3DTV – SKY TV Risking the Farm by buying links?

The “dark underbelly of Search” (the world of deliberate search engine ranking manipulation) was recently big news in the mainstream, with the NYT openly snitching on JC Penney for link-buying which resulted in a very public Google penalty on the domain – which affected their search engine rankings detrimentally (effectively wiping them out) for 3 months.

Every internet marketer or search engine marketing expert worth a penny should have this information lodged in their subconscious – especially if they are managing the link acquisition initiatives of clients (especially large clients with a lot to lose if things go TITSUP).

Google is very vocal in the past and more recently about how it doesn’t like (or tolerate) link-buying or other search engine manipulation schemes.

So after the very public JC Penney linkbuying & penalty incident – which large corporation in their right minds would (knowingly) risk the farm by buying links? the answer appears to be (either knowingly or unknowingly) SKY TV.

Site: SKY TV.
Destination Page (Exhibit A): http://www.sky.com/shop/tv/3d/
Target Keyword: “3D TV”
Local Keyword Demand (montly): 246,000
Google UK Ranking for Keyword (04/07/2011): #8
Google UK Ranking for Keyword (16/08/2011): #6

It looks like Sky and LG have teamed up to sell some 3D televisions.. Time to buy some links?.

Some Sites Which Appear to be Selling Links to Sky

I’m 99.9999% sure these sites (and hundreds more) are selling these placements to SKY TV – let’s face it. they didn’t put them up for no reason, and there’s no revenue to be made or click tracking on the links.

http://www.eteknix.com/

http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/tags/netbook

http://www.shropshirelive.com/

http://www.slashgear.com/page/301/

http://3dtvreviewsblog.com/

http://www.totallygn.com/page/350/

Idiot Linkbuilders / SEO agencies

It looks that whichever idiot linkbuilders or lazy SEO agency [I mean 'top class & award winning of course] used for link-building for SKY decided to use ‘fake’ banners laden with text-links and styled with in-line css. Examples:

Spamtastic – and not even done cleverly. The spammers behind this linkbuilding could have easily made the ‘banners’ clickable via some JavaScript (while preserving the desired outbound links) and could have made the ‘banners’ look like affiliate banners to avoid arousing the suspicions of SEOs with too much time on their hands.

Why SKY has to buy links when they own one of the most powerful networks in the UK is baffling.

If I sold 3DTV’s, I would be PISSED. If i were SKY TV, I would probably also fire my link-builders for being beyond stupid. Will SKY or anyone else get massively penalised publicly for this stuff, I wonder – or is this just the way things are going until Google et al come up with a less-exploitable organic algorithm?

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