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DazzlinDonna’s take on SEO news, tips and theories.
Dr. Strangelink, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Google bomb
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By: Ken Jones
I noticed something interesting about the trackbacks in my spam filter the other day. Something that’s been reinforced by Yahoo Site Explorer’s link checking tool. I’ve suddenly been getting lots of links from sites I’ve never heard of…
You see, as a new (and largely unknown) blog there were very few sites linking to me and I tend to notice when a new link sprouts (kinda like a teenage boy with those first tufts of facial hair) and given that the majority of those links were from comments I had made on other people’s blogs I knew exactly where they were coming from.
Then suddenly, a week or so ago that all changed.
I wrote a post about how the SEO world is like high school, which was just meant as an off-the-cuff joke post to fill a gap in my posting schedule but ended up linkbaiting a large segment of the SEO-blogging community and I found myself getting mentioned by a handful of high profile SEO blogs, like the Bruce Clay Blog, SEOmoz and the SEO Guru. Very quickly I began to notice that I wasn’t just getting links from these sites; I was also finding links from a lot of sites that were obviously scraping these big SEO blogs, and they were all using the same anchor text as the original posts.
The net (and decidedly unexpected) result of this is that I’m now achieving a front page SERP placement (8th at the time of writing) on Google for the query seo school. It seems that the self-replicating effect achieved by linkbaiting (I’m not sure that’s really the right term given that it was unintentional, but that’s what everyone else called it) these big blogs has ended up creating a sort of mini-Google bomb aimed right smack-bang at my site.
In the past I’ve been pretty unhappy about discovering that my site’s been scraped, even going so far as to try and prompt the formation of an SEO Blog Scraping Revenge Squad but after the initial anger wore off, I came to realize that there isn’t really a great deal I can do about it and it’s something that you just have to be philosophical about and accept as an unfortunate reality when creating content on the internet.
The best advice I’ve received and can pass on to others in a similar position is to make sure that every post you write includes at least one link back to another post on your own site, so that if and when the inevitable scraping occurs you’re at least getting a backlink out of it and hopefully helping Google to recognize your site as the original source.
And if you’re lucky enough to get mentioned by one or more of the “A-list” blogs out there, don’t feel sorry for them over the fact that their site is getting scraped over and over again by dozens of sites (if they’ve learned to live with it, why can’t you?) instead you should rejoice at the fact that instead of just one or two new links, you’re getting one or two dozen, all focusing what will hopefully be some suitably tailored anchor text link love your way.
Author Bio: Ken Jones is a relative newcomer to the SEO-blogging scene. He regularly posts on his own site at www.seopscentre.com where he is building up a simple, easy to follow guide to learning SEO, starting from the ground up, with the motto “Learning by Doing”. Ken can often be found posting jokes and asking silly questions on Twitter: @TheKenJones
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If you are the first to "discover" any of my posts in StumbleUpon, one of the following categories would probably be the most appropriate to place it into. You don't have to choose one of these, of course, but based on what I usually write about, there's a good chance any of my posts will fall into one of these categories.
Business * Computers * Computer Graphics * Computer Hardware * Computer Security * Databases * Ecommerce * Internet * Internet Tools * Linux/Unix * Marketing * Search * Self Improvement * Web development * Weblogs(Blogs) * Windows * Writing
April 22nd, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Another key tip, that I wrote about in a recent post on my blog about this topic, it to make one of your internal links you talked about in the first sentence…
This still gives you link benefit for scraper blogs that only show the first sentence or two and then have a “more…” link.