Warning: this post is not safe for work, children, or pets. It contains strong language and the word “assclown.” Mom and Dad, stop reading this blog entry now. It wasn’t me; Jeremy started it.

Okay, spam-reading posse, ready to roll? This time, I’m going to cover two spammer mistakes in one post. Take a look at www.rosaevelien.com in Internet Explorer. Looks fine, right? Something like this:

No problems? Okay, now load the page in Firefox 1.0.7 or so. Interesting, huh? The page looks like this:

So why do you see a spammy doorway page in Firefox, but not in IE? Because the SEO company messed up the doorway pages, and their sneaky redirects only work in IE! The page loads some external JavaScript from http://www.rosaevelien.com/Principal.js, which looks like this

document.URL=’Html/main.asp?res=’ + screen.width + “x” + screen.height;

In Internet Explorer, this does an immediate redirect away from the spammy doorway page–the user never sees the keyword-stuffed page. But Firefox doesn’t parse that code, so 5-10% of visitors are left staring at a crappy doorway page!

Okay, that’s mistake #1. Mistake #2 is shorter. Look at the bottom of the page. See this text:

That’s right, the SEO that couldn’t even get a sneaky redirect right was *also* adding links to itself from the client’s pages. I see this all the time: clients who didn’t know what their SEO was doing can actually get their PageRank sucked away to the SEO or the SEO’s other clients. Classy, huh? That’s why our SEO guidelines tell you that you need to understand what your SEO is doing on your domain. To the SEO that did this to a mom and pop florist site: after your site is removed from Google’s index, your reinclusion process is going to be.. difficult.

Here’s my takeaway points:
1) Do not hire an assclown SEO that makes doorway pages with sneaky redirects.
2) If you do hire an assclown SEO, make sure they don’t half-ass your sneaky redirects so they only work in one browser.
3) If you’re staring at broken doorway pages that your lazy-ass SEO made, go ahead and check if they were hiding links back to themselves or to their other clients.

At this point, it shouldn’t be a surprise what I have to say about any particular site (Hi Jeremy!) selling links. Danny gives a good recap here, and I’m happy that Danny can channel me and say what I would say at this point. Let’s see how succinctly I can say it. Many people who work on ranking at search engines think that selling links can lower the quality of links on the web. If you want to buy or sell a link purely for visitors or traffic and not for search engines, a simple method exists to do so (the nofollow attribute). Google’s stance on selling links is pretty clear and we’re pretty accurate at spotting them, both algorithmically and manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines.

Okay, everyone should expect me to say those things. Let’s lighten up this post a bit. Would anyone be surprised to find that some link buyers turn around and then sell links to other sites? And that those links may not be of the highest quality? Let’s take a concrete example. Jeremy vetted his sponsored links trying to remove anything reminscent of blog comment spam, but take one of Jeremy’s sponsors, www.thisisouryear.com. Can you get from that site to the “Lesbian Gay Sex Positions” site at www.gay-sex-positions.com in two mouse clicks? Looks like there may be some scraped content on that porn site.

Just to be clear: it’s Jeremy’s site. Of course he can try any experiment he wants (YPN, AdSense, BlogAds, AdBrite, Chitika, Amazon affiliate program, selling links with nofollow, selling links without nofollow, offering flying lessons to the 10,000th visitor, selling pixels, auctioning lemurs, etc.) to make money. Many such experiments cause no problems for search engines. But if a web site does use a technique that can potentially cause issues, it’s understandable that search engines will pursue algorithmic and manual approaches to keep our quality high.

I take it as progress that most people would expect what I was going to post. So, other than the two-clicks-to-scraped-lesbian-porn, how many people could have guessed everything I was going to say?