Guestbook Links Were Never Credible, but Branding Always Was: A Look Back at 2003 (A Hamsterdam History Lesson)

By Ethan Lazuk

Welcome to another lesson from Hamsterdam History!

This week, we landed on the topic of guestbook links.

Like all our topics, it was selected at random.

However, soon after digging into this week’s article from Search Engine Watch circa 2003, I realized it was the legacy of its author that was the bigger history lesson.

I hope you enjoy the learning journey!

What is a guestbook link?

First, some basics …

A guestbook is a visitor log.

Historically, they were books that visitors signed.

I’ve been to museums that had historical guestbooks with famous signatures. Mount Vernon has a popular guestbook for foreign dignitaries:

Nowadays, you’ll see photos in the news of politicians or government officials signing guestbooks when they visit a foreign location or monument:

But mostly today’s guestbooks are for events like weddings, bridal showers, and baby showers.

Website guestbooks are (or were) a thing, too, though.

These digital guestbooks were a way for website owners to know who their visitors were and receive feedback from them.

You can think of a website guestbook like a blog post comments section, except it’s for the website as a whole.

Many website guestbooks didn’t require visitors to sign up, so they could freely leave comments.

These comment sections usually also let users enter hyperlinks using <a> tags:

That meant guestbooks were a way for SEOs to build backlinks from one website to another.

Of course, this is clearly link spam.

The rel=nofollow link attribute discourages search engine crawling and PageRank flow (or rankings influences) from unnatural links.

Well, Google introduced that in 2005 for the purpose of eliminating spammy links that users could leave themselves. As their blog post explains, “We think any piece of software that allows others to add links to an author’s site (including guestbooks, visitor stats, or referrer lists) can use this attribute.”

In short, “securing every location where someone can add a link is the way to keep spammers at bay,” and rel=nofollow was the solution.

Most CMSs will nofollow blog comment links by default, and even flag spammy comments for deletion (thanks to machine learning).

Of course, today’s website owners don’t really need guestbooks anyway. They can build email or subscriber lists and use analytics platforms like GA4 to understand their site visitors.

In fact, 2005 was also the year that Google analytics launched, after Google acquired Urchin.

That’s what makes the blog post about guestbook links that we’ll be looking at all the more interesting.

It was published in 2003, two years before rel=nofollow or Google Analytics.

“Link Popularity and the Myth of the Guestbook Link” – Eric Ward, Search Engine Watch (2003)

On April 15th, 2003, Eric Ward wrote an article as a guest writer for Search Engine Watch called “Link Popularity and the Myth of the Guestbook Link.”

Here’s how the post looked the day after it was published, according to WayBack Machine:

We’ll look at the article’s content shortly.

But first, let’s learn more about its author, Eric Ward.

The legacy of Eric Ward

Eric Ward was a content-linking strategist whose career started in 1994.

He was called “THE authority on links” by Danny Sullivan in Search Engine Land, according to his website biography page.

His website also features a quote from Matt Cutts that says, “Eric follows the right approach. He’s interested in earning links based on content merit, and those are the links that stand the test of time.”

Eric’s biography page also mentions how he “founded the Web’s first service to help publicize web content to the online world back in 1994,” and that “Jeff Bezos asked Eric to announce and publicize Amazon.com’s debut.”

In 2013, Eric authored a book called “The Ultimate Guide To Link Building.”

He also published a linking strategies newsletter called LinkMoses Private.

Eric passed away on October 16th, 2017.

A memorial article with quotes from other search marketers was written by Michelle Robbins for Search Engine Land.

His website also features a message from his family:

Here is a link to Eric Ward’s link-building newsletter archive.

And here is a link to his blog, which has a lot of great information.

The first article available is originally from 1996, and it links to the original version on InternetArchive:

In that article’s updated introduction (from 20 years later, it appears), Eric also writes:

Here’s a key section of it that we’ll reference later on:

“Some aspects of it are dated, such as search engine submissions, but other aspects are as relevant today as they were two decades ago. Also, it helps show that some of us were seeking links as a form of branding and topical publicity long before it became mainstream, and long before there was a ‘Google’ to reward us for those links. The beauty of the ‘branding and topical publicity approach’ (for those of us who used that approach) was that we ended up creating the type of backlinks Google was looking for: not manipulated, earned, and relevant.” [Bolding added.]

– EricWard.com

Now that we’re familiar with Eric Ward’s legacy as a link builder, let’s look at his 2003 article for Search Engine Watch.

Analysis of “Link Popularity and the Myth of the Guestbook Link”

From the opening sentence, we get the description of guestbook links as “questionable, at best, and potentially lethal, at worst.”

“Link popularity is crucial for your pages to rank well in search engines, but the value of guestbook links is questionable, at best, and potentially lethal, at worst.”

– Eric Ward, Search Engine Watch

That sets the message, while the remainder of the article is about making the case.

Here’s a notable paragraph that contains an interesting reference to exit pop-ups:

“Naturally, some web marketers (probably the ones that think exit pop-ups are useful) think that by signing guestbooks and adding links by the hundreds they will improve their link popularity scores at search engines.”

It’s a funny line, but one that’s telling.

