Its true that the majority of blogs are set up just to promote the owners URLs, or create revenue / sell ads, and they are not entirely white hat – they are more grey hat, but what can be done about it – theres no point in moaning

My mistake wasnt this big, I had four non visible links to inside sections of my site . I wont bother with the justification and plead ignorant , a gut feeling told me i was being naughty. In the eyes of google I spammed and yes I did.

Heres the thing. Thankfully I was warned about it the day we were dropped saying to ask for reinclusion. Having reviewed the email and our site I emailed for reinclusion admitting that it was me who made the screw up , that it had been removed and would never happen again.

Everything is geared in the reinclusion towards blaming seo companies or somebody else but i had to put my hands up if i wanted to stay honest. Overall our site has value and clients say its well constructed.

Do self confessed people get a second crack at the the whip or have i thoroughly shot myself in the foot?

I’m rather concerned with the number of blogger sites that are artificially rising to the top of the search engines. Keyword-rich names are registered and the blog then has, dotted around the copy, the main search phrase. This precludes real websites functioning on the search engines if the status given to blogger continues.

What I really want to ask is: does Google regards such practices in the same light as doorway pages and, with links into their main site, what is the effect on that?

Peter

Just realised that the website with hidden spam mentioned by PRotheus in the first post of this thread, The White Company, won the prestigious NMA Best Use of Search award last year here in the UK, which was also sponsored by Overture (http://www.nma.co.uk/imaawards04/SearchMarketing.aspx). Surely, if you’re handing out awards you have a responsibility of determining what a company is doing and not reward them publicly if it’s spamming the Search Engines.

Great blog btw!

Reading through this post and the comments, an interesting idea came to me.

I get less referrals from Google than from Google images. I’m convinced that Google believes I am using a blackhat technique. Can you find the blackhat SEO on my site? (I’ve linked to the site in comments to some of your previous posts). If you can find it, please feel free to use the site as an example of what not to do. I’ll be the first to take your advice.

I’m pointing out that, based on what you said and what I suspected, that there’s a spamming potential issue.

There’s one problem with your “remove nofollow for all but a single link” idea that I can see, and I’m curious to know how you deal with it. So I’ll change my identity for a minute to give you an example:

(Adam disappears into a closet and reappears one minute later as…)

HI, I’M DON LAPRE!

And I’m going to show YOU how you can lose 120 pounds in just 15 DAYS with my ultra-cool new super greatest weight loss pill ever! Now come check out my spammy crappy ugly-assed one-page doesn’t-tell-you-bugger-all-about-the-product-which-doesn’t-do-anything-anyway site at www dot some spammy site dot com !

(Adam changes back)

You still leave yourself open to potential forum/blog spam, which is the whole idea behind the rel=”nofollow” link in the first place. And since it’s still the first link (at some point, anyway), it would be followed and therefore gain some PR from your site.

So the question is: how do you deal with/get around this issue?

Second, if the PR is redistributed at full value among the remaining links, then what happens to those who spam blogs by creating them with signatures and then just fill the things with random crappy posts? They actually get rewarded for this as a result (and yes, it is occurring or I wouldn’t have thought of it.) I hate to reask a question, but I can see a real potential for abuse here.