Spammers are everywhere. They really annoy me.

Watch out for one of the latest crazes spammers are up to.

Now they are leaving spam comments on blogs saying things along the line of “I like your site, it is good, I have bookmarked it”. This generic comment might seem genuine but when looking at the associated link to the comment it could be pointing at a mobile phone ringtone site, or a casino site, or something else.

Link spamming. Crafty, and not good.

Trackback linking is also a nightmare for bloggers.

Trackbacking enables bloggers to see which sites are pointing at specific webpages within blogs. Each post within a blog with trackbacking enabled will list all the sites pointing at it. Now imagine what would happen if spammers simply pointed their pages at your blog entries? Your blog entries would unknowingly point back at spammers websites, those pointing at you.

Not good.

As I’ve expressed earlier here at GoogeJuice….Spamming simply does not work and search engines are building technology to counteract those that spam against us.

Check out what Matt Cutts has to say about it all here.

Search Engines spot spammers, pouring unrelated links onto pages of the Internet, mainly though blogs.

Search Engines learn what links on pages are unrelated to content. I’m sure of that.

Because there are vast amounts of information on any and every subject now available on the Internet, simply indexing of content by search engines was the job of the past. Search engines need to get down to the nitty gritty, grading everything.

As searchers we are all hungry to be given the most useful information in relation to the search string we use on a search engine. Being faced with unrelated content, or spam pages causes us annoyance and frustration.
Spammers are nasty people, basically they are attempting to do two things:

1) Get a ‘free link’ or ‘links’ through blog comments back to their page and hope a visitor will click.
2) Improve their ‘Google Juice’ by having lots of sites pointing at their sites.

Search engines validate each and every page on a site and grade how ‘useful’ searchers find it. Search Engines also look at the links contained on each page and their validity to take the searcher to more related content.

The overall site containing the graded pages also gets a grade of its own. A big job. So when people say ‘my website has a Google PageRank of 4′ it might have, but the page rank for each of the pages within the site will vary on their relevance to each and every subject they discuss.

The most common rule of ranking is to grade each ’site’ based on its popularity, which is considered by the number of other sites on the Internet that link to it.

To add to the mix are these spammers, who try and get as many unsolicited links to their sites by volume posting on blogs and in comment boxes all over the web.

Spammers think that by commenting on blogs where possible they can raise the amount of links back to their website for specific ‘keywords’. I’m constantly challenged to remove spam comments linking to everything from Viagra sellers to Casino’s.

What spammers don’t think about is that if my blog about cats is linking (because of the spammer) to a casino website Google and rivals will consider the link ‘unrelated’ to the cat related article, discounting the validity of the link. If someone links from my cat blog to another cat related article (through a comment) Google and friends will consider this more relevant and of more use to its searchers.

So I guess what I’m saying is if I’ve written a blog article about cats and then linked it all over the web to related cat pages and then a spammer comes along and comments linking my cat article to a casino, pine tree seller, fish finger wholesaler and a breast enlargement discount special deal …. don’t they think Google and friends wont notice?

Spammers should attack gambling blogs if they want to link to their gambling site, they should spam cat blogs if they want to link to their pet food site. Most of all, spammers should get lost, because their links do.

In a nutshell, Google Juice is all very complicated really, if you want to talk about this more I might be online, check on the top right hand side of this page.

A really easy thing to do, using Google.

In the search box, type in the following:

link:www.ultralab.net

That will show you all the pages from around the world that have links to Ultralab, my employer.

Simply replace the www.ultralab.net with your own URL in the search box.

Some of the 454 links will be from within the www.ultralab.net site, linking back to itself.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters is a very important site to go and visit if you want to hear it all straight from the horses mouth.

A quote from a linked page within the site explains the PageRank a bit better…

“Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query”.
http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

So explore what Google has to say as you build your site.

Find out and predict future Google Page Rank

The above link might be an interesting tool. The page will check 10 website urls at once to determine the exisiting Page Ranks, along with a prediction for future rankings.

One of the best features is that it tells you how many ‘backlinks’ are pointing at your site.

Doing a search for my employers website: www.ultralab.net (don’t include the http://) shows 5815 links to that website from other sites. Ultralab has a Page Rank of 6.

A search for Ultralab’s parent Univiersity website: www.anglia.ac.uk shows 8850 links to that website from other sites. Anglia Ruskin University has a Page Rank of 7.

And a search for my work weblog: matt.ultralab.net returns 411 links from others and maintains a Page Rank status of 4.

Because matt.ultralab.net is a seperate website compared to www.ultralab.net sub domains of Ultralab.net (including matt.ultralab.net) do not retain the same Page Rank figure as the main www.ultralab.net site. So we learn here that subdomains have their own levels of Google Juice.
The above searches also show that the more links to a site, the higher the Page Rank status.

I think implementing the code for this tool will have done something very smart for this website, they have given websites another reason to link to mine, directing web users at the Page Rank tool which could be considered a useful resource. In providing a useful page with ‘link to me currency’ the generaged ‘backlinks’ to the main site have increased and the Page Rank for this site.

This experiment has raised yet another question:

Would it be a benefit to have something other webmasters will point their websites at in order to increase backlinks and improve Google Juice?

I think so.

Find out and predict future Google Page Rank