I find most pop-ups egregious, personally.

When I worked in marketing agencies, I saw them often get added without a second thought, “because they convert well,” or so I’d hear.

Of course, we as SEOs know that intrusive interstitials are referenced in Google Search Central’s current page experience documentation. Meanwhile, there’s a related page experience document that’s dedicated to avoiding intrusive pop-ups by using banners instead.

That’s pretty clear guidance. Except there’s also an older 2017 line (from a 2016 page on mobile friendliness) that mentions intrusive interstitials and says that “pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as high.”

Some marketers, and especially the creators of pop-up apps or plugins, took this guidance to mean that using exit-intent pop-ups was a loophole.

Maybe it is, in one regard, but nowhere in Google’s documentation does it suggest this method. The emphasis is on the pop-ups being intrusive, all the time.

Perhaps that’s partly a self-interested stance related to content indexing, but it’s likely also because pop-ups are typically unwelcome.

But taking a step back to analyze the past and present more holistically, that line from Eric’s article speaks to what’s arguably a search engine-first mentality, which is the same that would lead a person to think guestbook links were useful.

In short, spammy tactics and loopholes suggest a fundamental disregard for the user, and certain search marketers were just as much against this attitude in 2003 as they are today.

Another interesting part of the article connects the value of links with being an indication of content quality:

“The real question here is do search engines know about this scam yet, or do they count guestbook links as additional links for poplarity rankings? My hunch is that since guestbook links are not in any way an indication of content quality, then they do not matter at all.”

We don’t necessarily think of links as proxies for content quality today.

But if we do think about it, links would show popularity, and, in theory, popular pages that accumulate links would be higher quality content.

The issue is that the backlink profiles of “popular” pages could be manipulated.

That leads to the next interesting point from the article.

I assumed a guestbook was on the website’s homepage, like a comment section of a blog post.

However, Eric explains it’s a dedicated page, which often could be determined by its URL:

“If ANY search engine currently gives any credit or rankings impact for guestbook links, this impact is only because the engine hasn’t yet figured out the guestbook trick, and soon will. In fact, since the majority of guestbooks pages have the word guestbook in the URL string, it would be absurdly easy for the search engines to simply ignore any link that appears at any URL with the letters guestbook in it.

And I’ll bet you if they don’t already ignore them they will soon.”

He also speculates how guestbook links could be ignored, or will be soon.

As we know, Google introduced the rel=nofollow attribute two years later.

The article’s conclusion lastly speaks to the guestbook link-building approach as being based on a lie:

“a) The link can be obtained automatically or in bulk numbers and b) You are trying to inflate links for SEO purposes, then the bottom line is it’s all bullsh*t, and no matter if the engines figure it out today or next month, the tactic is based on a lie and shouldn’t be done.”

This further shows how the debate over user-first vs. search engine-first tactics — which we also explored in a previous Hamsterdam History lesson from 2005 — isn’t new, but rather has been ongoing for at least two decades.

Eric also published an updated version of this article on his blog, where he highlighted the following quote:

That about sums it up.

Does this type of link building still go on today?

We don’t really have guestbooks today to build links from.

However, the SEO industry’s debate over link spam tactics still persists.

Here are some personal dealings I’ve had …

When I was agency side, I discouraged most link-building tactics as a waste of time. They were usually pushed from the top down by people either with dated SEO knowledge or who saw link building as an easy service to sell, hence the enduring popularity of cold email outreach.

In another blog post on people-first SEO, I also tell the story of when I interviewed for an in-house role with a marketing manager who had been a guest post link builder. I said my piece in that interview, namely asking rhetorically, “If a link doesn’t earn referral traffic from your target audience, does it really have SEO value?” I might have said some other things about wasting client budgets. Anyway, I didn’t get that job …

But that wasn’t very long ago.

And even today, in 2024, my blog still gets regular (and probably automated) comment link spam:

The most ridiculous part about that is not only that rel=nofollow has existed for nearly 20 years, but that we’re also in an age of advanced machine learning.

Not only can machine learning quickly train on what links are spam, but neural networks also contribute to search engine ranking systems.

In another Hamsterdam History article, we also talked about how links are no longer a top three signal for Google Search.

Today as an independent SEO consultant, I don’t even offer “link building” services, or even use that terminology on my website.

I see it as “authority building,” a broader ecosystem of tactical considerations that I think is more in line with the original intents mentioned earlier in this article from nearly 30 years ago, such as brand building, user trust, and reputation management.

Of course, I’m not anti-link building. There are many creative and user-centric ways to build legitimate backlinks, such as with digital PR campaigns, pages that have original and quotable data insights, or best of all, distributing great content that people want to share organically.

Enduring classics (takeaway)

The context of link building has evolved over the decades, yet we can still see how the classic debate over user-first vs. search engine-first tactics has been a part of SEO since at least 2003.

Even two years before rel=nofollow existed, link builders like Eric Ward were speaking out against tactics like guestbook links.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this history lesson! I’m personally glad to have been introduced to Eric Ward’s work and legacy.

See you next week for another one. And feel free to check out past Hamsterdam History articles below.

Until next time, enjoy the vibes:

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing! 🙂

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