Web marketter Ken McGaffin says he found an invisible link on the Financial Times’ website acting as search engine spam. He shows a screenshot of the link, invisible and then made visible by selecting it. Apparently FT responded by making the link visible.
I don’t care anymore. This is the fourth time I’ve reported on a reputable website doing something of this sort. I’m refusing to be outraged anymore. Oh, I’ll still post about it, but I’m not going to let it piss me off. Let this be the spammers problems. If you sell a link to some website and hide it, just to pass along PageRank to a website, you will get found out, and hopefully 100 or more bloggers will write about it. Then, when people search for your website, maybe they’ll see the word “dishonest” in a high ranking article about your company. And you’ll deserve it, you certainly will.
Take a look at the Google results for “Matt Mullenweg“. Number six? Why its my post about him gaming Google (and I love Matt’s software like crazy, but he still deserved to be outed). On a search for “Syndic8“, number three is Andy Baio on their trangression, and number 2 on a search for the “Stanford Daily” reveals Asa Dotzler’s post on theirs.
There are few companies with the Google juice to get around this. Thus far, every company that has been found out has very bad Google results, and that seems quite fitting.
(via Techdirt)
Links:
Ken McGaffin’s Article
Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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