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.
May 28th, 2005 at 1:44 am
Those gambling sites on Stanford Daily have been spamming my blog, and they are still trying to spam me after I blacklisted them because I can see it on my blogs activity log!
If I ever catch a spammer, I’m gona squash him, and I wont get up!
May 28th, 2005 at 2:22 am
Remember, the more reports Google gets about these link farms, the more likely it is that Google will de-index them, or at least penalise them in some way.
May 28th, 2005 at 4:19 am
I thought it was allready established that it wasn’t the universities condoning this, but the private operators of the news websites?
May 28th, 2005 at 2:28 pm
After reading this, I got curious about The Daily Bruin. Looks like they’re running a small link farm at the bottom of their page too — I gotta love the fact that they’re advertising for “Online College Degrees” and “Baseball Betting”.
My (already low) opinion of them has dropped even farther.
May 28th, 2005 at 3:06 pm
I’m not sure if anyone noticed, but the majority of these student newspapers carry these “link farm” ads. (Either scroll to the bottom, or look on the sidebars)
http://www.michigandaily.com/ (University of Michigan)
http://www.thelantern.com/media/paper333/template/main.cfm (Ohio State University)
http://www.thecrimson.com/ (Harvard Univesity)
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/ (Princeton)
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/ (Columbia)
The list goes on…
I think it’s harder to find a university student newspaper that *doesn’t* have a link farm than to find one that does.
This makes me think perhaps the same group of advertisers approached all the student newspapers about these mini-linkfarms.
May 29th, 2005 at 5:51 am
The Cal paper appears to be done by this company: http://advertiseu.com/
The case study on the front page states is pretty clearly:
“Collegester was a social networking site consistently getting about 20 loyal visitors per day. With Advertise U!’s Search Engine Marketing, Text Link Ads & Email Marketing, Collegester received over 100,000 unique visitors in 6 weeks”
SEO tricks, link farming, and email campaigns got a site noticed.
My big beef with link farming is that it simply strives to make Google worse as a result, because those links are “votes” from the Daily Californian, even though the paper isn’t actually vouching for them or offering votes of quality by linking them.
May 29th, 2005 at 9:02 pm
Daily Cal Engaging in Minor Link Farming
Here is a post by Blake Ross on what the Daily Cal is doing:
The Daily Californian, Berkeley?s newspaper, has a link farm of its own (scroll to the bottom)…
In short, you?ve grown a link farm when you include a whole bunch of links on y…
June 1st, 2005 at 1:31 pm
“My big beef with link farming is that it simply strives to make Google worse as a result, because those links are ‘votes’ from the Daily Californian, even though the paper isnt actually vouching for them or offering votes of quality by linking them.”
Maybe your beef is actually with Google. If their PageRank model can be broken this easily, it might not be the scalable, long-term solution everyone’s looking for.
October 18th, 2006 at 11:18 pm
[…] I was browsing some Mozilla developer blogs, and an entry by Blake Ross on The Daily Stanford and its link spam caught my eye. In a nutshell, The Daily Stanford was (and still is) helping search-engine spammers game google by advertising crap such as diet pills and online degrees. They also advertise online casinos with this amusing quote, “Stanford plays slot machines and blackjack daily at established online casinos where black jack and slots are safe and rewarding.” (originally references www.allslots.com). A later post from Blake shows that the Daily Californian is playing the same game, though a bit less deceptively. […]