As reported by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, another link network bites the dust. Does this mark the beginning of a period of great change in search? Maybe. But maybe it’s just a PR move. In any event, here are some details about what’s been going on and who you should be avoiding (if you haven’t been avoiding this kind of stuff already).
This link scheme goes something like this:
Step 1 – Article Added
To get started, you would either write an article of at least 150 words or hire one of our writers to complete the task. For every 150 words you can insert 1 backlink to your website with the anchor text of your choosing.
Step 2 – Article Published
We publish your article randomly on 1 of our high page rank, aged domains. You control how many articles are published daily for each of your domains.
Step 3 – Backlinks Created
Once your article is published we first create an RSS feed of the article and submit to various feed aggregators such as FeedAgg, Feedage, and countless others. Not only does this help articles get indexed rapidly, but it’ll also drive some backlinks to your article from other sites.
Next we submit your article to a random selection of social bookmark sites and web 2.0 sites. These backlinks help add extra link juice and added indexing speed.
Step 4 – Index Monitoring
After your article is published, we’ll start checking to see if it has been indexed after 3 days. In many cases, articles are indexed in just a few hours or a day or so. Nonetheless, if an article isn’t indexed after 3 days, we’ll build additional backlinks to it and take extra steps to get it indexed so that you can benefit from every article you submit.
And if you read Barry’s post, de-indexation of these sites has been confirmed by their owner.
And as you might now, if you rely on search for traffic and business, de-indexing is the NCAA death penalty for your website.
And while this is good news for many SEOs and search engine users, I will be interested to see the ripple effects of this, as well as, other upcoming changes.
How will this update impact sites that receive a large portion of their back links from these neighborhoods? Will they be penalize? Perhaps just normalized? Or will they too be de-indexed?
And how about sites involved in similar schemes. Resource page networks? Will they be getting the ax?
If you’ve been participating in any of these types of schemes, keep your eyes peeled in the next couple months. Hopefully, these paid link scheme networks don’t account for too large a proportion of the back links to your site.
(Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/opensourceway/4639590010/)