When I edited the world’s largest magazine for sports collectors, we got a lot of reader inquiries. (This was back in the day when magazines ruled and readers actually wrote to them.) Most went something like this:

“I have this extremely valuable baseball card can you please tell me how valuable it is because I want to sell it and retire to Bermuda thank you.”

The standard response became known (by me, at least) as Kiefer’s First Law of Collectibles: If it’s valuable, how come you got it?

This law is actually transferrable to many different environments, including, believe it or not, the world of online marketing.

It changes a little but the thought remains the same: If it’s working online, how come? What did you do?

Now it seems that in addition to all the other sneaky little tricks organizations can pull to inflate their numbers, there’s something called link manipulation that’s being used to fake authority and move pages up the SEO ladder.

According to Russ Jones, the top search scientist at Moz, this technique involves buying links, setting up phony blogs, and rigging comments sections to link back to content the manipulators want boosted.

“People have spent a lot of time focusing on how to bypass Google’s rules through sophisticated, professionally designed private blog networks,” Jones told MediaPost. “They have purchased a lot of websites, preferably that already have links, and would put links on these websites that link back to theirs. By controlling all of the links they can, in some cases, [have] the sites rank very well in Google. This has probably become the most sophisticated process during the past couple of years. It’s expensive, but very effective.”

Moz’s recommended approach to dealing with this fraud has two components, near as I can figure:

Legal link manipulation is okay; and
We can sort of detect the bad stuff, but no one can do much about it.

Now that’s the can-do attitude that eradicated measles. (Oh, wait. It’s back.)

It’s not Moz’ fault, really. This is deeply embedded stuff – and like Jones said, it doesn’t come cheap.

Jones says that some organizations spend $100,000 a month on manipulation alone, which thankfully means that most honest organizations don’t have the budget to play the game … but because most honest organizations don’t have the budget to play the game, they lose out in search rankings.

Link manipulation is just one more thing honest publishers have to deal with in order to make inroads online – and let’s face it: It’s hard enough to do this stuff legally.

If you don’t believe me, check out this post from online-publishing experts Winbound on the deep science behind title tagging and meta descriptions.

It’s not for the amateurs, that’s for sure.

And let’s be absolutely clear on one other thing: Manipulation of distribution is not a new thing. In the sponsored-magazine days, we would dump thousands of magazines at a student union, knowing that at most half of them would actually be picked up, much less read, and count all of them as paid circulation.

And we were mere babes in the woods in that regard.

However, it’s never been so easy to manipulate distribution and inflate actual reach, and the payoff has never been greater.

Now, let’s bring this back around to the modified version of Kiefer’s First Law of Collectibles. If something is working for you online, if you’re ranking highly for key search terms, if your posts and pages are kicking butt, and if you’re working with an agency that’s helping you do this, you have every right to ask why.

Why are my pages doing so well? Why is my SEO improving? Why do I have so many more followers?

Ask questions. Probe about techniques. Determine for yourself if what’s being done is legal and ethical – and by ethical, I don’t mean ethical in an agency’s eyes. I mean ethical in terms of your organization’s ethics. If this technique was used anywhere other than online, would your organization be okay with this?

If you’re not sure, find an impartial third party you can trust and ask them.

Online search is the Wild West. There are white hats and black hats. Thankfully, most agencies are white hats. But it’s on you to make that determination for yourself.

Good luck.

Oh Great, Now It’s Link Manipulation