Not to turn my blog into a chronicle of search engine spammers, but I’m pleased to discover that the Stanford Daily has removed all of its link farms! Many thanks to the staff over there for doing the right thing even before they’ve had a chance to secure a new advertising method. Will the other college newspapers follow its lead?

Praneet Kandula points out that it’s a party: nearly every college newspaper out there is in the business of buying and selling search results. The culprit behind all of these faux college advertising networks appears to be the New Digital Group.

I’m currently in an e-mail discussion with staff members from two of the offending newspapers about their advertising practices. They’ve asked that I not post our conversation, and I will respect that provided they fix their sites. I will say that I’m seriously dismayed by the defense being mounted, which is a combination of:

• This is the essence of advertising—that people with more money can make their services more prominent through media.

  Yes. But these advertisers only care about your media to the extent that it lets them get more prominent placement in search results, and at reputable search engines, my search results are not for sale and therefore not a legitimate advertising medium.

• It may not be fair that large companies can buy superbowl ads while mom-and-pop shops can’t, but that’s the free market we have as defined our laws.

  That’s a straw man. The superbowl is a legitimate place in which to advertise. Search results are not.

• It’s critical to keep independent student journalism alive in this day and age.

  Agreed. The ends don’t justify the means.

• It’s difficult to keep independent student journalism alive in this day and age.

  Agreed. The ends don’t justify the means.

• Google and other search engines seek to make money and don’t necessarily act in the public good. They could be selling search results, too.

  What search engines may or may not be doing is not an ethical defense of your demonstrably unethical behavior. The burden is on you to prove wrongdoing, not cast vague shadows. In any case, the booty seized when you win the search war is far more valuable than the money you rake in from companies trying to buy their way to the top, as Google has proven. And the war is won on relevancy.

• Even if “online MBA program” search results are hijacked by scam companies, people can search for “online MBA program scams” to find the scam information.

  So people should change their searching habits to accomodate scam artists? What if I’m not even aware of the potential for scams and don’t think to search for that? And what do I do once the scam artists hijack “online MBA program scams”? It’s already happening with diet pills dangerous. What do I do now, search for “Be honest: are diet pills dangerous?”

Meanwhile, kids, if you’re in the market for a timeshare, The Daily Princetonian would like to sell you one. See, it’s right at the bottom: “Rentals, Timeshare Resales, Sell Timeshare, Rent Timeshare, Timeshare For Sale, Timeshare”. (None of the bottom links are even delineated as advertisements.)

I knew the Stanford/Cal rivalry was heated, but I didn’t realize it went this deep. The Daily Californian, Berkeley’s newspaper, has a link farm of its own (scroll to the bottom). It’s quite not as bad as the Daily’s because no cloaking or spam articles are being employed.

This page has a good explanation of what constitutes a link farm. In short, you’ve grown a link farm when you include a whole bunch of links on your page that are unlikely to be of interest to your audience and exist only to offer another “vote” for each page that could boost it in the search engine rankings. So for example, most Berkeley students probably don’t care about renting a car in Brisbane, Australia (”car rental brisbane), booking hotels in Italy (”Hotels Italy”), leasing a timeshare (”Timeshare Resales”), or embarking on an African safari (”African Safari”). But just in case they do, all that information is conveniently linked at the bottom. Link farms are generally identified not only by their irrelevance to the actual page content but by the use of short keyword phrases that are intended to guess what people might search for later on. In other words, the hope is that when people search for “car rental brisbane,” the first result will be the site that the Daily Cal endorses.

The reason you should care is because many of the companies who engage in search engine spam are, lo and behold, the same companies who aren’t morally repelled by the idea of spamming your inbox or your blog. And sites like The Daily and The Daily Californian are effectively helping to fund them. Not by much, but they are contributing. These kinds of practices also lead to a serious reduction in the quality of search results since they undermine the democratic underpinnings of PageRank. This means that instead of spending all of its time on, you know, procuring and immortalizing all the world’s information, or defeating the language barrier, Google has to spend an inordinate amount of time fighting this crap that our own universities are encouraging.