Black hat SEO, Link Spamming and how it effects the RMT industry.

What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

What is White hat SEO?
An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines’ guidelines and involves no deception.

What is Black hat SEO?
Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception.

What is link Spamming?
Link spamming is considered a black hat technique which involves the use of a bot program to spam links to a domain for a specific keyword on other web sites usually on forums, blogs, guest books and comment sections.
When you conduct a search on Google you will notice that there are ads on the very top of the search page and on the right hand side of the search page that are marked as “Sponsored Links”, these are Adwords advertisers that are paying via the Adwords program to have thier links displayed at the very top and sides of the search results. Below the “Sponsored Links” are the “Organic Search Results” which are web sites that are indexed by Google and placed in order of importance based off of Google’s algorithm.

Googles site indexing weighs heavily on how many backlinks your domain has and the quality of those backlinks. To view how many backlinks a domain has you can use www.smartpagerank.com, this site will query any domain and provide all of the backlinks that the domain currently has indexed with Google and other search engines.

You can be almost guaranteed that any site that ranks in the top two spots for “wow gold”, “wow powerleveling” and “wow accounts” is using some form of black hat technique to maintain that ranking. The most popular and most widely used Black hat technique is link spamming. It is extremely easy to find out if a domain has been link spamming simply by viewing the domains that are linking to that site.

I will pick on ga-sale.com as they are extremely involved and the most prominent site involved in link spamming and have successfully link spammed several of thier domains to gain top search results.

Results from SmartPageRank.com

As you can see the domain has 59,498 backlinks, that is 59,498 other sites linking to ga-sale.com. By doing a search for all of the sites linking to ga-sale you will find most of the sites that have links on them to ga-sale are forums, blogs, guestbooks and comment pages for posts of pictures of celebrities or for adult sites. Completely unrelated content to the sale of World of Warcraft accounts and 99% of the links are spam on other peoples sites that are not monitored by admins.

But, Google LOVES these links, 100% Black Hat and 100% successful. I routinely monitor top ranking sites that I am well aware are link spamming, ga-sale is one of them. ga-sale has managed to maintain a top 1-4 spot ranking for most of all of the major search results for selling WoW Accounts and has been able to maintain there ranking for several months now with no sign of being banned from Google or removed from the search pages. ga-sale has been so blatant to even go as far as to create multiple sister sites selling the same product and link spaming those domains as well.

List of domains owned by the same individual who is the registrant of ga-sale.com, all domains have used the Black hat technique of link spamming.

accountol.com
ga-sale.com
accountbar.com
mygamesale.com
powerlevelings.com
mmogcart.com
acctstore.com
top-account.com
play4uber.com
comegames.com
trade-accounts.com

Who commonly uses link spamming in the RMT industry?
Chinese. I am extremely sorry to have to narrow the use of Black hat techniques in the RMT industry to an exact demographic however it is a true and proven fact. I have been unable to find a single North American owned RMT company that uses link spamming to dominate and cheat organic search results. Granted the majority of RMT companies are owned and operated from China, with a few North American owned with Chinese farming operations.

How this affects our industry:
Google’s system is intended to provide users with a search result page containing sites that are the best and most popular sites for that search result. When web sites link spam thier domain they are cheating the system, in ga-sale’s case they are causing major issues with searches for World of Warcraft accounts as they are link spamming many, many domains forcing other sites onto page 2 of Google’s search results, basically they start to have a monopoly on all organic search traffic. This results in the stop of any possible customers and revenue for other companies competing for organic search traffic. Domains that are using link spamming to maintain top Google search results are also saving hundreds of dollars a day by not having to spend money on Google Adwords, providing them an economic edge over thier competitors.

 Stay Tuned for information on the program used to spam thousands of links in less then a day.