SEO = Some Evil Operators
by Joey Manley
So cat garza called me last night in a panic. His old website, whimville.com, had somehow mysteriously returned to life — with a mangled version of an archival comic on there, and a blog post underneath it pimping Santa Barbara Chiropractic numerous times. It appears that Santa Barbara Chiropractic has hired a Search Engine Optimization specialist, and that said specialist has picked up the old expired domain name for the sake of its still-extant Google ranking. By linking to Santa Barbara Chiropractic numerous times on a website with a relatively high Google ranking, the SEO is making Santa Barbara Chiropractic’s website appear higher in Google searches for that phrase than it might otherwise. cat’s a bit irritated, as you can imagine, that his artwork is being used to promote Santa Barbara Chiropractic. He could sue, but a copyright lawsuit (for the artwork being used) would be expensive and time-consuming. Besides, it isn’t really Santa Barbara Chiropractic who is at fault, but the SEO they hired. Or, well, okay, I guess they’re at fault for hiring the SEO in the first place. But they probably have no idea what is being done in their name. They just wanted a higher Google ranking. There you go.
I’m not sure what the answer is. Maybe if somebody with a reasonably high Google ranking were to link multiple times to an irrelevant website (like, say, hell.com), using the phrase Santa Barbara Chiropractic as the link text, Santa Barbara Chiropractic might become aware of the sleazy tactics of the SEO it has hired — when they look at Google searches for that phrase and see where it ends up going. But I guess only one website with a reasonably high Google pagerank doing this wouldn’t be very effective. Would be more interesting if a lot of websites with a high Google pagerank were to do such a thing.
It’s funny to think about these kinds of retaliatory tactics, isn’t it? I would never encourage anyone to do this to Santa Barbara Chiropractic, though. Because that would be … evil.
April 7th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Ha! Domain hijackers these days! When I were a lad, they just put porn sites on stolen domains.
Everything Cat needs to defend himself against these sort of practices without necessarily going to court, can be found at Plagiarism Today.
April 8th, 2009 at 1:23 am
A little bit of server-side work can make the image displayed be different for anyone pulling it up via that page (the Referer field in the http request can be read by the server and used to decide what file to send in response)
April 8th, 2009 at 7:58 am
This is hilarious. And evil.
I love it.
I hope the people at Santa Barbara Chiropractic read this and fix their site.