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.

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.

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