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I just filled out my first ever “Report Paid Links in our Index” report through Google’s excellent Webmaster Tools and, while I feel somewhat of a dirty snitch, at the same time, I’m absolutely sick of the amount of people who get in touch trying to buy links from us.

When the company doing this is a reasonably big company, who is, in my eyes, a major competitor, then, I’m afraid, I just had to take advice from my (imaginary) friend Sir Richard Branson and say “screw it, let’s do it!” when it comes to ‘outing’ the company behind the link purchase request.

That company? Twenga.

So what did they do? Expose their black hat SEO strategy to a major competitor, that’s what!

See below the email I received earlier:

Hello,

My name is [name removed at request of Twenga] and I am in charge of Partnership for Twenga.co.uk, a search engine shopping tool, gathering all products on the Web.

Twenga is present in all major European countries (France, Italy, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Russia, Poland, Belgium…) and all over the world (Brazil, Japan, Australia and the US).

We would be interested in having a text-link visible on your site in order to provide your readers interesting content for shopping. For example we could imagine a link on your homepage http://www.celeb-ratings.com  saying: “Find Designer Handbags and the Latest Fashion at Twenga” that would lead to http://www.twenga.co.uk/dir-Fashion  Directory.

A link on a specific keyword appearing in one of your articles for example ‘Bikinis,’ leading to our specific page http://www.twenga.co.uk/dir-Fashion,Women-s-swimwear  could be another possibility.

We would greatly appreciate if you could let us know if you are interested in our proposal, and if so would it be possible to forward on your rates/prices per month

Best Regards,

[name removed at request of Twenga]

My response (excuse the dramatic shift half way through, this is what I sent out, I just didn’t really pay attention when I cut a paragraph, so there is a clutch-less shift! Also there are typos too as I was on the netbook with its infernal tiny keyboard! Oh, lastly, please see past my somewhat haphazard use of punctuation.)?

Hi [name removed at request of Twenga],

We do not sell links in order to maintain our market leading search enging rankings.

Further, you perhaps should look at some of our other websites: we have a womenswear website among our other 50 or so domains, and several shopping based portals, many of which, do the same as Twenga. Essentially, you are a competitor in this regard.

This is particularly true if, as I suspect, you have contacted more than just us with offers of this nature. It will become known that you seek to purchase links, this is regarded as ‘black hat’ – you and all those who link to you are likely to be punished by major search engines in the long run. This is not a risk I’m prepared to take with our business, now, or ever.

I’m reasonably sure we have very little to offer one another.

Regards,

Robin Scott
Managing Partner
24 Hour Trading

I hate paid links because I play within the Google quality guidelines, and try to push our websites up the SERPs by making sure 24 Hour Trading is responsible for producing better and better content. So, while I appreciate the mental wrangles one goes through during the ever-so-slightly browncoat and/or Orwellian process Google has created – in getting webmasters to ‘do the dirty’ on each other – I see it as necessary to create a self-policing community which will ultimately aid the searcher in the long run: by preventing organisations who attempt to subvert organic search engine listings. It will help us if quality sites continually rise to the top: we, at 24 Hour Trading, are now producing high quality, user-focused content on a daily basis through a great many domains.

What is also galling is that I put a fairly clear message on our contact form stating that I won’t tolerate contact of this nature. Surely the person in charge of partnership can read, so they must simply have ignored our message, which reads:

Please do not contact 24 Hour Trading offering services of a commercial nature, requesting link exchanges or asking to buy links on any website: we will not respond, and if we do, we may not be polite.

So Twenga, do I hope all of your various domains are smacked with a PageRank penalty that knocks you off the front page search results? Yes, I do. Not because I view you as competition, but because I view you as cheats who devalue the entire organic search field. As that is our main area of new readership and hence our primary source of income, Twenga isn’t just a competitor, Twenga is a threat to every webmaster who, like us, produces quality content.

So I’ll end this with a question to Matt Cutts (who’s great videos I was, coincedentally, watching literally minutes before my inbox was sullied with the above) – the above is ‘Black Hat SEO’, right? and one more, is this article right here ‘linkbait’?

‘Black Hat SEO’ and ‘Linkbait’ are words I try very hard not to say out loud in public places, lest someone uncover the nature of this strange life we are leading here in online media. Apologies to those of you who, like me a couple of years ago, are in the sensible position of not knowing what they mean!

Now that this rant is over, we can go back to making the internet finer, and leave the link buying to Twenga.

I’m a tell-tale, it was me filed that report: confession over.