Comments on: Links, Issues not attacks

By: Iantrepreneur

Iantrepreneur — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 01:06:23 +0000

agreed! well put I too do not think these viral activities work

By: Louis Gray

Louis Gray — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 07:31:12 +0000

Earl, I see it as a loophole not yet discovered by Technorati. Technorati in the past has made efforts to remove “spam blogs” that offer no content at all, but I think the issue of removing “spam links” from otherwise legitimate blogs will be much harder. The note you said above about how you feel in your gut is the best indicator to me if it’s really a gray area.

Back “in the old days” of the Web of 1998-99 timeframe, I worked for a company that had a lot of the early SEO technology, but no good business model. We were among the pioneers of spawning multiple Web pages at multiple servers with tons of keywords to drive up positions in AltaVista, Excite, and Infoseek, and that all worked for a while before the search engines got wise. What we were doing then was seen as approved behavior, but when they changed their algorithms, traffic could be cut in half. I think this viral tags game will be short lived. If it isn’t, then those sites that deliver statistics using it will be less respected.

By: Earl Moore

Earl Moore — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 14:43:46 +0000

Louis,
It’s a subject worthy of conversation. I see it falling into a grey area. If the system allows it, is it cheating or is the system invalid? That’s when I think it falls to a personal choice. As I said in my post, I participated, but my guts telling me it’s not for me.

As far as the Viral Link Technorati results, they now can only be resolved by Technorati. If Technorati decides to do nothing, I would have to ask if that’s not condoning them as an acceptable form of linking?

Your thoughts?

By: Louis Gray

Louis Gray — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 14:07:39 +0000

Earl, good insight here. There were a couple ways I could have addressed the issue. I led with the idea that Technorati should fix the problem, and used Kent as the most prominent example I know. There’s no question that my post was strongly worded, as I do get frustrated with stat manipulation. As said there and elsewhere, I think Kent, and others using this process, is a great guy who got involved with what I see as a bad practice.

Sometimes you can soft-shoe analysis like this, and sometimes, I feel you have to come out and say, “Hey! This is messed up!”, which is the route I took this time. I like Kent’s blog, and his comments, and I can take it when he slams me as a newbie or a pandering wannabe. It’s on me to prove that’s not the case. I like your comments saying you’d consider getting rid of the practice now, and maybe others will as well.