Update: The Daily has removed all of the illegitimate advertising and hopefully set an example for the other college newspapers offenders.
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Last week, the Stanford Daily ran an article headlined “Diet pill use on the rise among teenage girls.” It concludes by quoting FTC chairman Deborah Platt Majoras: “As part of our ‘no tolerance’ policy, we are announcing six new cases against advertisers using bogus weight loss claims.”
But a funny thing will happen as you read through the article. You will notice that in the left sidebar, among a sea of other spam links, the Stanford Daily is advertising… diet pills. Diet pills that claim to offer natural and safe weight loss. Then there’s the sea of online gambling ads. This type of advertising is called linkspam, and most search engines consider it illegal.
It’s hard to vocalize how absolutely disgusted I am, and on how many levels. First of all, the dozens of links that pad the side and (especially) the bottom of every Daily article do not constitute mere “advertising,” despite what it says on the label. Nobody is expected to click on these links. The links are intended to boost each page’s ranking in search engines like Google that place a high premium on inbound links from credible sources. It’s hard to get more credible than stanford.edu. Which brings me to the second reason this is disgusting: that Stanford, of all places, is being used to game Google. (I realize Stanford itself doesn’t condone this, which makes it all the more frustrating that the Daily is leeching off its clout toward these ends.)
For years, bloggers have been writing about the importance of trustworthy and credible search engine results. And for years, others have written them off as geeky Web purists. This article is the most compelling and tragic demonstration I’ve seen of why we all need to care. It begins: “Type in the words ‘diet pills’ into the Google search engine and you’ll receive more than 800,000 hits.” Yeah. And the Stanford Daily is doing its part.
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Update: It’s even worse than I thought. The Daily is transparently hosting spam pages that resemble articles on its domain. If a marriage of academia and journalism can’t breed integrity, what will? Right under the diet pills ad on every page are two invisible “article 1” and “article 2” links that you can see when you begin selecting text. More on this technique here. I can’t imagine a dirtier or more dangerous use of this kind of spam than hosting advertisements about diet pills that look like actual Stanford newspaper articles.
Update: Here are the 3,950 links reciprocating the relationship.
