While I’m on the topic of my crappy link networks, here’s a tip to help you keep your cover. Generally the intention of a spammy site falls into one of two categories: 1. Page Spam or 2. Link Spam. I call crappy pages created at a high volume for the purpose of ranking (like MFA sites) page spam, since the purpose is to draw visitors to the page. Link Spam pages are those where you create sites for the purpose of getting links indexed.

When I find myself having to create bad sites for the purpose of generating links, I try to make it look like a poor attempt at page spam rather than link spam. With all of the recent hype about reporting paid link sites and link spammers, I like to keep my cover for any human visitors who are checking backlinks to my sites, while still getting the linking results I desire.

To do this, I create sites that look like their purpose is to draw clicks to affiliate programs. Thus a visitor is just thinking it’s a bad attempt at trying to spam search results rather than spamming links. I then link to several high quality sites within the niche in order to make it look like the links are there just because I’m following SEO advice about having high quality outgoing links to improve rankings. However, I don’t want to really pass juice to these competitor sites, so I do “no follow” on those links. I then place the link to my own site in the middle of the high quality “no follow” links, but I “accidentally” misspell the tag on the link pointing to my site as “no folow” or something similar.

So far it seems to be working. The search engines simply ignore the misspelled “no folow”, yet to a human who is reviewing the page it looks like a simple programming typo rather than a link dump. Thus the human thinks I’m just a bad page spammer rather than a crafty link spammer.