It turns out beyond being a major crazy player in the Tea Party doesn’t do it these days to get traffic. You have to manipulate the SEO too. I know, shocking, right?
Now it’s one thing, of course, to use normal meta tags. Only these aren’t meta tags. Mark Williams, writer of the “colored people letter to Lincoln” and leader in the Tea Party Express, has done the same thing you see on shady shady websites. Text hidden by Javascript or simply slapped down to size 1 font blended with the background, with clearly politically related text like “Buy Adobe CS4″, “Windows 7 Ultimate License”, and “Download Macromedia Software.” Yes, they’re sales/piratey terms, spamming up the page. BEFORE the actual content. Really. Header image, SEO bait, crazytext.
Naturally, Mark Williams has not responded to the questions about why he feels the need to do this, and why he doesn’t consider it unethical.
Edit:In the interest of fairness, I’m finding out if this was intentional, or if it was a hack. This could be someone attacking his site, him setting up an “I’m a victim of the liberals!” play, or a genuine attempt to get more traffic through deceptive keywords. But we’ll find out soon! Well, probably not, because I think the odds are a declaration of “It was an attack!” is assured, no matter what it was.
5 comments ↓
Looks to me like he was hacked. That’s not SEO; at least, it’s not SEO for him.
I agree that Mark is crazy, but this doesn’t look like his doing. If anything, I’d say he’s too stupid to understand that someone has turned his website into a linkfarm.
Dig a little deeper.
That’s exactly why I’m thinking it was intentionally placed, to simply draw traffic.
Every one of those links leads to a student pageset at washington.edu, specifically the Noble Research Lab.
While I’d though they must go through to a sales site, even once there every single link refers back to the noble.gs.washington.edu set. No sales, no harvesting, just pure spammy goodness on each page leading back to other pages within the tenure directory.
If it’s a linkfarm, I can’t find the point of it. I am looking to see if I can catch someone from the lab and see if they’re aware of those pages within, of course. If they’re not, it could easily be a hack, albeit a strange one.
But for now, it’s just so much FUN to make unresearched and possibly baseless accusations toward Mark Williams based on what may or may not be anything remotely to do with him. It does, however, tie in well to the fact he’s also in charge of the Tea Party Advertising network, and I suspect he’s just using all that keyword spam to bring people in and show how good the traffic for the Tea Party sites is, and how effective ads are with them.
But I really have emailed him, because I really do want to know just what’s going on, and to see if he has a reaction to take it down, it was a hack, etc.
Well, if that is keyword spamming, he’s doing it wrong.
Keyword spamming does not involve encasing every keyword and linking it to a keyword-farm on another domain.
In fact, by having so many links on his pages, he is diluting the pagerank juice which would otherwise be going to his other content.
If you follow Matt Cutts, you’ll know that this sort of activity is not only against Google’s policies, but the pagerank algorithm will automatically penalize his site for doing it.
There’s no win here. He’s clearly a victim. The .edu domain is also a victim.
Look at the parent directory of the .edu page:
http://noble.gs.washington.edu/excursions/2006/
There’s the tenure.php which spews up random self-linking keyword-spam link-farm crap, but try to access it without an ?id= query string and it’ll give you a false 404 error.
Being on an .edu domain does not give any credit to it. From my experience, .edu domains are some of the most compromised with link-spam.
To be fair, there’s a long list of things Mark is doing wrong. But it is quite possible he did something leading to his site getting hit. .edu definitely doesn’t mean secure, at least outside of the main school pages, but I do wonder just what the self-linking farm is for.
He may well see his site g-lined soon, if it hasn’t already been.
And yet, I still wouldn’t be surprised if he did it intentionally, even as a “Look, I’m a victim!” ploy. I think it’s time to see if the wayback machine has anything relevant.
Again, I don’t think so.
He’s a victim of what? The chinese and russian spam-gangs? I’ve seen a lot of attacks like this; the only thing he did to provoke it is having a high pagerank site, making him a very attractive target.
Just be careful that you don’t sink to their levels, making childish accusations based on no evidence and stirring up a shitstorm about it – because if he is innocent, you’ll just look silly, like they do every day. His ideology already discredits him enough for me to ignore him, and you’re not going to convince some idiot that he’s evil based on this keyword spam incident.
If I were you, just sit back and wait for Google to blacklist him, removing him from our search results – hopefully forever.
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