your site ever again.
• Wasted links – because the same site is on two domains, if someone links to “domainname.com”, then “domainname.com” gets all of the credit for that link, and it doesn’t help the natural search rankings of “domainname.co.uk”. You’re optimising for two sites instead of one, and therefore need double the effort.

Instead of using an iFrame to do this, use a 301 redirect to point the .com domain to the .co.uk domain. Its a little more complex, but once its in place its completely search engine friendly and completely user friendly. You can also do it retrospectively – so if you’ve been using an iFrame for years, doing the 301 redirect now will do no harm. In fact it will probably make your .co.uk site rank better.

For information on how to create a 301 redirect, see this tutorial. I’ve also put together a post describing how 301 redirects work.

For a start, they begin by saying that there are only three ways to get listed on Google – natural algorithms, PPC and link spam:

To be noticed quickly in search engine results pages, achieving a high page ranking, is essential. That keenly sought and often competitive place may come naturally through a website’s importance (as calculated by search engine algorithms) or via sponsored links such as Google AdWords, which charge advertisers when visitors click through to their websites.

There is a third way: leaving links in the comments pages of blogs – so-called “link spam”. And with the recession biting, link spam, which is almost free, suddenly looks a lot cheaper than AdWords to some companies.

Hmm – I wonder what SEO agencies do all day if there’s only those three ways, when they’re not all blog spamming anyway! They then launch into a tirade on some SEO agency that spammed a Guardian blog, and to be fair this wasn’t some nice friendly social media campaign – this was an SEO agency posting links from completely irrelevant articles to relatively well-branded clients. Not a clever move.

The Guardian get back on track with an interview with Google, which although a little Google-friendly, was fairly balanced. But then they finish with this killer line:

“Being advised to pay for Google AdWords would have saved him much time and trouble.”

Wow! What a fantastic ad for Google Adwords. Don’t bother with SEO – just pay Google to get you rankings and give up on natural search. I don’t think that Google could pay for better publicity.

If The Guardian had been bothered to look into the issue and been a bit more even handed, maybe they could have asked why SEO agencies exist in the first place? Is it because business actually need help to get their perfectly relevant pages indexed by the big G?