Spamming anchor-text links via blogger

[McFox]

I came across someone who is spamming blogger.com.

In a period of some two weeks, this person has created 42 seperate blogs and has dumped over 6000 anchor-text links to a variety of websites wihtin the blogs, obviously in a bid to manipulate rankings.

Does anyone know if this is a wasted exercise or will the value of the spam links over-inflate the inbound links as intended?

Is there any way to penalize the process?

McF

[sugarrae]

Blogger gives out subdomains to bloggers and these domains will carry little value unless they are built up themselves - and in addition, blog links seem to have been devalued a bit from what I've been seeing. Though the inbound anchor text will still count a bit IME.

He wouldn't likely get penalized in the serps (for the domains being linked to) under a logical thought process or else people would do this every day and link to their competitors. However, I'm sure this is somehow against bloggers TOS and the blogs would probably be pulled if found.

I think the best way to impose a "penalty" on this SEO yourself is to simply create yourself some links of medium and high value rather than spend hours researching his links of low value. But, then again, I'm kind of a "live and let live" person when it comes to SEO.

[rustybrick]

Not sure why he would go the blogger route to do this.

Stupid, IMO.

Well, I would never do this any way, blogger.com or mydomain.com.

[seobook]

to call it stupid is to call all seo stupid...if it works then somebody will do it.

I bet it is somewhat easier to fly below radar by spamming other blogs into a fake blog that at least temporarily looks real and then parsing that link pop out to your real sites...plus that way there is not as much risk of damaging your brand or bloggers coming after you to attack your server.

if you were too high profile with the idea though it would be a cheap and easy way to give google a roadmap to your sites which may deserve a penalty of some sort.

[rustybrick]

seobook, let's look in hindsight (I know we are not there yet). But let's try and look. What do you see? I think I saw this exact thread not only in this forum, but in two others. ahemm...

Oh, you're right. I should not use the word 'stupid'. I am sorry for that.

[I, Brian]

Originally Posted by McFox

I came across someone who is spamming blogger.com.

In a period of some two weeks, this person has created 42 seperate blogs and has dumped over 6000 anchor-text links to a variety of websites wihtin the blogs, obviously in a bid to manipulate rankings.

Does anyone know if this is a wasted exercise or will the value of the spam links over-inflate the inbound links as intended?

Is there any way to penalize the process?

McF

Using blogs in this way is an old SEO tactic - but using a high profile site like Blogger in this way is disingenius - not only might Blogger take offence and remove all that hard work, but Blogger is also owned by Google and so there's room for communication about "offensive" use of Blogger by the registrant.

The "penalty" simply comes from the fact that all 42 blogs would then require promoting - a bit of link-spamming in other blogs, no doubt - but getting a more natural linkage would be more difficult.

And if the "offfending" blogs are removed, then the backlink building to them is effectively wasted.

At the heart of it is the problem that Google seems to have (or until recently, had) a clear bias towards blogs. Somehow, the idea that Blogs are mostly content rich, has been a keen mistake, in my opinion. Forums can also be content rich - but they have already seen devaluation.