Wolf Harper's Journal

Showdown over Search Engine Spam
LiveJournal is kind of a sheltered garden. People on my Friends list talk mostly about personal issues. It's not that way in the rest of the Blogosphere. There's a real knock-down, drag-out over WordPress' loading up their site with doorway pages from hotnacho.com.

Why? HotNacho is good at writing pages structured to seem important to search engines (rather than being good articles). They've written hundreds of thousands of pages on high-paying subjects like "asbestos litigation". WordPress.com is a popular, important site, so HotNacho's pages get better ranked being on WordPress.com instead of some other site.

The result is, HotNacho is able to get their pages to rank high in Google, Yahoo etc. But that comes at a price -- the top 10 search results only hold 10, so for their page to rank, a presumably better page must be bumped out. Maybe a page you'd rather see!

So the debate is forged. Some accuse, One Two Three Some defend; One Two and some demur. One Meanwhile, WordPress's creator is out of the country on vacation.

My take on it? I fight spam for a living and I call it spam, or at least low-rate junk. I can't imagine what they were thinking. Perhaps they had the typical moral lapse: "I do good things, therefore I am a good person, therefore I don't do bad things, and even though part of my intuition says this is a bad thing, I'm sure somehow the math will work out that it isn't, as it always does." Right.

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