Anthology of Ideas

Thanks for giving such a detailed response to my humble idea. I am flattered and even more so since somehow on the way you managed to inaugurate me into the ranks of BlackHat SEO which I donâ??t consider myself to be a member of. I am taking it with humility as a sign of an honour I probably donâ??t deserve.

At the same time s the author of the idea I feel an urge to correct some points which I am afraid had been slightly misinterpreted. In your wonderful and rather professional review you seem to parallel LZZR Linking to traditional Link Exchange schemes that are known to be easily detectable and punishable these days. This approach tends to overlook the core idea of the whole thing, namely placing RSS (or other) Feeds at third websites and resources. It would have been so if I was only linking to Google or Technorati results pages. True it would have created a complex but detectable star-like linking structure. In fact the uniqueness of my approach is in distancing of links to the linking sites at least one step from lzzr.com. In brief the approach can be summarized as a fully automated 3-way linking which in terms of page-to-page relations can be even 4-way or more-way linking. As it also relies on social networking â?? i. e. a spontaneous linking from previously unrelated websites the resulting linking structure will be in no way similar to star-like or ring-shaped linking so characteristic for the outdated Link Exchange structures. In fact the resulting structure will be so chaotic and unpredictable that makes it virtually undetectable. Besides I doubt that Search Engines will ever attempt to detect such structures as ultimately the idea is designed to improve, not to harm the relevancy of Search Engine results.

Secondly the whole ethical point of mutual interest did not receive in your article a kind of resonance it deserves. In short it can be summed up as following: donâ??t turn yourself into a link-whore, be generous, instead of asking for links from other sites promote sites that have already linked to you. Give them some link-love back!

Now, after about a day of functioning I can already assess how effective the system is and honestly it exceeds all of my expectations. Itâ??s a clockwork linking monster! Backlinks to sites linking to LZZR.com appear exactly where I promised with minimal delay. I agree that some of those spots have 0 PR at the moment but thatâ??s because I only created them days ago. Letâ??s wait for the next Google PR update which I expect to happen sometime in early August to see how they develop. Do I need to say that meanwhile Iâ??ll be doing my best promoting those spots and creating new ones?

1. Aaron posted the following on July 7, 2007 at 5:50 pm.

   As Sebastian said below, the technique’s intent is to manipulation of the search engines which makes it Black Hat, so regardless of whether the SEs can currently detect such structures, it is still inadvisable as a long-term solution.

   mutual interest did not receive in your article a kind of resonance it deserves

   While yes, there is a side effect of mutual interest, the main goal of the technique is to increase the promotion of your site. If other sites gain something it is just a side effect–akin to feeding birds by throwing leftovers on the ground.

   Now, after about a day of functioning

   So far all that has happened is the feeds are updated. Unfortunately, it will take weeks or months to really see what the effects of this are on SERP placement.

   Reply to Aaron
   1. Sebastian posted the following on July 7, 2007 at 6:29 pm.

      “Black hat whatever that means” meant exactly that: not each and every approach to manipulate search engines is evil. For example I do that all day long by improving contents, navigation and all that – pretty white hat but manipulating search engines.

      Providing links to other sites linking to me is a white hat tactic too. For example I may link out to Wikipedia when someone has inserted a nice link to my stuff, and most probably I don’t link from the page already connected to Wikipedia. Dumping visitors to a Wiki page of their interest from my site B to filter the traffic which then will land very targeted at my site A has nothing to do with black hat tactics. And despite the nofollow crap at Wikipedia it manipulates the judgement of search engines too. Everything you and I do with Web contents manipulates the engines.

      That is what LZZR does too, he just automates a few tasks. All the talk about detectable link schemes and PageRank boosting is just fogging the fact that the technique at all is not that questionable, when one looks at it from a traffic management perspective. These links get clicked, that’s the valuable load of a link. As a side effect these links pass search engine love, like most other links too. Stressing the SEO aspect wouldn’t be necessary to sell it, but might give it a shady touch.

      When the updated feeds generate traffic, that’s fine. Every visitor is a chance to make a sale. When these link help with SE rankings next week or next month, depending on the crawl frequency of the pages involved, that’s a nice side effect. What takes months is a possible change of funny but utterly useless green pixels on the Google toolbar.

      Reply to Sebastian
      1. Aaron posted the following on July 8, 2007 at 11:51 am.

         For example I do that all day long by improving contents, navigation and all that – pretty white hat but manipulating search engines.

         See, you just drew a line in the sand of what was White hat worthy. Although manipulative, they just make your site look as attractive to a robot as to a human and help to level the playing field–they do not try to abuse the system.

         As a side effect these links pass search engine love, like most other links too.

         You have it backwards, the clicks are a side effect of setting it up for SEO purposes. I suggest rereading the parts of the LZZR post where he talks about the program, and read the comments LZZR postd on this site.

