Greywolf does a greate review of the recently awarded Google patent.

I have made a few, which have not sold many, & still might not be good at it yet ;) but I will eventually pick up graphics a bit better and am a huge fan of irony.

Recently WordPress got caught content spamming by using a hidden div. Their motto is "Code is Poetry," and that it is.

Anywho, here is the image from my first SEO related T Shirt, which you can buy from SEO Shop (with what the price is set at I do not think that I profit from sales, but if I do that would go to charity.)

I have done more stupid things than most people who are still alive, so I am not going to pretend that I am better than anyone. Admitidly this whole incident is a bad deal for WordPress, but I am amazed - and perhaps even perplexed - at the lengths some people will go to in order to describe their actions or the actions of their friends as legitimate.

From J Luster's blog

Spam involves other, involuntary, carriers. No comment boxes were contaminated, no mailboxes, no Usenet forums, and certainly no one spent a single byte of extra bandwidth (with the exception of the links from Wordpress.Org) on it. It's not spam.

The interesting thing there is he is trying to describe spam as it relates to email or social software. WHICH IS THE SAME MARKETING SPIN SEARCH ENGINES USE TO DESCRIBE THEIR FAULTS WITH THEIR ALGORITHMS.

It is fine to say there is no such thing as search engine spam. The truth is search algorithms are not - and will never be - perfect.

Many a webmaster has been told that he is a hunk of crap for doing far less than what WordPress did. If what they did was not search engine spam then perhaps WordPress does not believe in search engine spam. If that were the case, then why did they sign up / support NoFollow?

Again the hidden story that nobody is giving any coverage to is that up until yesterday Google was the company who was funding that lousy content, and it is their own business model and complete lack of quality control that caused that search engine spam.

To say AdSense was on the whole funding quality content would be Orwellian.

Why isn't anyone giving Google crap about this? What we saw with WordPress was just the tip of the iceberg.

SEOs Are Scum:
For a long time many bloggers have stated that SEOs are scum, as said best by Anil Dash.

I've always had a pretty low opinion of the Search Engine Optimization industry. Though there are of course legitimate experts in the field, it seems chock full of people who are barely above spammers, and they taint the image of the whole group.

Content Spam:
Blog comment spam is one common type that bloggers know all too well, but creating tons of rubbish content is another type of spam.

HotNacho hires writers to write low quality articles for $3 each. The articles, being of low quality, have little value by themselves. However, if you can get an authoritative site to host the articles you can make a ton of money from advertising.

Affordable Quality Hosting:
WordPress - an open sourced blog software make which is part of the anti spam brigade - hosted over 100,000 HotNacho spam pages, linking to them from the home page using a negative div.

Hmm... manipulating search results for personal gain by posting complete crap to a hidden section on your site.

What makes that action more ethical / better than actions of the average SEO?

Is this the type of openness we should expect from open source software? Where is the transparency? hehehe.

Google Funds Web Pollution, Again:
Google is funding that web pollution with their AdSense program.

If the stuff is bad enough that it needs kicked out of Google's index then how were they displaying ads on over 100,000 pages on that site without noticing the problem. Why are the ads still there?

I think this is the real story that everyone is missing. Google's AdSense quality control is a complete joke.

Advertisers and content publishers should be disappointed in Google's lousy policing of their AdSense program. Much web pollution would not exist if Google did not lucratively fund it.

The WordPress moto has never been more true:
Code is poetry!!!

The Go Network:
is to Go from Google to Overture

Black Hat:
PPC Techniques. First time I have seen an article about Black Hat PPC. Good stuff Mikkel.

I do understand the reasons as they want to know what pages they send users to but why on earth does Google have to reset my hard earned high CTR if all I change is an added tracking parameter? In any case, I am not going to pay for it!

The simple solution is to set-up some kind of layer between you and them so the URL you use is actually not the one that shows the content.

Content, Content, Content:
A couple newerish (is that a word) products aim to help people grab or create loads of content. I have yet to use any of these.

• Article Equalizer - pulls articles from various content sources. I think he also created traffic equalizer, rss equalizer, and many other equalizer products. Wonder if he will eventually release the ultimate equalier suite. ;)

• AdSense Gold - evidently comes with thousands of articles
• ArticleBot - rewrites articles using grammar rules, allows you to dynamically reorganize SERPs, can mix up content and create many readable articles from a given seed set
• Yahoo! Creative Commons search - seach for content that can be freely used
• some people translate and then untranslate content.
• how not to steal content 101

LinkExplore:
reviewed

Yahoo! have launched their social network / blog program Yahoo! 360.

NickW gave me an invite and my blog is here. Yippie. If you want an invite PM Nick on ThreadWatch or shoot me an email.