I got contacted by a journalist (who I happen to be a regular reader of) yesterday. He was following up on the investigation I did into CNN comment spam, and some similar stories. I thought I'd post an answer to one of his questions:
What are these people -- if not the companies themselves -- doing to manipulate search rankings, and what can bloggers and Google do to fix things?
The SEO tactic which poses a danger to bloggers is perhaps most simply put
as "reverse search engine optimization". Google has a set of filters which
detect and punish pages that use certain outdated SEO tactics. In the case
of the CNN spams, we observe a tactic called keyword stuffing. Put simply,
keyword stuffing is flooding a page with repeated search terms, (i.e. CNN
CNN CNN CNN CNN CNN CNN). At one time, this tactic actually worked; but now google has a set of filters whicheasily detect this practice, and in
response, either punish, or remove the page from the index. In the case of
spams that target posts that are discussing a company, the possible damage
of stuffed keywords is greatly intensified. But to understand that, you must
first understand how google assigns weight to the content in the page. For
convenience, we'll use the page of mine that was attacked "CNN: Television's
Great Orifice"
