Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets - NYTimes.com (via gladstein)
Bob, beyond buying links…. which sorry is biz as usual… we were doing it before Google even came on the scene… and who are Google to say don’t buy advertising. Kinda’ seems hypocritical from a company that literally only survives because of the activity. What are they really saying?
Don’t buy ads from our competitors or we’ll punish you.
For me the fact that many of the links were from irrelevant pages… puts all the blame squarely on them… because even if they didn’t catch paid… they should be able to easily determine irrelevant IBLs. This was a hand job… they can’t fix this…. just like they can’t fix attribution either. After their big announcement Dave and I found lots of instances where attribution (distinguishing ownership and removing scraped results) was not even close. In fact very well known SEO blogs were being outranked by nobodies sitting on top of a mountain of spam and scraped/aggregated content.
(via terryvanhorne)
