Big Media Or Big Seo Spammers?
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. (Heres the link Warning: Not Safe for Work) Heres 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 articles content. There is a much bigger story here. Its all in whats going on with archive duplication and the nations 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 SEOd 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 theres 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 Marketss technology are isomorphic, from a search companys 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 Googles back pages, or banished altogether. One has to wonder just how long this type of abuse will be tolerated, simply because its being practiced by a recognized media outlet.
I couldnt agree more. Nor could I help but notice the irony, considering how quick the mainstream media is to lament the traffic-stealer that is Google. It wouldnt surprise me if more newspapers adopted these kind of strategies.
Source: gigaom.com