I’m just going to shake my head in shame. The Stanford Daily was caught 10 months ago spamming the web with fake articles designed to generate Google juice.
Well, they’re at it again, hosting doorway pages with useless information about topics like Forex and lots of ads and paid links for the same. They pulled the pages as soon as the story broke, but Google’s cache has it here.
It looks like the so-called journalists at Google founders Larry and Sergey’s old university know a thing or two about search spamming, and have successfully managed to rank highly for some keywords while getting paid to do so. They currently rank fourth for “Forex“. GoogleGuy says he’s on the case.
It amazes me that after getting caught only ten months ago and supposedly apologizing for it, they went right back and did it again. They removed the links back then and were praised for acting quickly, when all they were doing was playing some stupid game with the internet. Google, please cancel their AdSense account (AdSense client id: pub-1320721762140362) and think about banning them from the index altogether. I wouldn’t trust them anymore.
Also, the Daily’s advertising manager is Chris Rudiger, their business manager is Brendan Marten and the editor in chief is Camille Ricketts. I wouldn’t be so lawsuit baiting as to suggest that future employers shouldn’t hire them, but I will say that I would think twice about hiring someone so willing to lie in public, engage in black hat SEO, deal with dishonest marketing firms, use dishonest marketing practices and risk a website’s future by engaging in practices that could get the site banned from Google. I wouldn’t hire them, but I’d never say specifically that no one else should.
Did you know the number two result for “Stanford Daily” refers to the last link scam? That’s a great job of managing reputations.
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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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