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05.22.08 SEO Strategy Through Fake News  By
Philipp Lenssen Over at Search Engine Land's Sphinn, people are discussing a search engine optimization tactic which tries to assemble backlink juice by posting a fake news article. Jonathan Crossfield wraps it up: "Online marketer Lyndon Antcliff recently helped a client achieve over 1500 inbound links in under a week with a story designed to grab attention." The article, titled "13 Year Old Steals Dad's Credit Card to Buy Hookers," was and still is hosted at the authoritative looking domain Money.co.uk, which is a financial advisor and Lyndon's client, apparently. The hoax news explains that "Ralph Hardy, a 13 year old from Newark, Texas confessed to ordering an extra credit card from his father's existing credit card company," taking his friends on a $30,000 spending spree "culminating in playing 'Halo' on an Xbox with a couple of hookers in a Texas motel." Jonathan continues to explain that the page received 2,452 votes at social news site Digg.com (it's currently at 2,489 diggs, and not marked as incorrect, attracting comments like "Ballsy kid."). Then, mainstream news made it into the mix. The hoax item was covered in Australia News.com.au, The Daily Telegraph, Fox News and many others, Jonathan says, and even reached the print version of UK's Sun newspaper.
Google's Matt Cutts makes a statement Google's anti webspam worker Matt Cutts at Sphinn gets involved too, making a statement in regards to the question "Where does [Cutts] and search engines stand on something like this?". Matt argues, "My quick take is that Google's webmaster guidelines allow for [as in "cover"] cases such as this," citing the bit at the guidelines which reads "Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it." Matt Cutts says, "There's not much more deceptive or misleading than a fake story without any disclosure that the story is hoax." I wonder if it should be any of Google's business when a page games humans - and whether it should only be of their concern when a page games Google. Otherwise, Google risks becoming an editor for the web, additional to their existing strong traffic channeling power. In that role, they would have to decide what is correct reporting and what is not. In that role, Google would need to answer a lot of new questions, and they may not always be the most qualified to answer them. For instance; should popular sites like The Onion, which claim to be "America's Finest News Source," be judged as deception or satire? What if search engine abusers simply disclaim their own hoax news as satire somewhere on the page? And what happens to news sources which some people would consider so badly researched or sensationalist that one may argue it borders on a hoax? What if the hoax has a bit of truth in it? Is hoaxing allowed on April 1st? Are April 1st articles allowed to reside on the server after the day, without disclosure? What about sites publishing fiction? Once before, Matt Cutts argued that he thinks "of 'linkbait' as something interesting enough to catch people's attention, and that doesn't have to be a bad thing. There are a lot of ways to do that, including putting in sweat-of-the-brow work to generate data or insights, or it can be as simple as being creative. You can also say something controversial to generate discussion". (That last tactic, he argued, "gets tired if you overuse it, though".) Continue reading this article. About the Author: Philipp Lenssen from Germany, author of 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google, shares his views & news on the search industry in the daily Google Blogoscoped. |
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