OTB in the New York Times
Steve Verdon
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Thursday, October 26, 2006
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8 comments
I was reading an article (via Drudge) in the New York Times about the Google Bombing campaign that James noted a few days ago and saw that OTB got mentioned.
Still, some conservative blogs have condemned Mr. Bowers’s tactic. These include Outside the Beltway, which has called him “unscrupulous,” and Hot Air, which declared the effort “fascinatingly evil.”
About Steve Verdon
Steve has a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles and attended graduate school at The George Washington University, leaving school shortly before staring work on his dissertation when his first child was born. He works in the energy industry and prior to that worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Division of Price Index and Number Research. He joined the staff at OTB in November 2004.
Yeah, I saw that this morning in the printed copy while I was eating my Cheerios and was waiting for you guys to catch it!
The Noo Yawk Times? Well, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” I guess.
Pfui. Rev. Sensing beat me to it.
This seems to confirm the suspicions, and the fears, I have had about Google for some months.
Ok, Google built a system that ranks websites by, among other things, the number of links pointing to that website by other websites. As such, even if someone sets out to increase the number of links pointing to a specific website, it doesn’t invalidate the results anymore than the old Meta-keyword choice rank manipulation schemes.
Here we have a scheme that involves political websites, containing a lot of original content, linking to a political article containing content you would expect it to contain. It’s not gaming the system, it’s utilizing the system the way it was built to achieve a predetermined outcome.
Michael,
Right, and all the comment spammers are just the same. Thanks for clearing that up for us. Sheeesh.
Heaven forbid the Times actually put a name to the quotes. Webloggers do like their name in the papers as well as their weblog.
Sean,
Even worse than that, I expect that the HTML version didn’t have hyperlink. Getting your name in the paper is good. Getting all that extra traffic even better!
Congrats to OTB for being on the radar of someone at the Times.