I feel almost bad for reporters in the mainstream media who attempt to cover the search marketing field. It's a tough gig to wrap your head around the concepts of what makes the industry tick, made doubly so by shady tactics and those who practice them. When these combine to slip past Google's spam filter and slide onto the desk of a hapless journalist, it's time for Rand to put on his sleuthing hat and become... drumroll... Debunker-Man! Defender of SERPs, righter of SEO wrongs and foe to those who would point at their crappy link farms and call themselves

wizards who possess a sophisticated understanding of the complicated mathematical algorithms used by engines such as Google

Yeah. That's a direct quote from the piece. On to the debunking.

Business reporter Chris Sorenson wrote about the "Robin Hood of Online Marketing," which, by any standards, is a great title for a piece. Heck, I was excited to read it and I'll bet a lot of my Canadian cohorts were too, eh, gang? In the piece, Chris follows the success of local directory portal, FabulousSavings.com:

At present, FabulousSavings has about 1,100 clients, about 240 of which are small businesses located mostly in the Toronto area. Each of the small businesses pays about $180 a month to participate in the program.

Here's how it works. Yack's firm, first launched in 1999, signs up small businesses in several pre-identified categories – painters, car rentals, furniture stores are examples – and then uses pre-existing templates to build custom Web pages to be posted at www.fabulousavings.com. Search engines notice the pages in part because they include key words and attributes that are popular among online surfers looking for particular services, Yack says.

Yack deliberately limits the number of clients he will do business with to two per business category. He says that's because searching on Google, for example, for "Faux finishing and Toronto" won't bring up more than two painting businesses connected to FabulousSavings.com.

The key ingredient is that all FabulousSavings clients offer online coupons for discounts or free services, which are designed to convince surfers to engage the website by leaving a name or phone number that can be followed up. It sounds simple, but Yack says the technique has proven to be a real competitive advantage.

I have to say that the concept behind the company - connecting those interested in small businesses online with incentives to really use small business websites - isn't a bad one. In fact, if FabulousSavings.com were on the up and up SEO-wise, I'd be praising him. But, that's really not the case. Here's how the article pitches the rankings they've achieved:

Yack is less forthcoming when it comes to explaining the finer points of his firm's "search engine optimization" services, saying only that he employs several "wizards" who possess a sophisticated understanding of the complicated mathematical algorithms used by engines such as Google.

"A lot of it has to do with their algorithm and what it's looking for," he says cryptically. When asked to explain further, he stresses that his firm has never "broken any laws or done anything unethical."

One shadowy technique is known as "link bombing," where a Web page is filled with hundreds of hidden hyperlinks. The idea is to fool Google's algorithms, which rank the importance of a Web page by looking at how many other pages are linked to it. Google, however, has said it's wise to such tricks and changes its algorithms regularly to prevent abuse.

Yack, however, says his firm's techniques are above board and focus more on providing the type of content search engines look for, which can be as simple as ensuring that key search terms are included on a Web page.

As well, he says FabulousSavings benefits from being in the business for eight years because search engines tend to favour websites that have a history of providing relevant information.

Are you getting that creepy, something-doesn't-feel-right vibe? If so, you're on the right path. Let's go investigate how and why Yack's portal is pulling in traffic from the engines.

The best tool we can use for this is Yahoo!'s Site Explorer. In fact, if it wasn't for Yahoo!, I don't know how the search industry would police itself. Diving into the results, I see them reporting ~100,000 total links to the site - not great, but not bad, either. It's once you start looking into those links that things appear fishy...

As you surf through the first few dozen links, you can see a lot of lists of pages on the site being linked to with appropriate anchor text. There's nothing particularly wrong, but it's clearly manipulative and "un-natural." Still, not particularly heinous. It simply looks like they've asked all the companies they work with to link back to them on their websites. However, when you start seeing interconnected linking like this:

from parcsafari.qc.ca

...on the bottom of lots and lots of pages, it's an eyebrow-raiser. This is the same "link-farming" style tactics that got countless webmasters into trouble way back in the Florida days at Google.  Here's a few more gems:

from cppterminsurance.com

from hiven.qc.ca

from cityknowitall.com

Of course, once you notice a pattern to many of these link farms, you can pick up on them and expose an entire network - like this - Google search for fabuloussavings+"this webpage is available for a business offering" - 700+ results. And that's just one of the apparent schemes, all of which center around building sites for "clients," interlinking the domains (or sometimes just building junky, worthless sites for more interlinking) and reaping the rewards. I wish the reporter had pressed a little harder about those "wizards" who follow the algorithms.

Once you see something like this, is it any wonder that folks are attempting to cloak their links? If I were in FabulousSavings' position, I wouldn't want anyone knowing where my links were coming from, either. I guess link farming and high volume interlinking is back. At least, in Canada...

p.s. The Toronto Star was kind enough to embed a link to what they thought was the correct site in the piece, but sadly, a typo by the reporter (one "s" instead of two) means that some domain squatter is making a killing right now, and a lot of frustrated newspaper readers are probably scratching their heads. Is that karma, or just poor proofing?

p.p.s. Rand - why are you outing spam? Because I hate to see the mainstream media take the bait and give the industry and profession a bad name by association. It's not that I want to see FabulousSavings fail, I just want the wider world to be aware of how misinformation combined with a difficult-to-investigate field can combine to make SEO out to be something it's not.

UPDATE- Spent some time on the phone this morning (the 19th) with Mr. Yack. While he didn't attempt to defend the link tactics, he certainly is very passionate about helping small businesses succeed and has a great number of satisfied clients and consumers. I did my best to make it clear to him that I was not, by any means, attacking him personally or his business model, but rather, the interlinking domain tactics.