I recently came across a post by Loren Baker of SearchEngineJournal about Google Loves Transparent Links and Hit counter Spam.
It is shocking to see that Google has not been able to tackle such crude level of spam. We hear about site ageing, search engine saturation, quality one way link and latent semantic indexing as key factors that Google is using to improve search results. However what Loren has investigated in this case is absolutely shocking.
It shows how a million dollar keyword (i.e. payday loans made it to #1 in Google by using under-the-belt techniques like transparent links bundled in hit-counters offered by "free hit-counter website" in less than one year of existence and less than a dozen indexed pages with not-so-good quality content. It is really confusing.
We all presume that Google is very smart and to do well on this search engine, we have to be very smart. I just hope we do not need to be spam-smart 🙂
Read the complete research here – Google Loves Transparent Links and Hit counter Spam
Abhishek