Mel
10-08-2001, 02:30/02:30AM
Hi All:
After spending nearly an hour at "the other forum" reading the very long saga of pagejacking which concluded with discovering that Bruce Clay had several hundred machine generated pages online with content taken from other high ranking sites, I must say I am disheartened at some of the goings on of our fellow SEOs.
Bruce, to his credit, immediately apologized (sort of) and said that it was just a simple programming error - he had intended that the content be taken from his site and the pages generated according the the format of the high ranking pages.
Well that still seems a bit spammy to me, and the fact that he had simultaneously posted a disclaimer page stating that the copyrights of these very well known pages did indeed belong to the authors and then named them all, seems to me contrary to a simple programming error.
As SEO becomes a more recognized and profitable industry there will be more and more cheats attracted to the "easy money" they can make by playing outside the rules
But what are the rules? My feeling is that the search engines do not exist just to make money, but to serve the internet community by providing everyone with a means to find information in this quagmire known as the Web. If they are not more or less accurate they are useless.
If we can accept Bruces argument that it is his Duty to his customers to try and see just what he can get away with then where do we stop? Is it a war between the SEOs and the Search Engines or is it a form of mutual co-operation?
After spending nearly an hour at "the other forum" reading the very long saga of pagejacking which concluded with discovering that Bruce Clay had several hundred machine generated pages online with content taken from other high ranking sites, I must say I am disheartened at some of the goings on of our fellow SEOs.
Bruce, to his credit, immediately apologized (sort of) and said that it was just a simple programming error - he had intended that the content be taken from his site and the pages generated according the the format of the high ranking pages.
Well that still seems a bit spammy to me, and the fact that he had simultaneously posted a disclaimer page stating that the copyrights of these very well known pages did indeed belong to the authors and then named them all, seems to me contrary to a simple programming error.
As SEO becomes a more recognized and profitable industry there will be more and more cheats attracted to the "easy money" they can make by playing outside the rules
But what are the rules? My feeling is that the search engines do not exist just to make money, but to serve the internet community by providing everyone with a means to find information in this quagmire known as the Web. If they are not more or less accurate they are useless.
If we can accept Bruces argument that it is his Duty to his customers to try and see just what he can get away with then where do we stop? Is it a war between the SEOs and the Search Engines or is it a form of mutual co-operation?