Dealers take care where your websites are linked and with whom you are linking to. Most dealers have no idea how to determine where their websites are linked and whether there is a risk. But given the direction of Automotive SEO, you cannot afford not to know.
In the interest of providing more robust lead generation for their dealers, some automotive SEO vendors are moving into the very dangerous business of building linkfarms (large networks of linked websites). This is a seduction all webmasters flirt with sooner or later. To go over the line that search engines have drawn very clearly in the sand has grave consequences. Any SEO knows this. The question is, do the clients?
A linkfarm is a group of websites whose only purpose is to promote each other via interlinking. The quantity of links is meant to trick search engines into believing these websites are more authoritative than others in the same “theme” (Theme is a term used in the search business referring to the business category of your website as understood by the search engine. i.e. Ford dealer websites).
If your website is identified by a search engine as belonging to a linkfarm, and Google is the most sensitive, you will certainly loose significant page rank (position in the search results) and in some cases, your website may be blacklisted (deleted from the search results altogether). You’ll need to discard your domain name and start over – very expensive.
That is why quality matters. Thats why your Page Rank matters. Linking to websites with no or lower page rank will cause search engines to lower your page rank. An alert SEO will avoid linking your site to bad neighbors.
Linkfarming is a seductive path in SEO. Its like a stack of bills left on an unattended table. There is the chance no one will see you grab the cash. Do you want to go there? You’ll get away with it for a while, but linkfarm long enough and your chances of getting caught approach 100% – as seems to have already happened in this video.
Google’s webmaster Matt Cutts has mentioned that there is a threshold of about 10 interlinking sites. More than that and you could become noticed by Google as a linkfarm. A dealer with a dozen dealerships all interlinked has nothing to worry about. There are other little clues the search engines pick up on; too little content, keyword stuffing, the age of the websites as a group and the C-block of the host IP addresses.
Legitimate large dealers and even large dealer groups run no risk of having their interlinked sites perceived as linkfarms. But joining a network designed for this purpose is a risk a prudent business person will not take. Take care, and check your backlinks.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I respect your opinion as a well-trained SEO, but I would disagree with your assessment. Feel free to call me at your convenience, as your analysis is incomplete and incorrect.
My number: 949.310.1727
Your synopsis is way off base. If links from a blog network with poor content content, which this network does not have, was all it would take to get a site deindexed all you would have to do is create them around your competitors in bad neighborhoods.
Sure there are other ways to gain inbound links, but this method is not all bad…
Paul, the technique you’ve referred to is often used in negative SEO campaigns. Bottom line, if the SEO firm is claiming that linkfarms are quality inbound links then you’d be a fool to agree, right?
Although inbound links from linkfarms are not as devastating as outbound, the association with low quality sites may bring the search engine ranking of the page down. Any SEO should agree with this. This is what I think the author was trying to state.
I agree with Paul on this issue. Stick to social marketign techniques because this is evident that you truly do not understand SEO. Becuase if you did, you would understand that Google’s rules are applied to different levels of search terms based upon demand levels. I have a site that has a pagerank of 0 and has multiple top 10 rankings and a number of #1 rankings for highly competitive terms. So much for your theory that a page rank of 0 means your banned.
Matt Cutts has also stated on the record on a number of occassions that a site will not be penalized by who links to it…Better go back to school
Thanks for weighing in. Controversy is good. In hindsight I could have written the article a bit clearer. But thats the way it goes on the Internet. Those words are permanent. Thanks for kind words guys
To clarify: the point of the article is not limited to inbound links, but rather about dealer awareness of networks built for the sole purpose of increasing search rank – that is explicit in Google TOS as cause for blacklisting. By definition this is still a linkfarm tactic.
I wrote this in the context of TK’s on-site SEO. That is what makes this network stand out. TK’s on-site SEO is (was) non-existent. Instead of doing search marketing the way professional SEOs would – on-site SEO first, off-site SEO last, TK had decided to take a short-cut. (After speaking with JD I now understand they do have an upgraded website in the wing that is improved for SEO. But I didn’t know that before writing this article. And I had asked for example dealer websites to evaluate.)
My concern is that dealers who buy into such programs usually do not know the details or ramifications of their vendor’s SEO package. And how long before one such vendor starts putting reciprocal links on the dealers site without that dealers knowledge? I can show you examples of that right now (re. VINsolutions) vendors placing links back from dealer sites to their (vendor) site without the dealer awareness. There go all your inbound-outbound link arguments guys.
Like I said, linkfarming is a seduction all SEOs contemplate. And everything is great while it works. But as these things take their course, competition being what it is, when will a vendor go over the line? And as a dealer, how will you know?
Do you have faith in the perception of a searchbot? That robot isn’t terribly smart and they don’t answer your phone calls when things go wrong. If the network is “perceived” by Google to be a linkfarm – throw away your domain. That is a devastating prospect for a dealer. Like I said, that is not a risk a prudent business person would take.
A well built website, good search marketing and ethical SEO pose no risk and will do more for a dealer’s bottom-line than having a vendor provided link.