LA Times: SEO Spammer

If the thought of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) makes your eyes glaze over, breathe. It’s ok. It’s basically getting your site to the top of Google and how you do that.

Om Malik at Gigaom writes:

The San Francisco Chronicle, it seems, like the Los Angeles Times, is using the technology of an LA-based startup, Perfect Market, which has raised $20 million from Trinity Ventures, Rustic Canyon Ventures and others. Tim Oren, a venture capitalist at The Pacifica Fund, on his blog, Due Diligence, points out that while there’s nothing illegal about what the newspapers are doing, it does border on scraping. Typically, spammers scrape web sites, then set up shadow blogs and fill them with pay-per-click ads.

The rest of the piece explains how this is done and what this means.

Basically, the paper’s archive is being modified in hopes of getting more click throughs. Akin to writing, “naked naked porn porn” to get page views and ad revenue…like we just did.

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