Clicksharp Marketing

Lately I’m on the lookout for bigger and better case studies — when digital marketing at a Fortune 500 company goes horribly wrong. (Though I might let in a few under the bar, if the foible is of a certain caliber.)

So around this time last week, it became apparent that the Baltimore Sun was playing around with page titles, trying to make the same page look like multiple pages in order to increase search engine exposure and, potentially, artificially inflate advertising inventory. And over at Search Engine Journal, Loren Baker was all over it like Tommie Harris on a scrawny quarterback:

You see, even though Hollywood has taught us that man can triumph over machine, in the case of search engines you’ve got a unique paradox — the machines themselves are created, maintained, and continually improved by some of the brightest technological minds on the planet.

But search engines are smart enough to see that the rest of the page showed little or no changes, and using whatever review process they use (likely some combination of automatic flagging and followup manual review), they slapped back by docking the Baltimore Sun in its Google News rankings.

All because someone thought they could pull a fast one. And if I was a betting man, I’d say there’s a good chance their domain will linger on a “questionable” list for some time.

Was it worth it?

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 @ 6:42 pm on the category SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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