The Business Of Burying Internet Search Results

npr.org

17 points·soundsop··5 comments

Companies who "specialize in suppressing negative content" often spam lots of social sites with their positive pages, under the (usual) misconception that this will improve search rankings. Things like that make it interesting to be a person who identifies and nullifies spam patterns - you see who's trying to hide something. You can't ever tell anyone, because respect for users (even spammy ones) is essential, but it's interesting.

Oh go on, tell.

Wow, that article kinda missed the better half of search engine reputation management by not touching base at all on google bowling.

http://seoblackhat.com/2009/07/22/google-bowling-what-is-it-...

I haven't heard of that before. Pretty devious. Don't know much about link farms - do you have any examples of typical link farm sites?

Well, when you say link farm you can be talking about ones used for either positive or negative purposes. Link farms used to improve a sites results are always setup in a pyramid format so that any penalties that occur from the practice are not passed on to the "important" sites.

http://seoblackhat.com/2009/07/10/link-pyramids/

If you check the backlinks of many mainstream sites that compete for common keywords (anything pharmaceutical or related to gambling for example) you will see this sort of thing setup. However, as this is still a tricky practice, most sites will make sure that they are never getting more than about 1/5 of their incoming links from their pyramids.

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