I was intrigued when these showed up on Twitter this weekend:

1: So a little quick research: Trump digital director Brad Parscale owns a small web design firm in Texas. Seems successful. But def … — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 21, 2016

Paid Parscales company $8m+. Seems like that’s self dealing but very standard way campaign work. Digital or ad guy is on campaign but … — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 21, 2016

Folks in biz, pls share. But having non political web design firm handle email lists, data work, ads for nat campaign seems most unwise. — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 21, 2016

and then…

Trump’s web guy has made $12.5M from Trump, guess that’s why he doesn’t need his hidden link on Trump’s homepage now https://t.co/7o7q75amKS — Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) August 21, 2016

I couldn’t resist doing a little digging on this guy. First, here’s an example – courtesy of Archive.org – of the hidden link on Trump’s site to Parscale’s with the anchor text = “San Antonio Web Design” from May 2015. For you non-SEO reader types, these links should help Parscale rank well for “San Antonio Web Design” & related queries:

Web developers have been pulling this scam since the dawn of SEO, but it’s particularly prevalent on SMB sites who don’t know better. Kind of awesome to see someone try to pull this off on a YUGE domain like Trump’s.

And if you look at Parscale’s backlink profile, you can see that this has been part of his stock in trade for a while:

All of these domains have a link to Parscale’s site in the footer. Not all of them are hidden, so it’s possible that he has the site-owner’s consent to do this. Perhaps his clients, including Trump, even consented to the hidden links.

But it’s clear this guy likes his exact match anchor text:

Now many of these might be legit, but he is definitely trying to diversify his anchor text with keyword variants:

So does this kind of link scheme still work in 2016?

According to SearchMetrics, Parscale.com’s rankings have been cranking ever since Trump announced his candidacy (which is starting to look like the biggest linkbait campaign in history) in June 2015. I haven’t been able to find supporting data but I wouldn’t be surprised if the link to Parscale’s site went up in February 2015 when his rankings started to rise.



According to our 2016 Local SEO Ranking Factors study, backlinks are critical to local rankings, so it’s not surprising that Parscale is aggressively pursuing these links. But these links are risky, for both Parscale and his clients, as they are obviously intended to game Parscale’s site’s search engine rankings.

In fact it looks like Google may have penalized Parscale’s site sometime in October – there was an unconfirmed update around then – as Parscale’s rankings started to tank:



And you can see in Archive.org that during the first week of November 2015, the anchor text to Parscale’s site from Trump’s site was changed, probably in attempt to reduce the exact match targeting on “San Antonio” keywords or throw Google off or something:



As you can see above, in January 2016 Parscale’s rankings recovered.

I am not surprised that Trump’s well-oiled campaign has a SEO scam-artist (or SEO genius – you be the judge) on the payroll. I am also not surprised that Google has not really nailed Parscale yet.

Seems to me if Google wants to really drive home that these kind of link schemes are not “good for users”, they would make a very public example of this. But then there’s this: