Friday, May 16, 2008

Real estate spammers

I scanned my inbox and found Iain's email! He is a really good friend of mine from Scotland I used to work for in Leeds, in the north of England.

He said: "Hi Pun, Glad you've settled in and have a new office. Wishing you well. As to your problem, people these days understand the significance of the domain name when registering a site. It's given far too much weight, especially in MSN and Yahoo, but even Google has fallen into the trap. It's all got a bit out of hand, with hyphenated domain names springing up all over the place to take advantage of the loophole in search engine algorithms. I've looked at the first few sites for you. The #1 has few backlinks and only has a Google PageRank of 2. They've got to that position purely on domain name, I'm sure. The #2 has double the backlinks but has inbounds from another five sites belonging to the same owner; all linked together; all with keyword spamming SEO tactics. Highly black hat. #3 looks reputable. Been going a long while and has a shed load of backlinks. Corporate site. It would be difficult to compete on this one. But the two above? They both employ keyword spamming techniques; the second one is highly dubious and is spamming the engines. They've duplicated entire websites. Not sure where you go with this though. I don't believe the search engines will listen to you. Maybe Matt Cutts? SEO forums? Cheers, Iain"

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