         Reply to Aaron

Obviously I can’t stay away from this discussion although I would have much preferred it to happen on my site ;-).
I see that the burinig issue is how to class my idea – should it fall into Black Hat or White Hat category. On this many thanks to Sebastian who not only immediately grasped the core of the idea but also expressed the attitude I fully associate myself with.

By all means I don’t consider LZZR Linking as Black Hat technique. I totally agree with Sebastian on the point that any action taken with the aim to improve your own Search Engine position can theoretically be classed as an attempt to manipulate search engines. Following this logic White Hat is Black Hat and vise versa. Surely it’s a poor ground to build your argument upon.
To me the real distinction between White Hat and Black Hat techniques lies in how much harm they bring to other sites (see comment spamming as a clearly Black Hat technique) and on this I completely agree with Aaron:

…it wonâ??t cause any harm…

and Sebastian:

this campaign could stay under the radar in the sense of it will not harm

here is the point: the linking idea in question is completely harmless! Contrary from harming the linking party I intend to promote it.

Besides I truly believe that everything that is not forbidden is permitted and since it’s a rather fresh technique Google just didn’t have enough time to make it forbidden
There is a window of opportunity there. Certainly as Aaron remarked:

… once it proliferates enough to get on the radar of a solitary Google Engineer it risks becoming a side-project just for the challenge, and at worst, it will cause Google to redefine how it integrates links.

Once again I am flattered I truly don’t believe that my rather humble project will ever grow to such a scale that will prompt the almighty Google to take action. However, thinking about this possibility of it being detected at all – as Sebastian rightly remarked:

Google can detect three-way, triangular, and all other systematic link patterns

I hope I managed to build a system so chaotic and so idiotic that it simply should escape any sort of detection. My belief is based on the fact that in its core it is no more than just a simple amplification of natural linking! Possibly due to my lack of imagination I myself can not adequately visualize the resulting linking structure.

Finally I must confess of an inspiration behind LZZR Linking. It was a wonderful social experiment called LinkieWinkie. I am sure you both remember how nice and how effective LinkieWinkie was and somehow it did not get itself banned. My project is no more than just a logical extention of LinkieWinkie ;-).

1. Aaron posted the following on July 8, 2007 at 11:44 am.

   real distinction between White Hat and Black Hat techniques lies in how much harm they bring to other sites

   Link farming and keyword stuffing don’t harm other sites directly, but they do by artificially raising their value.

   LinkieWinkie was a single site trying to promote themselves, but what you are suggesting is a whole new technique. While at this level it isn’t worth Google’s time it will grow and once it does THEN Google will begin to punish the sites that do it.

   The link structure would be easily detectable if Google even went that far. More likely it would just dial back the effects of sites that can be “abused.”

   Reply to Aaron
   1. LZZR posted the following on July 8, 2007 at 4:36 pm.

      Link farming and keyword stuffing donâ??t harm other sites directly, but they do by artificially raising their value.

      Well, not exactly true – you are forgetting about self-harming effects these techniques produce eventually
      The key notion here seems to be the one of artificiality. If we step back from the binary opposition SE vs WebMaster the notion of artificiality is just pointless. Again a weak foundation because all of the web is in fact artificial. By artificially rasing value one may only mean abuse of SE algos. But even this is a logical nonsense. How can I abuse SE algos if I don’t even know what they are. Aren’t they the best kept secrets of the trade? If they weren’t why Google would object against reverse engineering of their algos. The truth of the matter is that these scary terms are only needed to denote things with which SE algos can not cope in a favourable way for SE. Only from Google’s standpoint you can talk meaningfully about artificial vs natural. I am in my shoes so far and fromthere the method of amplification of inbound links looks only natural …

      LinkieWinkie poineered this technique sine in fact it was a page pulling out backlinks feed (I assume from Technorati) and displaying the most recent five entries thus creating a simple star-shaped linking. I am just taking it one step further and make the linking structure slightly more complex.

      True that the method I propose is in a way more democratic as almost anyone prepared to invest a bit of time and effort can replicate for his/her own blog. It does not require any programming, any knowledge of API etc. A simple DIY solution.
      This is BTW a reply to your

      it is just a side effectâ??akin to feeding birds by throwing leftovers on the ground.

      remark. Even if it was creating a sort of unequal linking relationships I think the balance is paid off by time and effort needed to create the system as well as by my willingness to share it with everyone. I understand that this anti-elitist stand may annoy some of SEO elite but at the time of writing the idea seemed so brilliant that I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

      I also begg to differ on another point. You are assuming that the linking sites will experience only long-term benefits (if any) in terms of SERPs position relating it to Google Toolbar PR. I am afraid it isn’t quite correct as otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to observe significant SERP fluctuations in periods between PR updates. I’ve seen many times how one link can push up a page in SERPs almost instanly.

      Interesting that both of you overlooked one possible flaw that became apparent only after I’ve set up the system. If not carefully architectured this system can produce not only positive feedback but also an infinite loop but I better shut up on this .

      Reply to LZZR