Guerrilla Linking - We Have a Secret Admirer
Looking through the logs yesterday, we had a huge surge in referrals from some very recognizable sites. As always, I went to each one in case there was some discussion going on to see if I could add anything. We got a lot of links to our AdSense Reinstatement Guide from non webmaster forums and I usually answer questions on the TOS, etc. In this particular case, I didn’t find a single mention or link. Usually that would mean they were Coop sites which linked to me at the time but now link to someone else. I scrolled to all the usual places and still didn’t find any evidence.
Due to the large number of uniques, curiosity got the best of me and I searched the source code. I quickly found the links and going back to the page itself, quickly realized someone was hiding links to us. The technique they are using is putting a lot of normal links in their posts/comments then on the last link, using a single letter in a longer word to link to us. This way the links are not moderated out. Normally, I would say it wasn’t right to take advantage of site owners in this way, except they seem to be linking to a few well known peoples sites, none of which they own. I am proud to have the Guerrilla links right there next to Jeremy Shoemaker and Jim Westergren but if anything, it just confuses me on who is doing it. None of the links have a no follow attribute so we are benefiting from them.
I would never encourage this kind of behaviour but I have to say, it is delivering a LOT of uniques. I can’t even say which sites they are because I am sure it would get back to the owners and get the Guerrilla Linker in trouble. This wouldn’t, however, be the first time we benefited from mystery traffic. Just 2 months ago I made a positive comment about a few hackers that defaced the sites of DMOZ editors that offered submission services at a cost to the gullible webmaster. Within a few days they hacked Open Directory Status, put up my picture then redirected to Off the Top of My Head. Despite bringing it up in the same forum I made the original remark, they never revealed themselves. Will the Guerrilla Linker be different and make him/herself known or will this be for me to figure out?
When we were building our new house, we wanted to go the extra mile on a few things. After all, the hope is you won’t be moving for a long time so you hate to spend your days saying things like I wish I had done this or I wish I had done that. In addition to that, you always seem to think you are better off with a new build as what can possibly go wrong when everything is brand new?
Those of you that read this blog each day might have noticed that the byline at the top of the blog changed for “Rantings of a Forum Junkie”. Although I started this blog to talk about my experiences posting in forums over the years, I found that it pretty much stopped interesting me around post number 2. Instead I naturally gravitated towards the topics that did interest me such as interviews, business advice and just general silliness.