Although Google stated that Googlebombing would become very difficult in the future, SERPs show still examples of pretty good results. Most of them are intentional, some are by accident.
The example below (thanks for the tip, Hamoedie ) is a great example of an accidental, but very effective, link bomb.

The web design market is very competitive, even a phrase like “Open Source Web Design” shows 350 million results. Number one is oswd.org, like the screen shot below shows. With over 225k links, that isn’t a big surprise.

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When I wanted to clear the comment spam Akismet blocked during this week, I spotted something very funny: a spammer with a conscience.

I guess he’s having second thoughts about spamming the hell out of bloggers with his used car spam sites

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You have probably already read the articles with 5, 50, 66, 101 or even 131 strategies to attract links (if not: go read!). Some strategies (the most effective ones) are being mentioned in each of these articles. The following 4 activities are not very ordinary ways to build links, but can be at least as effective.

1. Get a dog.
Dogs are not only a great way to pick up girls (for some reason, women digg puppies) or an overly underestimated networking strategy (you’ll meet lots of other interesting dog owners), but it can also help you to build links.
When you’re staring at a monitor almost 24/7, getting out once in a while can really open up your mind. That dog scratching your leg is your appointment with fresh, creativity stimulating air. A walk around the park provides enough time to think about at least 3 linkbaity articles, 2 improvements for your website and 1 new marketing approach each month. So besides a date and a bigger network, getting a dog can also make you think of a new way to attract dozens, hundreds or even thousands of links. And maybe a link from one of your dog’s new pals.

2. Teach.
Because SEO, Link Building, AdWords and Social Media are relatively new, there aren’t a lot of studies related to these subjects. Some Colleges and Universities are desperately looking for someone to teach their students something about Search Marketing. Even if it’s just a workshop or a few lessons, they don’t care. Volunteer.
No seriously. Ok, maybe not completely voluntarily, you can offer yourself in exchange for a link on the college or university website. You can even offer to write an introduction page (with a few links and info about you and your company) about the subject you’ll be discussing.

Using this strategy will not only be an opportunity for you to get your brand out to marketing-managers-under-construction, or to get a few tech savvy students to work for you during the summer (cheap labor!), but it can also get you a few (.edu) links.
Keep in mind that some of these students may know more about the subject than you, so you’d better know a lot about the subject you’re teaching.

Are there no schools looking for Search Marketing teachers near you? If you happen to speak a second language, you can try to teach SEM in that language.

Warning: offering your services in exchange for a link definitely makes you a link whore.

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There is enough info available about how and why to use LinkedIn and how you can add links to your profile. But why would you neglect optimizing your profile links, by leaving out the anchor text?

Recently, I came across two profiles with links that didn’t have one of the standard LinkedIn anchor texts, but also dind’t have a “polluted” anchor text. This means no company names, high competitive keywords or common anchor texts. In both cases it were links with a (pretty) unique anchortext.

Here’s Michael Gray’s profile. There are three links listed in his profile. Two of Graywolf’s links aren’t anchor text optimized (the ‘My Company’ and ‘My Blog’ links) and one has a customized anchor text (Central Hub Website). Now check out Google’s search results.

Example number two is Peter vd Graaf’s profile. Peter has also optimized one of his three links; the link to his SEO workshop page has an optimized anchor text (not anymore; see comments). If you check the Google search results, you’ll notice that this page also ranking quite high (please note that the page’s language is Dutch, so I had to adjust the query language a bit).

In both cases, the anchor text used has no occurances on the page. I guess this is LinkedIn Google Bombing

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With the “Are paid links evil” session at the San Jose SES in sight, it seems like the buying-links-discussion has started all over again during the past few weeks. Rand and Aaron both published great articles about buying links and the discussion seams to get hot again in other places -and in other languages- as well.

Last week’s SESSJ session has already been covered in a few places (thanks for that, those recaps are really useful for us home stayers), which should get this thing heated up again. I guess that, because buying links as a link building strategy still works, this discussion will remain to go on for a while. Great, I love this discussion, so there will be a lot of new blog posts about paid links during the next few weeks

Here’s something about paid links to think about:
- If link purchases have a positive ROI for a company, they’ll continue to make them. If they have a positive ROI, chances are good that they must also be serving the searcher effectively and thus, be good results for the engines. (Todd Friesen)
- Link Baiting, what Google’s suggest as link building strategy, is as egregious if not worse for relevancy than paid links - viral content of such an off-topic nature should not help your rankings and is more “polluting” than relevant paid links. (Greg Boser)
- Google often uses the example of the Yahoo! Directory as a place where paid links are acceptable, because these links get an ‘editorial review’. However, not only is Yahoo!’s directory filled with spammy sites, but the $299 reviewing fee is a recurring fee. What kind of editor needs an annual fee of almost 300 bucks to review a website?
- Matt Cutts states that the FTC has said that word of mouth marketing is like any other kind of marketing, and if you’re being paid to say something, you should disclose this to both people and machines. Do regular ads have hidden disclosure messages for the Yellow Pages? Should I disclose that the link has been disclosed to search engines as well?

And I really love Michael Gray’s theory about paid links & Google (copy/ pasted from SEOmoz):

• Both commercial and non-commercial queries exist on the web;

• Commercial websites are NOT generally linked-to naturally;

• Non-commercial websites are much more likely to entice natural links;

• By eliminating paid links, Google will fill the top results for commercial queries with primarily non-commercial results;

• Thus, when a searcher wishes to take a commercial action, the only relevant results will be the paid listings;

• And, thus, searchers will be more likely to click on AdWords links, which earns Google money.

Not that I think that this theory is the truth, but it is a nice point of view.

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When I was writing up a post this morning, I checked to see who used AdWords for their personal name. Besides the fact that I, strangely enough, noticed that only very few use this strategy, I came across these ads.

So I guess Danny found a new job at Vizion, or is he just a scam?

Edit: David Naylor seems to be for sale on eBay as well and Jill Whalen might also be a scam.

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