Creative Jersey
We’re proud to announce the launch of Creative Jersey. When the flying banana contract was awarded to the UK agency, the view was expressed that there wasn’t adequate talent on the Island to meet the brief.
Creative Jersey is the eloquent rebuttal from the Island’s lead creative agencies.
Spamdexing
Inbound linking is a key part of Google’s ranking algorithm. Check your site’s relative popularity by typing link:www.mysite.com in the Google searchbar.
Frustratingly, you’ll often find that many of the sites that do link to you are not yet indexed on Google, so you don’t get the rewards you deserve.
Links are weighed by Google for relevance, and the relative importance of the linking site. If your flogging tennis balls, then a link from Wimbledon.org will be much more useful than a link from MUFC even though the latter enjoys plenty of traffic from misguided supporters.
Link building agencies can sometimes work effectively, but if they produce too many links, and the links are spurious in quality, there’s a real risk Google will zero your PageRank.
Spam techniques include:
Link farms
Involves creating tightly-knit communities of pages referencing each other, also known humorously as mutual admiration societies
Hidden links
Putting links where visitors will not see them in order to increase link popularity.
“Sybil attack“
This is the forging of multiple identities for malicious intent, named after the famous multiple personality disorder patient Shirley Ardell Mason. A spammer may create multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other, such as fake blogs known as spam blogs.
Wiki spam
Using the open editability of wiki systems to place links from the wiki site to the spam site. Often, the subject of the spam site is totally unrelated to the page on the wiki where the link is added. In early 2005, Wikipedia implemented a ‘nofollow’ value for the ‘rel’ HTML attribute. Links with this attribute are ignored by Google’s PageRank algorithm. Forum and Wiki admins can use these to end or discourage Wiki spam.
Spam in blogs
This is the placing or solicitation of links randomly on other sites, placing a desired keyword into the hyperlinked text of the inbound link. Guest books, forums, blogs and any site that accepts visitors comments are particular targets and are often victims of drive by spamming where automated software creates nonsense posts with links that are usually irrelevant and unwanted.
Spam blogs
Also known as splogs, a spam blog, on the contrary, is a fake blog created exclusively with the intent of spamming. They are similar in nature to link farms.
Page hijacking
This is achieved by creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites.
Referer log spamming
When someone accesses a web page, i.e. the referee, by following a link from another web page, i.e. the referer, the referee is given the address of the referer by the person’s internet browser. Some websites have a referer log which shows which pages link to that site. By having a robot randomly access many sites enough times, with a message or specific address given as the referer, that message or internet address then appears in the referer log of those sites that have referer logs. Since some search engines base the importance of sites by the number of different sites linking to them, referer-log spam may be used to increase the search engine rankings of the spammer’s sites, by getting the referer logs of many sites to link to them.
Buying expired domains
Some link spammers monitor DNS records for domains that will expire soon, then buy them when they expire and replace the pages with links to their pages.
Some of these techniques may be applied for creating a Google bomb, this is, to cooperate with other users to boost the ranking of a particular page for a particular query.