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Comment by cfiggers | Hacker News Reader

Sure, and I agree. But also, CNET has gotten more attention because of this stunt than anything else in the last decade because people WON'T STOP TALKING ABOUT IT. So while this technique probably won't help anyone else the same way, for CNET specifically I bet this has absolutely increased their Google traffic.

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> people WON'T STOP TALKING ABOUT IT

Maybe this is anecdotal on my part, but I’ve heard nothing else about this since the initial article [1], then this — by the same author.

On the other hand, maybe it’s anecdotal on your part, and not really that many people care, besides maybe this one author.

> has absolutely increased their Google traffic

I really doubt it, unless you have something to back the claim up.

But even if so, this type of attention won’t sustain, and long term, it will likely only hurt them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37107149

Will it though? I don’t visit CNET and I still won’t. Google isn’t going to rank any of their articles higher.

It helps them by generating a ton of links and mentions which Google still uses as a signal for authority. Getting high quality links from all sorts of places around the web is worth its weight in gold. So with these new links it will help to improve their rankings for a wide variety of keywords.

This isn't the kind of attention a (allegedly) journalism outlet benefits from.

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