Even CNN Keyword Stuff and "Blog Spam"

This is one of the most interesting reads I have found lately and it uncovers the terrible things that CNN!!!! have been doing with google in mind.

Have a read ...

http://nicklewis.smartcampaigns.com/node/367


Dave

interesting... i figured CNN would rank high enough anyway ... why would they waste their time spamming?

It is hard to tell, however I can only think it is more for "reputation" than anything else.
Although even if they rank high, it doesnt mean that people will use them for news.

I do not search for a news story, i head straight to cnn or bbc. However, many americans may head straight to Fox News for their fix of info so even though cnn may rank well, they would never be searched for. So by spamming blogs it gets more people to click through, which increases their readership and adverts displayed etc etc etc

Dave

You would think that sites like CNN won't be doing these things but I guess the ranking game has become a war and as they say all is fair in war and in that other overused overhyped thing.

Memonics

interesting read
thanks for the link

I wouldn't jump to any concusions. CNN is an authority site with about 10Mil backlinks in Y. They have no problems ranking for MANY keywords and phrases and obtaining a dozen of new backlinks (or even 50000) is not going to make much difference to them. Just because something appeared on 10 websites does not mean anything and can be easily accomplished by one person not related to CNN at all.

true. Should note that I didnt do any of this ;)
I just linked to the article so best to post over on his site maybe?

Although as I said, many terms / good ranks etc may exist, but that doesnt mean people will search for them (as news stories etc). Perhaps they were trying to infect peoples minds on a different level and get them to go to specific areas of cnn etc.... blah blah / viral marketing blah blah

Dave

On the contrary I believe people do search for news stories. I know because we offer RSS news feeds on our website. And here is an example. Just a few days ago we had about 500 clicks from googledotca for "caroline marcil". People who searched for that term did not know about our website but they heard about the story, searched for it and found us (note that we are not news portal at all). Same applies to other news websites. Many people know about CNN and simply go there to read news while others search for stories and CNN has no problem ranking in top 5 on any SE for majority of those searches. That is why i don't see why would they need to SPAM anybody

I dont think CNN would need to do this. They gain more backlinks every hour by simply posting articles. I cant even count the amount of times they have been referenced by large authority PR sites like Slashdot, Fark, etc.

This sounds like some rogue SEO trying to be "innovative" after reading the Google patent where it states that by gaining a large amount of unrelated backlinks in a short period of time can get you sandboxed. By keyword stuffing I'm guessing he's trying to boot Cnn.com from "CNN" keyword searches.

Ah well, just thought you would all be interested.

Dave

Fox is kicking their rear end in the ratings. Just like they blogger speculated, the goal with this was to create a buzz. I spotted four psychological selling hooks in the spam message ... all designed to get someone to watch CNN PrimeTime even just once.

Seriously, you gotta appreciate the ingenuity of it.

It wasn't pagerank or search engine positioning that they were after. It was the buzz they could get from the blogs themselves.



No, the tactic wasn't designed to hurt cnn.com ... it was designed to hurt the rankings of the negative posts themselves. They were trying to pick off posts from google by getting the posts slapped with a keyword stuffing penalty.

All i can do is laugh cause why would CNN need to do this come on now....

I agree with who says that is unsefull for CNN, so maybe is someone not related at all with them...spam doesn't help (often) and doesn't hurt...