When you stop to think about it, links are great.

Little blue portals to click and surf. Who knows what might lurk behind the next one you follow? Maybe a fantastic Stroud-based copywriter, an excellent illustrator, designer and teacher of watercolour painting or a promising, if unprolific, young band from London struck down in their prime by a perfect storm of Covid, parenthood, apathy and laziness?

The thing with links is: search engines rate them highly too.

When Robin Li developed the inner workings of RankDex (now Baidu) in 1996, he was the first to use hyperlinks as a measure of website quality. Two years later, the big brains over at Google filed patent on a very similar algorithm. The mechanics of their site-scoring system — and its potential for manipulation — helped spawn the murky, multi-billion dollar industry we know today as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

My start in marketing coincided with the fallout of a global financial crisis, some of the lowest graduate employment rates on record and my own vague sense that I needed to get to London as quickly as I could.

So, one Wednesday in 2011, armed solely with a print out of the Wikipedia entry for ‘SEO’, I hopped on a train to Paddington to interview for an entry-level role at one of the UK’s largest digital marketing agencies.

The following Monday I was somehow starting as an ‘SEO Analyst’, working on a handful of large UK clients — the sort of businesses your parents have actually heard of. Clueless, but wide-eyed and keen to learn, it quickly became apparent that links were the name of the game.

Back then (and even still) any old website could quickly climb Google’s search results if enough dubious links pointed its way.

The quickest and easiest way to build links? You buy ‘em.

Now I’m not saying that’s what this agency was up to. But at the time, near enough every other SEO firm worth its salt was. Chunks of monthly retainers went on the ‘acquisition’ of backlinks from link farms in far-off locales like Chișinău, Jakarta and Bangalore.

This was never directly explained to clients, at least not in as many words. I’m sure the marketing managers at some of the UK’s biggest brands realised that members of the international blogging community weren’t linking to the corporate websites of insurance firms, drain unblockers and hemorrhoid creams at a comically high clip from the kindness of their hearts.

The house of cards all came tumbling down six months after I’d started. Google weren’t enamoured with the idea that you could buy your way to the top of their pages. That’s what pay-per-click advertising was for — you know, where all the money goes to them.

So, in April 2012 they launched their ‘Google Penguin’ algorithm update. This major change downgraded websites using “manipulative link schemes and other webspam tactics”. Keyword-specific penalties were rolled out.

*Sole image of ‘penguin’ found on my phone*

Literally overnight, blue chip companies and plucky upstarts alike awoke to find their websites had, at least in the eyes of Google and its users, dropped off the face of the earth.

For the biggest businesses, appearing on page one of Google for transaction-focused keywords generates thousands in revenue each month. Some sites temporarily stopped ranking for their own brand names.

Naturally, the organisations most affected weren’t very happy.

Cue crisis meetings in board rooms and a mad scramble to sift through thousands (sometimes millions) of links to find the ones that were sketchy, with the aim of somehow having them taken down.

Eventually, Google introduced a ‘disavow tool’. This effectively allowed webmasters to dob themselves in. Companies could report their illicitly acquired links to the search engine in the hope that all would be forgiven and their organic rankings would be reinstated. This worked about 50% of the time. Sometimes, full repentance took multiple submission attempts over the course of months and years.

This algorithm update likely lost a lot of agencies a lot of clients, cost them a lot of money and deprived a fair few people of their jobs, too. On balance, this was probably justifiable and necessary to clean up an industry that was becoming increasingly odious. Even so, I’m told link buying still goes on to this day and still works to some extent.

Anyway, is there a reason why I’m banging on about all of this? Well, sort of.

Last year, after seven years of living the freelance content strategist dream — doing fine off the back of word-of-mouth and referrals — I thought it was high time I bought tomeperjesi.com. Another year of procrastination followed, before I finally launched my world-famous homepage in March 2025.

However, during those 12 months of dormant ownership, the domain somehow accrued a bunch of dodgy looking links. These have only grown in number since I put some content up that briefly mentions “SEO.”

Anyway, long story short, I don’t currently rank for my brand name on Google. You’d think that a site called https://tomeperjesi.com, dedicated to the fantastic work of its owner, would be enough to rank for the search term ‘Tom Eperjesi’, but apparently not.

I initially put this down to Squarespace doing weird things with the homepage. I then thought it was just Google taking a while to crawl and index my wafer-thin content. But Bing are into it. DuckDuckGo too. The big boys, on the other hand, say “nah.”

There’s no official penalty on the domain as such and, naturally, I’m not going to disavow any links when I’ve done no wrong. I assume these rogue sites scour the web for SEO-adjacent content and link to it, in hope of… who knows what.

This does however confirm my long held belief that if you want to tank the website of your fiercest competitor, nefariously buy a handful of low quality links, point them in their direction and let Google do the rest.

Enjoyed this post? Give it a link — I could use a few good ones.

The links effect

5 good things in Copenhagen