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July 22nd, 2009 
QuadsZilla After being in the industry for years, we often forget that not everyone is familiar with every term we use. We take lots of knowledge for granted. This is not unique to SEO: it happens in every specialty field.
Here was one of the questions from last week’s Link Pyramid© post:
I have a question… is it possible to bring down a competitor’s site by building a totally obvious link farm, totally interlinked and then linking all of the sites to the competitors site?
If so how many sites would you need in the farm? would the result be dependant upon the competitors original strength. Say a page rank five site, with 5000 existing links of which five are .edu and a page rank spread of mostly PR1’s and rising to about 60 Pr 4’s and 5’s’s. What kind of link farm would destroy a site like this?
I am not asking for any moral judgement of whether any one should actually do this but simply would it work, could a site ever be murdered by malicious linkfarm spamming? – if that is the correct phrase.
The industry phrase is “Google Bowling”: Manipulating the external ranking factors that Google uses to penalize a site against your competitors (or someone you just don’t like or want to appear in the SERPs).
On the most basic level, it’s exactly what was described in the comment: A really bad / obvious link farm pointed at a competitors site. There is not enough information from the “example” question to give a good “how many bad links would it take” answer. Everything is really on a case by case basis. If you have a site of the target’s strength, how much spamming can you do before you get a penalty?
There are plenty of other ways to get a competitors site banned or totally screwed in Google. Imagine the example where someone leaves a comment on a site with a link. That link is later redirected to a virus. The site is then reported to stopbadware: then everyone who goes to the site from Google is told that the site is potentially harmful for at least a month while they struggle with customer (no)service. There are other, even more malicious ways of taking down sites that I’d rather have as few people know about as possible.
For the Aspiring Google Bowler the question you have to ask yourself is: what are the ranking / banning / penalty factors that Google looks at for the target site / page that YOU have some control over. Add in some social engineering and a mind for mischief and it’s easy to see how Google bowling works.
For the Corporate Customer that really wants to Protect their brand: don’t try to tackle this on your own. If you brand is worth in the millions or billions of dollars: pay the money to have someone manage ALL the SERPs for your brand related queries. While this will be impossible for some brands (Viagra springs to mind), for the vast majority of companies and brands, the SERPs can be sanitized to include only things you want your customers to see: by hook or by crook.
The price for this type of service usually starts at $100k per year and goes up from there (for the people that can actually deliver what they promise). I know a few of the best in the Industry that do this and let me put it this way: it’s worth it for companies that do billions in sales to spend a few million a year on Search Engine Reputation Management over and above what they spend on PPC, links and rankings.
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). Kamihr had 5k visitors per day from Google that was making him roughly $5k per month in profits.
How to Build Link Pyramids
Yesterday, we discussed two of ways you can use bursts of spammy links to help you make money. But just because you have the ability to spam thousands of links a day to a single page doesn’t mean it’s the most effective use of the tool.
What if I told you there is a way to launder those spammy links; a way to sift out the negative Google Karma to leave you with pure Link juice that Google uses to rank. Would you be Interested?
If so, then you’re gonna want to know about:
Link Pyramids
Among of The Great Wonders of the Web are Link Pyramids. These majestic towers of ranking excellence are built on the backs of spammy links just like the Ancient Pyramids were built by slaves. Today we’re going to define what Link Pyramids are, why they work so well and what they look like. Later this month we’ll get into the nitty gritty on building them.
The Idea behind the Link Pyramid is that while link juice can pass from one site to the next, ranking penalties generally stop after one hop. It works on the premise that the lowest quality sites link upwards to the next higher quality sites in your network. Sites can link laterally and upwards but not downwards.
So here’s what the pyramid looks like . . .
[I started making a graphic of a Pyramid, but honesty, I just can’t be bothered. You know what a fucking pyramid graphic looks like – right? Great! Moving on . . .]
The Bottom
At the bottom of the Pyramid sits a network of sites you created on free blog host or Squido, or anywhere you can get web space for free. These sites should not have ads on them. These sites will link to random other quality sites on the web and to your 2nd level sites. You will experiment with how few links you can spam to these sites to get them to acquire link juice vs. how many you can spam to them before they get banned. If you are not selling anything on these sites there is more leeway. The only type of links you are sending to these sites are those free spammy links from link software.
2nd Level of Pyramid
Then we have your 2nd level of the Link Pyramid. This is where you put your domain portfolio to work. This network of sites is distributed across cheep shared hosting accounts. The more shared hosting accounts you have for this purpose, the smaller your footprint will be. Hosting is really cheep these days, and you’ll probably be spending more each year on domain renewals than you will be on shared hosting.
This 2nd level of sites will get links from the bottom level of sites, but never link back down to them. These sites can still receive spammy links but tread lighter: you don’t want your account getting banned with the shared host. Buying cheap links to these sites also helps the network grow. Directory submission and press release type links are good to go at this level, as is moderate monitization. The Primary purpose of these sites is to build a link farm to link to the Golden Crest of your link Pyramid.
The Golden Crest
Here we have the sites that are ready for prime time. They have fantastic designs and flow. They are your niche authority sites. Their links come from Level 2 of the pyramid, link buys, link bait, and manual, targeted Link spamming. The Golden crest can make money, but the real purpose of these sites is to link to the Top of your pyramid.
The Top
At the Top of the Pyramid is the Target site: That’s the pristine white hat looking site that you want to present to your customers and to rank in the search engines. This site has the bulk of your editorial content: you’re link bait. This site is an e-commerce site that is designed to make money. This is the site you’re paying bloggers and reviewers to link to. You’re only purchasing the highest quality links to this site and your link Ninjas are securing only the best quality links. This is the site that is optimized for the keywords you know make money. This is your money site.
Make sure to have every level of your site link to sites outside of your network and for fuck’s sake:
DO NOT INTERLINK YOUR ENTIRE NETWORK!!!
If you’re gonna do that, you might as well fill out a spam report on yourself with a list of all your sites and submit it to Google. Along similar lines, don’t use any of Google Products for these sites (like analytics, or Adsense, or Adwords . . . or even surfing to them with a Google Toolbar installed or Google Chrome) with the possible exception of the site at the top of your Pyramid.
I’m sure some of you have some questions. Fire away if you do: this way I have more shit to blog about.