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A comment on How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit. Parent comment

Re:How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did No... by leephillips on Monday February 24, 2014 @01:07PM (#7292308)
The other side of this coin is that spammers can buy pagerank by purchasing a reputable domain and then using it for spam. That, it turns out, it what happened here (according to a Google engineer who explained after I published this): http://lee-phillips.org/hitchYellowPages/
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Re:How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did No... by sharkweek on Monday February 24, 2014 @01:32PM (#7292492)
Yep - not uncommon for spammers to create powerful link networks by buying up a bunch of quality domains, and then spamming links at what they want to rank for.

It normally takes Google a few weeks/months to catch this stuff, so for super competitive terms, it's easy to make it worthwhile by ranking for something like "fast payday loans." Then when the domain gets penalized, rinse/repeating.

Someone teased Matt Cutts with this a while back:

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-payday-loan-cutts-16940.h...

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Re:How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did No... by diminoten on Monday February 24, 2014 @04:54PM (#7293665)
It consistently blows my mind how effective spamming actually is, given how much money, effort, and time spammers are willing to throw around.
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Re:How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did No... by saraid216 on Monday February 24, 2014 @05:30PM (#7293864)
It's easily one of the best illustrations of how naturally skewed our worldviews are.
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Re:How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did No... by datathis on Monday February 24, 2014 @02:34PM (#7292896)
Good post but I wish it had a date on it -- hard to know if recent or 5 years ago. Am I just not seeing the date?
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Re:How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did No... by leephillips on Monday February 24, 2014 @03:45PM (#7293320)
No, I neglected to date it. As far as I can tell from my notes it's from Jan. 20, 2012.
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Re:How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did No... by fhars on Monday February 24, 2014 @02:59PM (#7293058)
If you look at the screenshot, it looks like it is from mid-december 2011.
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