SEO and cooking search results
SEO is still a dirty word among technology professionals, and that’s a good thing. It’s good for people who understand the power of SEO and compete with people who don’t, and it’s good for Google. Were people ever to learn that the mantra “if you build something good, SEO won’t matter” is pretty much nonsense, there would be way more blackhat search results cooking.
Not that there’s aren’t plenty of cooked results already. Sadly, when it comes to search queries that lead to buying behavior, the majority of results are cooked. That means, those results are not in fact presented in order of relevancy, they’re presented in order of the magnitude of effort spent on artificially improving their pageranks. Until Google shifts most of the pagerank weight away from the backlink driven formula, results will continue to be cooked. Of course, Google will present a different storyline, but having fought the SEO battle it’s pretty clear that when money’s on the line, people get serious about their ranking.
How a linkwheel works
It’s probably not wise to write this, but linkwheels are fairly common SEO tools. I’m not sure if they qualify as grey or blackhat, but it’s definitely not advisable to use one if you’re looking to keep your nose clean. A linkwheel is simply a network of blogs that all link to one another, and then all link to a site that needs the link juice. When you have a powerful linkwheel (power here defined by pagerank), they’re able to produce serious results.
Potential tumblr abuses
Tumblr is open to being exploited as a node in the linkwheel, but it’s greatest opportunity for abuse lies in its social features. Because “linking” and “reblogging” automatically creates backlinks in the originator’s post (via the notes), a group of interlinked tumblr blogs could potentially be a pretty powerful linkwheel. All you would really need to do is find users with blogs that have both high pageranks and notes enabled, and then start liking and reblogging from each node in the linkwheel. Yikes.
