There’s a big difference between links being invisible to search-engine spiders and their being “undetectable” by search-engine watchdogs.
The former came up for debate earlier this week with Wikipedia’s controversial decision to tag all links on its site “nofollow,” which literally leaves those links invisible to Google and its ilk.
Now the head of Google’s “Webspam team,” Matt Cutts, treats claims of the “undetectable” link – as in undetectable to search-engine personnel and thus immune to sanction for policy violations – much in the spirit of Chris Rock’s famous “No matter what a stripper tells you” bit. Just as there’s no sex in the champagne room, there’s absolutely, positively no such thing as an “undetectable” link scheme, Cutts contends.
He was responding on his blog to reports of a new link buying service from V7N, in which the company makes this claim:
Contextual Links @ V7N are undetectable to search engines. Whether it be by human or algorithmic filtering, our links are impossible to detect. Additionally, an enforced non-disclosure agreement prevents both publishers and advertisers from revealing participating publishers and advertisers.
In response, Cutts digs back through his e-mail archive for a 2002 missive from another search engine optimization “expert.” It’s an amusing tale that I won’t spoil, but here’s how Cutts wraps it up:
One thing I do like about working on webspam at Google is that you collect really good stories. I don’t always tell the funny ones, but I share this one to make a point. The moral of this story is that “undetectable” spam sometimes stands out a lot more than you’d think.
In other words, no matter what an SEO tells you …
