Google Guys’ Alma Mater Newspaper Spamming
The Stanford Daily, student newspaper of the school where Sergey Brin and Larry Page built Google as a research project, has been caught by Blake Ross spamming search engines. Although the offending spam articles, resembling the ones in the WordPress and Syndic8 scandals, have been removed, there are just under 4,000 revealed link farm / spam blogs linking back to the daily as part of their relationship with whatever spammers paid them for this. Read Blake’s post for the details.
Unlike Matt Mullenweg or Jeff Barr, this is not about a person or small group hoping to monetize a website. The Stanford Daily is a respected publication at a respected educational insitution. I know very well the troubles student newspapers have in making money; I also know how important it is that the media conduct itself with dignity, at the the expense of financial gain. These actions (presumably on the part of the web editor and/or business manager of the student-run newspaper) have brought dishonesty and shame to this publication, and I hope that Stanford does not turn a blind eye to this transgression. Any student who believes that this is acceptable behavior does not deserve academic or any credit for his work at that paper, and I believe I would not be stretching it to say that those individuals deserve no credit for their time at Stanford at all. They clearly have learned nothing, and do not even slightly aspire to the dignity an institution like Stanford enjoys, and the integrity a news organization is supposed to possess.
I have forwarded my opinion to both the newspaper and the school President, which is reprinted in the comments below. I have far too much respect for all the honest men and women in the newspaper business to see these pretenders carry on, trying to cover up their transgressions by removing the links and remaining silent. Admit your guilt and face your punishment, and maybe you will gain a modicum of respect in your shame.
(via Google Blogoscoped)
My letter to the president of Stanford, which I cc’d to the newspaper:
Mr. President,
In addition to being a newspaper journalist, I run a news website which reports on search engines, particularly Google, which saw its birth at your fine institution. It is with deep regret that I learn that the student newspaper at your school is soiling both my profession and your universities good name by attempting to “game” Google by a process known as search spamming.
In this process, a website with a high ranking in the search engines, in this case that of the Stanford Daily, had placed on it links to gambling and diet pill websites, as well as containing fake articles that, while resembling articles written by the newspaper, actually advertise and promote the same gambling and pills. In addition, nearly 4,000 pages set up by the gambling and pill websites the newspaper is promoting, all of them spam pages, link back to the newspaper.
More information on this can be found at my own article on the subject:
http://google.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2005/05/29/google-guys-alma-mater-newspaper-spamming/
or at the original source:
http://blakeross.com/index.php?p=136
a blog by Blake Ross, creator of the Firefox browser, a product revered the world over. Despite not being an actual trained professional journalist, Mr. Ross has shown far more respect for the profession than the Stanford Daily.
The gain for the newspaper is one of either two scenarios: Either the paper is being paid for the link spam, helping promote these (possibly illegal or fraudulent) businesses, or the paper is benefiting from the increases search engine rankings that come as a result of the 4,000 spam links scattered over the World Wide Web by its partner in crime. Either way, it is a dishonest enterprise, one that deserves shame and requires action on your part.
Having worked at a student newspaper, I can say that the persons complicit in this action can be easily located on the staff page of the Stanford Daily’s website:
http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=about
The decision to include this dishonest form of fraud on a university hosted domain would have to come from either the business manager, Eric Eldon, the ad manager, Jamail Buchanan, or the web editor, who is not identified. Additionally, the decision could have come from the editor in-chief, Cynthia H. Cho. While that scenario is less likely, final responsibility for the actions of her staff lies with Ms. Cho.
For disgracing the very profession they aspire too, action on your part is required. Mr. President, it is your responsibility as the guardian of the academic credibility of your institution, to discover who is responsible for this scar upon its good name, and to censure those people. Assuming this was the decision of students, they show little regard for the professions they hope to earn credentials from your institution for. It will be your fault if these students earn degrees from Stanford saying they can perform their jobs at a high level, with honesty and integrity, when they clearly cannot. It should be a given that they deserve absolutely no academic credits for their service at the Stanford Daily, and it should be your decision whether they deserve degrees at all. Clearly, these decisions show they have learned nothing at your fine institution, and their fates should reflect that.
I hope that you consider this letter in the manner in which it is intended: To inform you of a wrongdoing being perpetrated on your campus, to alert you to the dishonesty of a small group of students, and to ensure that they do not profit from their actions. I very much hope you take the proper actions to show students, not just on your campus, but the world over, that integrity is more important than a few dollars in funding.
Thank you,
Nathan Weinberg
blognc.com
P.s. I have forwarded this correspondence to the editors of the Stanford Daily. I would hope that they show the integrity to address this issue.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | May 29, 2005
Well, what they did was add ads.
There are lots of ads all over the web. Google’s claim that no one can buy page rank is false. If you buy the number one ad at the Instapundit blog, you get some Google juice as a part of the deal. There are ads on this blog as well. Nothing wrong with that, IMHO.
What exactly is it that makes selling ads not intended for human viewing offensive? The number of the ads? The fact that they are only for the Google robot?
If so, how many would be acceptable? Or how viewable for human readers do the ads need to be to avoid the “search engine spam” criticism?
Comment by Karl-Friedrich Lenz | May 29, 2005
Actually, Karl, what offended me were the fake articles, not the link spamming. Lets say you searched in a search engine for information on diet pills. You see a high-ranking article at the Stanford Daily. Reading it, it seems amatuerish, but it keeps linking to this other website with the anchor text “diet pills”. You click the link, and are offered a chance to buy to buy the organic alternative to phentermine, or whatever crap they are spamming these days. You figure, well, it must be legit, because a newspaper wrote about it. Never knowing that it was all a scam to increase PageRank.
That is offensive. That a newspaper would do that. Can you imagine seeing a text ad for “FrEe VyAgGra” on the front page of the New York Times?
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | May 29, 2005
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Trackback by PostShow's BLOG | June 6, 2005
[…] I’m just going to shake my head in shame. The Stanford Daily was caught 10 months ago spamming the web with fake articles designed to generate Google juice. Well, they’re at it again, hosting doorway pages with useless information about topics like Forex and lots of ads and paid links for the same. They pulled the pages as soon as the story broke, but Google’s cache has it here. […]
Pingback by » Stanford Daily At It Again » InsideGoogle » part of the Blog News Channel | March 7, 2006