W-Shadow.com

Yes, I’m talking about backlinks, the spawn of evil. Everybody craves them, craves the promise of power, wealth and getting laid that links offer. And this craving is both abhorrent to and blessed by the mischievous higher powers, a dangerous path leading into the darkness. Outrageous!

Here’s further proof that links are the cause of suffering and climate change :

People are stupid

There’s ample proof that most humans are stupid. Stupid people do stupid things. Links are made by humans, therefore it is obvious that most links will also be stupid. Not only that, but the stupidity will trickle to your site through those links. The wider the appeal of a website, the more stupid people it will attract. And guess who will have to deal with them? Right, that’s you!

Click Here

As a corollary to the previous statement, most links created by other people will be ineffectual in helping your search engine rankings. The anchor text will be worthless, something that fits well into the sentence the author was writing, e.g. “I found a great site today….”, not the keywords you’d like to rank for, like “blue monocles for underwater kickboxers”. So what’s the point?

Spam

Ah, spam. Don’t you love it? Oh, I guess you don’t. Well, here’s some anyway. Sites with more links are more attractive targets for comment/whatever spammers and more likely to show up in their footprint searches. Spam is an occupational hazard on the InterWebs.

The Real Negative SEO

Google’s algorithms may or may not penalize your site for dubious backlinks. But there’s more. Imagine what would happen if some unscrupulous creature created 10 000 spammy backlinks to your site. Algorithms could discount them… people would not. Sure, most might ignore it, but with enough volume you’re bound to hit some quick-tempered admins. Enraged forum mods and furious bloggers would report your site to Google, complain to your hosting company and threaten legal action. And then the whole mess would end up on Digg, creating a scaled-down PR Apocalypse for your company/brand/blog/dog. Yay.

(If this post was linkbait this is where the punchline would go. It would probably be a meta-reference of some kind.)

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