Do you trust your Hit Counters?

In the early days, people loved to display a huge block of yellow-over-black hit counter on their website. Up until today, some still do that to show visitors how many hundreds of thousands of visits their site got. Others, just love to use them cute chicklets. For most bloggers, that chicklet has been replaced by the Google/Feedburner subscriber counter button.

For those who still use and display hit counters, did you read the fine print?

Loren Baker explains on Search Engine Journal how some hit counter services get their funding to operate these free tools — Google Loves Transparent Links & Hit Counter Spam.

Basically, these hit counters would use your displayed buttons to display links as well. These links are being sponsored by interested parties wanting to build massive backlinks to their sites, obviously in order to rank for certain keywords.

So, you might not just know about it but you are actually linking to some spammy sites. Go check the fine print of your free hit counter service. Better yet, check the output HTML of the hit counter’s code.

[tags]spam, hit counters, link building[/tags]