Hosting Company Sends Link Email

On the 21st of September 2005 a leading hosting company sent out the email below. Having contacted the sales department at the company we have been told that the company stand by the claims outlined in the email below. We have removed the name of the hosting account owner from the email, we have also added some html formatting.

Watch the visits to your site dramatically increase by gaining higher search engine rankings for free, with our all new 'Fasthosts powered' programme. Give your website the additional credibility and professionalism that goes with hosting with the UK's largest, most established web hosting company. The 'Fasthosts powered' programme is a way to increase your website's exposure through higher search engine rankings and an opportunity to feature on fasthosts.co.uk. How it works:
1. Go to http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/powered to select your preferred logo.
2. Add the supplied code to your site.
3. Use the feedback form to let us know
4. We select the best sites for inclusion on fasthosts.co.uk
By linking to fasthosts.co.uk, which is a known "authoritative site", your search engine ranking will increase as you will be seen as a knowledgeable website in your own right. To join this prestigious programme go to http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/powered
Regards, Andrew Michael CEO, Fasthosts Internet Ltd.

So why do we have a problem with this email?

• "Watch the visits to your site dramatically increase by gaining higher search engine rankings for free". The email starts off well offering to help you increase your positions something which is admirable by a hosting company wishing to improve the rankings of their clients sites and help them gain more business. However as you read on you see they aint being entirely honest...
  1. "The 'Fasthosts powered' programme is a way to increase your website's exposure through higher search engine rankings and an opportunity to feature on fasthosts.co.uk". The raised exposure may bring a site some business that is true to say what they outline will increase your site positions aint really.
  2. By going through the steps outlined you place a link to their site - one which is claimed to be an 'authoritative site'. So how are they an authoratative site? Well it may be because of traffic, may be because based on search engine positions or could be because of the age of theit domain. Either way no site can claim to be an authoritative site in their industry without evidence and an explanation of what this means. Many clients are likely to take this as read.
  3. By linking to them you will gain benefit of "additional credibility and professionalism". We are not convinced of this what we are convinced of is that by linking to the host you will help them increase their link popularity and aid them in Search Engine Optimization. This is as in effect what they are creating is a stream of one way links that will look like natural 'independent' peer links. Links where you link purely on the basis that you believe the target site offers information or services that you believe are good. In effect what you are doing is giving them "additional credibility and professionalism".
  4. By linking you are given the chance to get a link back. They do not even link out to you automatically, only "the best sites" are chosen. What defines a good site? Traffic Numbers, Quality of content, page rank, ranking success: None of this is defined. Further to this the link is transitory when they decide to link http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/companyinfo/fasthosts-powered/ states that "We will select the best sites each week" So the link will appear then vanish, great sites give out links that will age and grow stronger over time whilst your link profile is improved for a week.

Unethical Or Ethical SEO

Link building in this manner is highly unethical. If the goal of the campaign was to increase public awareness of their serving product, which in honesty is good, we would be happy. Having checked the email and spoken to the Sales department, customer services passed us to sales as they didnt see the problem. The sales department also made it known that they stood by their comments. We belive this is a cynical attempt at link building off the backs of site owners efforts with the promise of much and the delivery of very little.

If this campaign was for online advertising purposes we could see the validity of this service, the clickthrough for a week free advertising on a site as busy and large as theirs may bring benefits in traffic to a site, this could be done by altering the way the links are placed on the client site, whether it be in javascript or placing the link in ASCII. These would both be ethical website promotion tactics which would not be unethical.

We have taken screen grabs and have original emails from a number of sites as evidence to this matter.

Thanks to all those who brought this to our attention.

List of Articles on Ethical Search Engine Optimization

: Hotel Industry Booking Study :: The Horror of Site Submit Pro :: What do you need from Your Site? :
: What is Page Rank? :: Page Rank is Dead - Myth or Reality :: The Replacement for Page Rank? :
: Latent Semantic Indexing :: Using Latent Semantic Indexing :: Robots.txt :
: Writing a robots.txt file :: Server Company Link Request :: Duplicate and Near Duplicate Content :
: Web Site Spiderability :: Big Daddy - the new face of Google :: Page Hijacking and 302 redirects :
: To Submit to Search Engines or not to Submit to Search Engines That is the Question? :: Know Your Customer to Know your User :: Black Hat SEO - Dont Do it! :
: April Fools in Search Engine Land :: Search Engines and Menus :: High Rankings - How do Search Engines fit into Your Business? :
: Google - Da Vinci Code the Game :: Removing the ODP description from your MSN listing :: Viewing the Google index from different Geographic Positions :
: Underused HTML Tags :: Company Law Amendment :

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