[Infowarrior] - Big Media or Big SEO Spammers?

[Richard Forno]

Big Media or Big SEO Spammers?
By Om Malik Mar. 10, 2010, 8:30pm PST 11 Comments

http://gigaom.com/2010/03/10/big-media-or-big-seo-spammers/

Updated: Faced with declining revenues and increasingly dismal  
prospects, some  mainstream media outlets are adopting questionable  
tactics, specifically dead-end web pages stuffed with outbound links  
and pay-per-click ads. A liberally funded LA startup is only too quick  
to help them. The story starts with San Francisco-based sex writer  
Violet Blue. She used to be a columnist for the San Francisco  
Chronicle, the SF daily with ever-declining circulation.

Recently, while writing a column, she did a search through the  
archives of SFGate.com, the online presence of the Chron. She  
discovered that the web site was “copying” and “distorting” her column  
archives. (Here’s the link– Warning: Not Safe for Work) Here’s how she  
describes what she saw:

The column had been stripped of all links, and divided across several  
pages. My bio was missing, as were all the comments. Freakishly, all  
the commas were gone. And the URL had been changed. The address was  
comprised of words; to my horror the URL had been keyworded to say  
“ashamed porn star” — the exact opposite of the article’s content.  
There is a much bigger story here. It’s all in what’s going on with  
archive duplication and the nation’s old media newspapers online. I  
think that the work done to the duped content is done for the purpose  
of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The idea here seems to be  
stripping content, duplicating it, make SEO’d content that is a dead  
end for readers, and drive up results with cost per click ads.
The San Francisco Chronicle, it seems, like the Los Angeles Times, is  
using the technology of an LA-based startup, Perfect Market, which has  
raised $20 million from Trinity Ventures, Rustic Canyon Ventures and  
others. Tim Oren, a venture capitalist at The Pacifica Fund, on his  
blog, Due Diligence, points out that while there’s nothing illegal  
about what the newspapers are doing, it does border on scraping.  
Typically, spammers scrape web sites, then set up shadow blogs and  
fill them with pay-per-click ads. As Oren writes:

The keyword and ad-stuffed dead end pages apparently produced by  
Perfect Markets’s technology are isomorphic, from a search company’s  
point of view, to those created by more questionable tactics  such as  
scraping. The intent is the same: to spam the index. This is the  
behavior that routinely gets questionable sites shoved to Google’s  
back pages, or banished altogether. One has to wonder just how long  
this type of abuse will be tolerated, simply because it’s being  
practiced by a recognized media outlet.
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http://gigaom.com/2010/03/10/big-media-or-big-seo-spammers/