Links and porn

Link to others to get traffic, but be warned! CHRIS THOMAS

By Chris Thomas

Yesterday I had one of those embarrassing moments most of us have experienced in the course of our working lives.

I visited a porn site at work.

It was a total accident (really, it was) and it happened from a very unlikely source.

But more on that later…

When you operate a blog, you can set up trackbacks, or pings. Basically what this means is you can allow other web pages that link to yours to be displayed as a link, usually at the bottom of your post.

It’s a method of displaying links from other web pages that reference your article as a form of citation.

Here’s an example on our blog (see under “Links to this Post:”):

Of course I visited the link to see what context the person who linked to my article used to reference my post. That person’s website then received another visitor (me). Other people who read my post may have also visited the link to learn more about the topic I was writing about (more visitors).

From a pure SEO perspective, I’ve often recommended that it’s better not to link to other websites as it can drain your “page rank” as you pass some of your website’s authority to the site you’re linking to.

But in this case, I think it can be useful to link to others to gain targeted traffic.

Note, there’s no search engine benefit to you by having your trackback link posted on someone else’s site – in Blogger (which is the blogging software we use), the trackback link is neatly setup using javascript, which prevents a search engine robot following the link back to the web page linking to you.

I presume (but haven’t had time to check), that all the other blogging software vendors do the same.

But back to the porn site.

I visited the Google Analytics Blog, looking for more information about setting up analytics in Blogger (something I should have done ages ago, but hadn’t had time).

At the bottom of the article I was reading were all the trackback links and I clicked on one I thought was relevant to what I was interested in…

Bam! Up popped a very questionable site, which was totally unexpected and highly embarrassing.

What’s the world coming to when even Google can get spammed?

Be careful out there!

Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.

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