By the way I just made a posting in a follow-up article to the BlueFalcon incident at WPW that some of you might want to flame me for as it questions the hat colour of people directing hundreds of thousands of links at a site... http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=20172 Nothing personal - just looking at all sides of the issues. Mike
Hi Mike, The issue here is in my opinion a white hat vs. black hat issue. Unethical SEO is not illegal, so no matter the color of your hat you can operate within the law. The issue with this "Blue Falcon" guy is that he has stolen text from other websites, that is illegal. I sort of expect a black hat to win both legs of the "nigritude ultramarine" competition, but I sure hope the organizers will not reward criminal behaviour.
Stealing someone’s content is illegal. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with pointing links, however many, at a site of your choosing. To me, if someone has links they can point somewhere they in some way shape or formed worked to get them. No one just happens across 100,000 links they can do with what they please. I don’t even have close to that many links at my disposal, but I think the ones I do have can be used at my discretion. I worked, in one way or another, for every link on every site. If I choose to point them at a site (or sites) I don’t see how that could be considered unethical or black hat in any way. When you start going down that road you eventually end up at the question; is it unethical to point even one link at a site? If it’s not, why is it unethical to point 100,000 links at a site? Stealing is stealing, I don’t think anyone would question that. Stealing one site and staling 10 sites are equally as unethical. Link pointing on the other hand…I can’t come up with any reasons why I would consider it wrong, unethical or “black hatâ€. Nothing personal - just my 2 cents
Hi guys, It's not like I didn't know I would get clobbered for this - so there's no way I would take it personally. I guess the point I am getting at is that IMO when Google decided to dramatically up the importance of IBL's they were thinking more in line of an individual somewhere taking the decision that a particular website is relavent and worth linking to. I don't think they reckoned on individuals being able to point 250,000 links at a site in short order, but that is exactly what happened with some of the "white hat" entries in the competition. Did they research/recruit all those links - no. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying they shouldn't do it - I'm saying Google is wrong for not clearing-up the mess that it created sooner and that a lot of people used techniques outside of the spirit of "content is king" because Google itself created a situation making it possible - but I wouldn't try to claim a "white hat" for mass-linking just because it's not illegal. Mike
nigritude ultramarine update--- the seo dream team nigritude ultramarine page has emerged into the google index. finally. we are currently at #20. http://www.google.com/ie?q=nigritud...window=1&safe=off&c2coff=1&btnG=Google+Search ...time to make the move to the top!
Thanks, Sorvoja and Bernard, for explanations and comments! What I still do not understand is why cloaking is considered not to be illegal. IMO it definitely should be.
Hi leo, Illegal = breaking national or international laws = you could go to jail, get a fine etc. unethical / black hat = breaking Google or other search engines guidelines.
I have been following this contest only sporadically, but can see where it is getting interesting. I am not condoning the pirating of pages, but it illuminates what manipulation can accomplish and the damage malicious manipulation can cause. The duplicate content is faster acting than I would have anticipated. Blue- Falcon made a point. Perhaps he/she can make a counter point, after all it is a contest.
I agree Steve. While I may not like page hijacking and similar tactics, we all need to be able to get a clear idea of what works and what doesn't work, regardless of the color of the hat. Without that knowledge, we have no way to fight against it. With any luck, Google is also paying attention and hopefully will figure out a way to prevent some of these things in the future (hopefully, without destroying some innocents along the way, as they've done in the past).
I'm coming back in record time. Moving up every time I look (12th). And RelaxZoolander keeping in step one ahead all the way (11th) (so far). Was really wondering what was happening to your page - what was it? Anything we can learn from it? I have no problems with snippets being taken from a page, especially if there is proper attribution, but whole pages, look and feel and everything... I have taken pains to write up the case as thoroughly as I can, so it can be a learning exercise. So have some fun translating the page Sorvoja, just stick "Nigritude Ultramarine (Time2Dine New Zealand)" next to it. Had a great Google alert and Garrett French article written. Very interesting that there are now full terms and conditions for the competition - I'm sure they have only just arrived since Wednesday? Terms include - and does not invade "another person's privacy or property rights or is otherwise illegal" , and does not "Infringe the trademark rights, copyright or other intellectual property rights of third parties". Interesting how it all develops.
It is amazing how the copy and cloak saga has been reported on. I have seen a number of articles written following Garrett French's expose. All have brought extra links into my site. While I still am feeling the bad effects of the copy and cloak, the many extra links have brought me up to the 10-20th position. Protect your company from Cache Bashing - by Brian Livingston The great Nigritude Ultramarine Massacree! reported 30 May 2004 in Hunter and Associates Texas Fascinating that the noarchive tag that I placed on my page for a short time has meant that my page has not been updated by Google for over a week. Obviously the noarchive tag is not such a great idea.
After reading these two articles, just three silly questions concerning cache bashing: 1. Why is it necessary to take a cached copy - isn't it possible to get a copy af any webpage directly from the server where the website is located? 2. Why does Google penalize the original (older!) website instead of the newer copy? 3. How can I detect whether a copy of my site has been used to hit me off my initial ranking? (I mean a solution which does not require to look at each website with better ranking than mine in full detail).
google seems to be very slow at indexing and/or assigning PRs to some sites lately. During the past weeks 2 domains of mine went online, 1 being a completely new one (never registered before), 1 being mxlabs.com which has been dropped in january if I recall correctly. I didn't interlink them on purpose... because mxlabs is just a project I run in my very sparetime and I didn't even finish the scripts behind it yet. the results as of now: - both sites werent spidered google before end of april - googlebot started showing in logs on both sites (~may 10th) - in may I read about the nigritude ultramarine challenge on webmaster-talk and added "nigritude ultramarine" to the title and footer just for fun - backlinks to mxlabs: 3 PR3, 2 PR2 plus some forum backlinks, backlinks to my directory site: 1 PR4, 3 PR2 now after the update have a guess which site does NOT show up in google: mxlabs. it could be because of the virtually missing content of course... but it should at least be indexed IMO. I had domains with just "under construction" that were spidered way faster.
I have a visitors log, and every page is date/timed so I can check the date/time against the visitors log and get the perpetrators IP address, and ban it from my site - while they can get around such a ban, it does stop the people who are copying many sites. Google seems to penalize the site with the smallest PR and backlinks, rather than the logical of the most recent. If only it looked into its cache and compared against the new copied page it had found. When new pages first get listed, they have a freshbot effect of a temporary high SERP ranking. This is often enough to be more than the existing site, and so dump it, even though the new site might settle down to a lower rank than the original site was placed. You generally know when you notice the ranking of your page plummet for a particular term, then you search on Google for say the first 100 rather than just first ten, then do a windows 'ctrl f' find, to find some unique text that is on both your Google snippet and that of the copier.
Thanks, T2DMan, for your reply. Point 3 in particular I found very interesting. I suspect there might be one candidate...