Sphinn - Fun with Excel: Spotting Unnatural Link Patterns

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Fun with Excel: Spotting Unnatural Link Patterns

Went Hot: August 27, 2007 - 1:16 pm
Posted By: naturalwoman 678 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: Link Building

While I'd rather go to the dentist than spend hours in Excel, Eric Ward (aka Link Moses) has convinced me that just a little extra brushing and flossing with Excel can be well worth the effort ... he shares a method to make quick work of tens of thousands of backlinks to spot the ugly pattern of link manipulation.

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from qwerty 678 days ago #

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"Anyone want to hazard a guess as to what hosiery and self directed IRA's have to do with each other?"

That's easy. If you're going to the bank to open an IRA, you need to put on your shoes and socks, which means you need socks, and if you don't happen to have any, you'll need to pop by that hosiery site.

from TannerC 678 days ago #

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Great article. I like Eric's approach to manipulated links. Google could learn a thing or two from what he has to say.

from Aviva 678 days ago #

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"I define a manipulated linking pattern as links obtained purely in pursuit of search rank with no thought given to topical relevancy."

Like a chiropractor getting links from Wordcamp attendees, who have websites on a wide variety of topics, for publishing photographs of them? Matt Cutts doesn't seem to think that's manipulation:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/

"there's a lot of fishy looking sites and URLs there, along with oddly similar file and sub-directory naming conventions."

Directory submissions maybe? -

http://www.dmoz.org/Business/Investing/

http://botw.org/top/Business/Investing/

http://www.avivadirectory.com/Business/Investing/

from Dugdale 678 days ago #

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I find it interesting that more discussion is going on here than on the actual post.

from jasonm 598 days ago #

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While in practice, I largely agree with what Eric is saying here, aren't the arguments in this post ultimately self-serving? It seems convenient to me to state 'everything I do' = not spam, while 'everything i don't do' = spam?

Not to mention, isn't the whole idea of topical relevance a bit of a convenient cop-out? After all, there isn't a lot of topical similarity between server architecture and four irons, but I still see IBM commercials on the golf channel