There’s a post up on James Kew’s blog about using hidden HTML to insert false content in web pages, a technique used to manipulate Google and other search engines into rating specific sites higher than others. This was used famously by the Wordpress folks to milk some extra money out of their highly-rated site.

The article makes the point that this kind of spam is targeted at Google, and not at actual people, since it basically only uses keywords and links. I got to thinking, and I think that Wordpress screwed up. But not for the reasons you may think.

Think about it, if the content is only meant to be viewed by search engines, what’s the point of serving it to regular surfers? The best way to achieve what you want is to detect the user agent that’s requesting a page, and serve them different content. So when the Googlebot asks you for a page, you return the page plus a little extra. Easy money, especially if your site is rated.

Is it illegal? No. Is it ethically questionable? Well, depends on how you look at it. If you’re only adding bits to your page when you send it to Google, then all that will happen is that you’ll help whatever sites you link to, so you’re not actually indexing different content, you’re indexing more content. On the other hand, you’d be altering the results returned to people who are looking for things like herbal viagra or debt consolidation. How different is that from traditional advertising, where you accept money to try and change people’s opinions? Not much.

The advantage is, of course, that I think search engine optimizers will be willing to pay for such a service, and leave subscribing sites alone with regards to comment spam, because it will be so much easier than writing spam scripts, having most of the comments blocked or removed, spending time writing scripts for specific blog software, etc.

So, with this in mind, I’d like to announce that my domains davidcurrie.org and noaxs.net are available for search-engine exclusive advertising! Drop me an email, and we’ll talk about it..

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 4th, 2005 at 11:13 am and is filed under English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.