UPDATE: Take a few minutes and read this paper. It somehow reinforces what I said here about interlinking and such practices. It's a good read:)
Footprints and Fingerprints - What's those?
Footprints, SEO related, are repetitive sections of pages which lie in the visual side of things or in the code. For example: Powered By Platform vX.X is a footprint. These sections allow both search engines and competitors to locate your websites and cause you a world full of trouble.
So, everytime you keep a footprint on your site, all your sites that have it can be tracked from it by a skilled researcher. When we talk about source footprints, like affiliate IDs, they virtually can't be tracked by others but here the search engines are the trackers. They get access to your page's source code and can record all these breadcrumbs that could easily give you out.
Footprints are also used to track vulnerable versions of web applications. So getting rid of them quickly from CMS like WordPress, Droopal:) and so on could help you a lot and actually protect you.
The SEO F.E.A.R. - For All The Wrong Reasons
I have some SEO friends obssesed with footprints but for all the wrong reasons. They are actually trying to hide their ownership of their sites from search engines. One day I sat them down and I told them I'll help them strip away all their footprints. So we get on with the work …
The following pretty much regard the link farmers too so pay attention.
Common fingerprints!
- Hosting: IP Classes, Name-Servers!
- Domain: TLD, Whois Info!
- On-Page: SiteWides, Design, Copyright / Version Notices, Comment Form Fields, Any Repetitive Text.
- Source Code: Comments, CSS Styles.
- Linking: Interlinking.
- Linkbuilding: Spamming Angry People (Forum Mods).
- Links: Affilite IDs.
- … etc.
Getting rid of your fingerprints!
After analyzing their sites a bit I made up a list and we got on to work. Their main obsession was hiding from search engines so, with that in mind I started telling them what to do:
- Make sure you Variate the Themes used on your sites. Using a linkdomain you don't want others to clearly see that all those pages linking are yours also. The visual of the page is first thing noticed. You can see when a guy uses the same WordPres theme over and over again in his linkfarm. If possible use your own publishing platforms. This will protect you even more. Everybody is looking for blogs nowadays.
- Avoid Blog-Roll Links. What? Why? Lazy people use these a lot. These are sitewides. Sitewides are usually devalued and that's how it should be. Only few are counted especially as they have the same anchor text on each page. So, by avoiding blog-rolls, you get more link juice for your content embedded links.
- Don't Interlink your Link Farm. This will draw a lot of attention especially from search engines. You linkfarm needs to be as widespread as possible and not related one to each other in anyway.
- Don't Outlink Only to Your Sites. Each post needs at least a 3-1 ratio. 3 good outgoing links to 1 of your sites. Also CSS blend your outgoing links and make the valid ones as obvious (blue) as they get. This will fool many non-professionals.
- Disable Pingback! Blog and ping might get you indexed but you wouldn't imagine how monitored those services are. A blog has a certain posting schedule. You can't get tens or even more posts per day. And that is easiest to track with the Pinging services where you can monitor posting frequency.
- Stop Accepting Pingbacks! XMLRPC has to go from the HTTP headers. You have to do your best not to look like a blog even if you use a blog platform. Blogs are seen differently by search engines. Period! That's why they have a blog search and XMLRPC headers (X-Pingback) will get you listed there.
- Remove any Copyright or Platform Version Signature! Keep it vague. Like © 2008. That's it. Anything more can and will be used against you.
- Avoid .info as Much as Possible! This depends on budget but .info come cheap. Spammers use them a lot. Try to stay away from them. It's for the best. Go for .org which are a bit cheaper but better viewed.
- Don't Spam Forums! Or other people inhabbited place. Your sites can be connected between them by both competition and forum mods with loads of free time and … reported.
- Get other links. Don't rely only on your linkfarms. Get links from all over. Most of these will outrank your linkfarm and will appear, if not ahead, mixed with the linkfarm links. This will make life of those tracking your harder.
- Don't Host All on Same C-Class. Use different hostings. If you use different IPs you might share the nameservers and those are also footprints.
- Mask Your Affiliate Links! Block them in robots.txt. Even cloak them for search engines that don't follow robots.txt (MSNBOT).
- … and these would be a starting point.
Now the last step in footprint free existence.
This is the final step to protect yourself against search engines that could track you using footprints. Everybody was quiet. I started laughing and said:
Please remove the Google AdSense Code, Yahoo! Ads Code, Microsoft Ads Code, Amazon Code from your site. Also ditch any other type of ads that places your ID out in the open.
And they all go: What? Exactly! If you are involved in this kind of advertising you can't hide from the search engines. They know everything about you. The whole obsession of footprint free internet existance is just valid if you think of idiot competitors chasing your sites and reporting them. But you can't hide from the search engines. You can only fly below the radar by not going too far!
I might have missed some footprints. Use the comment form and mention your own. We'll discuss them:)
