How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google

I don't think we should accept that same behavior should have different implications depending on who is doing it.

The fact that you're the Marketing Director at Expedia makes it even worse (if you are lying).

EDIT: Okay, I just did some research and this person's company is extremely fishy but I would still like to see some evidence.

I'll draw my conclusion among other things from statements such as:

Sure, there are some skeletons in SEO-closets, but thats the same for every single major site that has existed for a decade or longer, bar none.

Not only do you attempt to drag the whole web business through the mud after being caught with your pants down, you also personally insult people who have been opposed to these kinds of practices and still ran major sites for a long time.

If I were you, I'd keep quiet and seek a position somewhere unrelated to SEO and not taint Expedia's reputation even more by invoking the "everyone else is doing it" defense, which most people in the web business know is just plain wrong.

Also, I'd now expect people to scrutinize Wikipedia more, looking for spammy Expedia links. Thanks for the hint.

I did notice that they give the blogger discretion on the link placement and anchor text so its somewhat natural...although still clearly link spam worth penalizing!

Aren't all search engines susceptible to the same practices? How would you like to see them fixed?

(The Japanese govt pages have high page quality, and link directly to these candidate domains, thus giving these candidate pages high link quality status in google's eyes. The candidate pages become info-spam-blog pages that peddle things like cosmetics and link to the mother payload pages to impose so rank.)

I'm happy this Rap Genius incident happened because it's driven some attention to how Google's business actually operates, how poor their algorithms actually are, how arbitrary their search engine actually is, how poor their customer service practices are, and many other similar ideas.

Granted, these are monumentally hard problems to solve and Google still does it better than anybody else, but it's good that some attention is directed here because there are numerous problems with how ranking in Google currently works.

Not (entirely) true. Here's a 'small business' sans any big-brand protection that is obviously spamming the heck out of electrician/plumber niches and has been succeeding for years. If you're near one of the relevant areas and Google "[area] plumber" you'll see a few of their sites on page 1. Not one or two. Maybe five. My fiancee got an electrician in from one of those sites and he was so clueless he claimed that his people were building an oven element (rather than buying it for $20 and just installing it.)

http://find-sa.co.za/directory/category/a1_plumbing_services...

See two pages with the same layout, and if you click around you'll see they're barely trying to hide it.

http://find-sa.co.za/directory/category/a1_plumbing_services...

This is 90's stuff. Google's being gamed badly by the most unsophisticated techniques. The guys who actually work in those areas and provide relevant services must be going crazy.

Observations: 1. As a product search experience, that is still horribly broken.

2. It is still good for the web, incentivizing you to create quality content.

This is nothing compared to what RapGenius did. This is a low quality, but legit link building tactic.

The author claims the articles are poor quality, but they aren't. The only red flag is commercial keywords as anchor text, which Penguin today does a good job of discounting.

Penguin is also discounting many of these links that have commercial keywords as anchor text. (I wonder if these links even help them.)

That'd really stick it to sites like Cracked.

All marketing is a Ploy if you really think about it, and businesses for intents and purposes is just an investment vehicle and marketing is how your turn over that investment.

Heck news media a ploy for corporations.

Someone has to Pay the Bills and Keep The Lights On

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I have to wonder though if these specific posts were linkbuilding posts, because of the location of the Authors. (i.e. Tampa - where copypress is, and blueglass was.)

Are these not essentially the same thing? I understand that in the SEO business this has all been carefully nuanced, but in the general world the idea behind pagerank was that it made the web a democracy of sorts[1], where authentic, honest links organically demonstrate resources that users find most useful. That is the antithesis of "whoever can pay the most to have the most pages full of rote text created with paid links tops".

[1] - I should mention that organic linking is virtually dead, so perhaps it really doesn't matter. Blogs are, by and large, dead (and the few that persist engage in a circle-link pattern that is intended to essentially keep it in the family), and they (and personal websites) accounted for the overwhelming majority of legitimately organic links. Outside of that source of links, sites like Reddit and even probably HN are overwhelmingly gamed and manipulated, because the majority of users simply don't "vote" at all, leaving the manipulators an easy course to ply.

The web has been bought and paid for for several years now.

"A little about me... I am a search marketing consultant,and I love everything about marketing and emerging technology. Growth Hacking is my strongest skillset, especially when leveraging search engines."

While I'm not sure that what you're doing is technically astroturfing, it's still equally as dishonest.

First, none of the links described in TFA match your "guidelines" to "Good offsite SEO", so even by your own admission this is not "Good offsite SEO".

Second, there is no such thing as "Good offsite SEO", since any "offsite SEO" is by definition either link farming or gaming the system. The entire point of the Penguin update (if I'm not mistaken) was to prevent quite literally all "offsite SEO" so google can rank your page according to your content, and so they can reliably weight incoming links. If an incoming link (that is not on your site!) has been SEO'd then by definition it is not an organic, quality incoming link.

Third, you state "this is legitimate link acquisition and its what all SEOs do today", which undermines the entirety of your post since link acquisition is by definition not organic, nor does it produce "quality" inbound links.

But hey, since "its what all SEOs do today" it must be kosher.

Edit: Just to address your last point (not to pile on or anything, but I feel like it's important), I'm pretty sure this is a willful conflation of two totally separate concepts. Since, you know, everyone who's ever done any sort of SEO knows that if you want to drive traffic, but not pay the penalties for link farming, you use rel="nofollow". Which Expedia/ the blogger did not do.

stackedmidgets 3 hours ago | link [dead]

You're hilariously wrong, due to your ignorance. As someone who has written thousands of black hat articles just like these, even in the same vertical as discussed in the article, except more specific (certain niche European destinations) -- well written, for what I was paid -- I can say that articles like these are paid for, and violate Google's guidelines.

There's on article that I'm particularly proud of that involved inventing all sorts of fictional romantic adventures on an island off the coast of Spain that included specific anchor text about cheap hotels for that destination. Creative? Sure! It was almost as good as a print ad, even though it's likely that few real readers actually read the thing. Violating Google's guidelines? Fuck yes!!

Google has no access to the bank accounts of these writers to verify that the links were paid for. The search quality team can't plum the e-mail accounts of everyone involved to see that said articles were commissioned to include specific anchor text.

It's quite difficult to establish objectively whether or not the writers were paid for this. However, I can say that whenever black hatters write these kinds of articles, we're instructed by the client to include certain anchor text types, and to vary the anchor text for different articles in the same campaign.

Further, botted traffic adds another ugly layer to gaming SEO. The publisher just has to 'look' legitimate. The traffic can even be semi-botted by offices full of Indians using software for that purpose.