Anthology of Ideas

Or at least odder. In a post subtly titled “Why it is good to link to LZZR” LZZR suggests that it is advantageous for you to link to their site, and argues (rather ineloquently) an interesting technique to raise PR and and raise SERP placement. However, it seems that the idea is black hat (or at least grey) and more likely to cause trouble in the long run.

Linking should be mutually beneficial for both the linking site and the linked one and more these benefits must be obvious and immediate. For quite some time I’ve been thinking about a strategy that would realize these objectives and finally I think I came up with one –LZZR.com

LZZR then continues and suggests that by searching for blogs that link to you on websites like Bloglines or Technorati and then linking to those search results, (eg: My Technorati reactions page) you can boost your own PR by boosting the PR of the sites that link to you.

And what’s the point, you might ask? Surely if you are greedy it does not make any sense to promote someone else’s URL but if you are clever you’ll quickly realize that it’s in your own best interests to have inbound links from strong pages…From strictly SEO point of view you create a perfect 3-way linking structure where Search Engine Results Page (SERP) serves as an intermediary between you and pages linking to you. In other words you link to results page and results page links to a number of sites each having a link back to you. This 3-way linking is known to be much more effective than a usual reciprocal linking and is not punishable like the outdated link farm method. –LZZR.com

But are these links really considered strong? Now I’ll ignore the fact that LZZR is only PR 3 for the moment and Technorati is a bad example because it uses nofollow in its META tags. So after sticking my head in the sand for a moment, Google can and does understand that sites like Technorati are just glorified search engines and will link to any page, so it seems likely that even though Technorati has been judged by other sites to deserve PR 8, its OWN ability to judge other sites is far less trustworthy. While I believe LZZR is correct that it won’t cause any harm, I don’t think it will have much of a positive effect either. At the very least, even if this does work in the short term, Google will quickly adjust itself to avoid these sorts of tricks just like it did the link farms of yesteryear.

So will the method work for him in the long run? I doubt it. However, he got one more incoming link, so I guess it was worth it at least a little bit. However, for everyone else out there, if you come across an idea that sounds exploitive, it probably is and it is best to ignore it.