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Busted: Privila Gets Canned For Gaming Google

Crafty companies continue to find new ways to game the engines when it comes to rankings and ads. In the case of Privila, the Chicago-based firm designed Web sites that were able to snag relatively high organic rankings by populating them with keyword-stuffed "articles" alongside text and graphical ads.

In addition to drafting unpaid "interns" to write these articles, Privila typically preyed on sites whose original owners had forgotten to renew the registration--capitalizing on the existing domain's authority and possible PageRank. And according to John Leyden, the company promoted its sites like wallofdove.com and soccerlove.com through link exchange spam.

But Privila got the smackdown, as Google dropped all 329 of the sites from its listings, following an exposé written by researchers at Cambridge University's computer lab. Steven Murdoch, a Cambridge computer security researcher discovered the sites via a link invitation spam email he'd received, and proceeded to highlight them in the University's 'Light Blue Touchpaper' blog. Guess they should have been more careful about who they advertised their scam sites to.

Read the whole story at The Register »

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