James Carson+ | September 1, 2011
5 comments

Community Hubris: Why I Love Michael Gray

Michael, if you’re reading this, judging from your Tweets you probably think I’m some kind of leech looking to piggyback your fame. But actually it’s a response to a personal attack on a few people who follow and respect you – members of your community.

So this post stems from a debate, or lack of it, between @graywolf (Michael Gray) and @sporkmarketing (Jason Lancaster). First of all Jason posted Let’s Kill the “Bad Inbound Links Can Get Your Site Penalized” Myth. I then noticed that a couple of people disagreed with Jason. Then rather than take to the comments of the article, Michael Gray took to his c.15,500 Twitter followers to discredit the article. Interestingly enough, Sporkmarketing’s response quoted Michael Gray as also Tweeting: “I call BS on this article narrow minded BS http://ow.ly/1wst3T&lt.” (although it’s not in the linked tweet).

I then Tweeted that it was “Bit harsh I think to be honest…” I didn’t even say I disagreed with him. This appears to have got Mr Gray really riled. I mean, check it out from the bottom up:

Michael Gray on Twitter

At no point did I say I disagreed. He just chose to slate me in front of c.15,500 followers – way to go man! Did he even look at my bio? Is he going to say that my experience is like a school child’s? I particularly love the way he mixed the open questions with replies that didn’t include my name, so when people checked his timeline they could see that he really thought I was dumb. Perhaps ‘a hack, charlatan, or a conman.’ At least he didn’t mention my name with these tweets – thanks Michael.

Why Did I Get Involved in the First Place?

I don’t think it’s particularly fair for someone with the community influence of Michael Gray to deliver personal attacks on posts and call the community idiots. Why can’t they say their opinions in the comments of the article and give it some context? Okay, so he has an opinion. No need to make it personal – this is not Perez Hilton. I particularly don’t think it’s fair to not express an opinion about a subject and then get laid into to this extent – incredible. Up and coming SEOs and marketers have respect for people like Michael Gray – I haven’t met him personally and I respect him – let’s not give in to hubris.

And for the Record…

I actually believe it would be possible to attack a competitor site with a load of paid links and get them banned. I’ve seen an agency buy a load of links for a client through third parties and get them banned, so it’s entirely logical. But I also agree with Jason Lancaster’s points:

  • Poison link networks exist, but he (Michael Gray) can’t tell me how to find one, nor can he share an example of a site that’s been hurt by one
  • Bad links can’t hurt trusted sites, but they could hurt ‘mom&pop’ sites, which I assume are small sites that probably weren’t ranking anyways

I also work for a pretty large men’s site – FHM.com. Men’s sites get hit by spam attacks, porn links and links from prostitutes. Often it’s a minefield of filter squeezing and shifting to ensure content is compliant not to be in the SafeSearch filter. But we don’t do badly on search – we actually do very well. We are certainly not penalized in any way – we rank highly for a range of celebrity names and other keywords. I don’t agree with Jason’s post – but if he was to work in a similar vertical to me, I can see why he formed that opinion.

We’d like to hear Michael Gray’s viewpoint on this without getting completely slated! Why don’t we have a conversation?

Category: Link Building, SEO, Social Media | Tags: ,
  • http://www.sporkmarketing.com Jason Lancaster

    James – First of all, thanks for putting this out there. I think Michael is a good SEO, and while it definitely took a little wind out of my sails to have him call me an idiot, I think both you and he raise a valid point.

    However, riddle me this: Google’s long-standing policy towards paid links is to devalue them. Penalties only arise when manipulation has taken place, and from everything we read, conference speakers, my work, etc. I believe penalties are rare.

    I also believe that paid link scandals such as the JC Penney-SearchDex issue show that Google doesn’t really penalize sites for buying links. At least not often.

    …which might explain why Michael Gray has long been an advocate of buying links. He knows that Google has a hard time determining when a link has been bought and paid for, so it must be *very* hard for them to enact a penalty.

    I will take your advice and try to sabotage one of my own sites with a .ru network, btw. Can’t hurt to try it, right?

  • Anonymous

    Hi Jason – thanks for this comment. I can only talk on my observations when I was in an agency a couple of years back – the algorithm associated with mass linkage has probably changed since then, but I haven’t seen a penalization due to link building myself since that time.

    So really it’s your view vs. Michael’s – I don’t really need a view in my vertical, which is large scale brand publishing. If I did, then I’d probably lean towards ‘it doesn’t effect me’ rather than ‘it is a myth’. The sites I deal with are seriously unlikely to be hit by this sort of attack. It seems like small beer to be overly concerned about.

    I definitely do not know about Michael’s point about the .ru network – I haven’t been involved with anything remotely blackhat for years. Perhaps Michael can enlighten us with his side?

  • http://sporkmarketing.com/blog/1286/bad-links-can-hurt-you-myth/ The ‘Bad Links Can Hurt You’ Myth Just Won’t Die | Spork Marketing Blog

    [...] idiot.” My problem is, I just don’t get it.UPDATE: James Carson, an SEO in the UK, wrote up a blog post about Mr. Gray’s response to my article. He’s said that he doesn’t agree with me (fair enough), but I think he’s done a [...]

  • http://www.sporkmarketing.com Jason Lancaster

    Just to clarify, I say bad links are mythical because I’ve seen lots of crummy affiliate sites use all manners of terrible promotion without suffering any sort of penalty. In fact, when I first started out, I pulled some of this crap myself.

    The thing is, none of it – not setting up my own site network, hiring social bookmarking/directory submission people, buying links from offshore networks, etc. – made a damn bit of difference.

    But none of it hurt me either, and none of it seems to hurt the sites I’ve looked at/worked with. Perhaps there are some particularly nasty networks out there that I don’t know about, but to me none of that matters.

    Really, it all boils down to this: Google can’t tell who bought a specific link. Therefore, unless there’s a relationship demonstrated, there’s no way they could enact a penalty. To do so would undermine the search engine.

  • Anonymous

    There’s a question of scale here though. The agency I was with had a big client with a big content network and dangerous link building tactics. One day everyone came to work and it had disappeared from the top 50. It definitely wasn’t due to devaluation – we spent a while cleaning up the act and eventually it came back around. I’m sure if you pushed it hard enough and started ranking for big money terms like ‘car insurance’ – we were literally going for ranking on that term – then you can get flagged.

    There’s a lot of sites out there beating Adsense policy too, but they still earn revenue!

    Saying that, I’ve also seen FHM.com disappear from rankings for basically being badly consolidated, then monarch.co.uk disappear due to use of a JavaScript drop down.