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HuffPo Pulls Off 'SEO Whoring'

  • Slate, Tuesday, February 8, 2011 4:43 PM
How did Arianna Huffington build up HuffPo for a big payday of $315 million? "There is no celebrity slide show beneath her tastes and no SEO trick she won't employ if it will get her traffic," writes Slate's Jack Shafer. "HuffPo pulled off one of the greatest acts of SEO whoring in the history of the Web yesterday," he adds, explaining how a HuffPo post ran with the question "What time does the Super Bowl start" to rank first in Google returns.

"I'm not judging Huffington here as much as I'm describing her," he explains. "Some of her innovations may make me squirm but -- to paraphrase Samuel Johnson -- nobody but a blockhead ever wrote a story that he didn't want people to read."

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