I just had another of those “we love your site and created a fan page, please link to us” emails.
It is obvious to an experienced webmaster that they are scams, but I must admit that until now I never worked out why. Now I know.
So, I just got another email saying to me;
I was just checking out yoursite and I wanted to say I enjoyed it. I just found it on Google.com when searching for “how to dance like a Pirate” (who would have thought right
).
We focus on Pirate dance lessons and reviews of DVD courses, and I know that helping each other could get us both more traffic. I went ahead and setup a page about your site on our site: http://piratedanceschool.com/resources/google.com
Our site has been around for over a year, and gets a lot of traffic.
It would be great if you could link to my site with something like “Pirate dancing lessons” or something similar as the anchor text. You know how hard it can be to get found online nowadays.
Well I wish you the best of luck and if you need anything just get a hold of me at [email protected]
Maria
Now, in the email they provide the link to http://piratedanceschool.com/resources/google.com, which you follow and see your page, with a nice photo and link back to your site. If you then navigate to the homepage, you will see in the side bar a link to “Check Out yourdomain.com”. So it looks like they really are promoting your page. But….. if you then put the domain direct into another browser, or a browser with privacy on (such as Chome’s Incognito) the homepage link is gone!
The cheeky spamming black hat SEOers are trying to fool you into thinking that the link is there for everyone to see, but in fact it is only visible if you have just looked at the “resource” page. There must be a referral command in the page, which says something like “if coming from resource page display link to resource page“.
This is very, very cheeky. It must happen a lot. In fact, according to Yahoo the last website that sent me an email (and remember, definitely an automated email) has 1866 backlinks according the Yahoo! Most of these backlinks are indeed from related businesses, all relevant. Big plus for Google rankings.
