Dark Matter Links

[TECHeGO]

From 2007 - 2004 I worked for Sprint in several positions with my last one being a Corporate Account Manager for fortune 1000 customers. In 2004 I left Sprint after the Nextel merger and created an eCommerce site called thesprintstore.net as a Sprint Nextel preferred partner. I used my inner working knowledge of Sprint to my wonderful advantage and began making 3x my original salary.

My desire for more business turned to greed and I began leaking information that consumers loved i.e. phone release dates, price points, warehouse stock levels and tricks of the trade. This garnered me thousands of links from big sites (had no idea at the time) and eventually my site was issued a Cease and Desist order from Sprint's Corporate Headquarters.

I recently realized one evening that I had a GEM of a domain with powerful backlinks that I could redirect to my current site TECHeGO.com [staff removed hyperlink]. (Some of the back links are from Engaget, Engaget Mobile, Rimmarkable and even one from Sprint.) The redirection has been in place for months now and I have confirmed that all that sweet Link Nectar is flowing through!

I have found it interesting, however, that my back link and referral domain count have never increased leading me to believe that in doing a 301 Redirect existing links become what can only be described as 'Dark Matter Links' i.e. the links are there, simply invisible.

Dark Matter Definition: dark matter is matter that is inferred to exist from gravitational effects on visible matter and background radiation, but is undetectable by emitted or scatteredelectromagnetic radiation.

Dark Matter Links: dark matter links are visible links that have passed through a 301 redirect which are now inferred to exist but are no longer visible by crawlers?

Is there a better definition that could be applied to the term 'Dark Matter Links'?

[DavidWolf58]

Awesome post. To throw one step further. I would like to propose the other site of your dark coin. Links that appear to exist but really have no value. This is common in the tactics of spammers picking up dropped domains and pitching them as high PR sites for link building. They have the signals of a strong domain, but futher evaluation proves that it takes more than strong moz rank to actually provide value to a site. I would assume the SEOmoz guys would say that the value is built in to their equation but you also have to remember that SEOmoz's linkscape only indexes a fraction of the web thats out their. It performs better in some niches than other. I find it useful to benchmark against a secondary source. I commonly check a domains metrics against SEOmoz and Majestic. Both have their own strengths. If I am link buying, I stay away from any site that doesn't perform well in both metrics as you will find that most sites with decent rankings do.

This will save you from dealing with "made for link sales based on PR rank" type sites that have little real world value.