HP SEO Invents New Link Spam by Leveraging M&A

I wonder if they priced SEO benefits in the deal when Hewlett-Packard (HP) bought Compaq, Mercury Interactive, Chain Link Technologies, EDS, DEC and the rest of the alphabet. Probably not. I would guess CFO's don't count domain strength as capital. Either way, somebody at HP was smart enough to identify the value of these domains. The question is what will search engines think?

Right now, the engines are absolutely thrilled that HP has decided to throw a page of spam links to SEO target pages. These pages, in-turn, come up near the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) on Google, Yahoo and Live. These links appear to be coming from external domains and pointing to HP with perfectly targeted SEO keywords for everything in their technology portfolio. The fact is that these links should be considered internal domain links coming from within the company itself. It's not black hat SEO unless you consider the fact that they are exploiting a flaw in Google's ability to identify internal links vs. external links.

For example, google "laptops"and see that the HP laptops page is doing great. Then take the URL for the page as show in Google and open it in Yahoo Site Explorer. I've done it for you here.

If you look closely at the result in site explorer, you will notice that a lot of the pages linking back to HP laptops have the exact same title. How likely is that? Go ahead and click-through to look at these sites. They are indeed all the same page.

So, why does this help HP SEO to the top for "laptops" and many other competitive keywords? Because that duplicated page is sitting on several old domains that don't appear to be part of HP to the search engine. It looks like a page from another company that believes HP is relevant for the keyword "laptops" in the link. That duplicated page amounts to a hill of spam links. And, as of today, search engines love it. For your entertainment, here are some of the hundreds of domains that are linking to this target page and dozens more target pages at HP.

http://www-svca.mercuryinteractive.com/#Product
http://www-heva.mercuryinteractive.com/#Product
http://www.extremelogic.com/#Product
http://www.desktalk.com/#Product
http://www.clti.com/#Product
http://www.opswareinc.com/#Product
http://www.compaq-computer.com/#Product
http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/welcome.html#Product
http://activeanswers.compaq.com/#Product
http://web.merc-int.com/#Product
http://www.mercury-eur.com/#Product
http://welcome.hp-ww.com/country/us/en/welcome.html#Product
http://hewlett-packard.de/#Product
http://www.hpprinterrepairs.com/#Product
http://www.bristol.nl/#Product
http://www.ecardfile.com/#Product
http://www.hpshipping.com/#Product
http://www.omnibook.at/#Product
http://www.youalwayshadit.com/#Product
http://www.ipaqnet.com/#Product
http://www.hp.edu.vn/#Product
http://demo.freshwater.com/#Product
http://www.hppcdirect.com/#Product
http://www.optane.ro/#Product
http://myhp.com/#Product
http://desktalk.com/#Product
http://hpcopier.com/#Product
http://www.jetdirect.at/#Product
http://www.ipaqnet.net/#Product
http://btoguide.com/#Product
http://www.cntgcm.com/#Product
http://www.e-utilica.net/#Product
http://www.synstardev.com/#Product
http://www.synstardev.com/#Product
http://www.testdirector.net/#Product
http://www.peregrinesucks.com/#Product
http://www.digitalworkplace.com/#Product
http://www.mercuryinteractive.lt/#Product
http://www.hpww1.com/#Product

The views expressed in this blog are my personal views and do not represent the views of my employer.