Matt Cutts: Industry Leaders Are Incapable Of Performing Editorial Discretion

For those of you who have missed the stories behind Google making Donna Fontenot jump through hoops and taking her prisoner of war, where’s a brief rundown. At one time Donna accepted money for advertising (fully disclaimed as such), and some forms of those adverts involved the client getting a link back. Google pimp slapped Donna back in October. She went through and changed everything she could find that might be the problem, and filed a reinclusion request back in December. As of yesterday

Read more

Hey, Donna… Your Lips Tired Yet From Puckering That Long?

Donna, I admire you. You sure do have some stamina, the way you’ve had them Louisiana lips of yours puckered so firmly to Google’s evil ass this long.

I dumped text link ads. I nofollowed paid links. I javascripted links that might be mistaken for paid links. I canceled my sponsored review accounts. I switched to a different method of monetization (Scratchback) that serves Google-friendly, nofollowed links. (And btw, Google, that put a huge dent in my revenue, just so you know). – Donna Fontenot of SEO-Scoop.com

Read more

Maybe The Wired Guys AREN’T The Tech Geek Gods We All Thought They Were

Yesterday, Smackdown noted that Wired put a robots.txt in place in response to spammers trying to use their wiki for spamalicious links. Oddly enough, that robots.txt also blocked everyone and everything, including Google and all the rest of the search engines, from the site. (Caveat: When I say “blocked everyone”, I’m referring to everyone who bothers to adhere to robots.txt).

Read more

Wired Says Screw It To All Search Engines After SEL Inspired Spam Attack, Disallows EVERYTHING With Robots.txt

So, it looks like after the mishap this past Friday, where SEL accidentally exposed the Wired How-To wiki to spammers, Wired has instituted their new spam deterrent measures. They seem to have gone just a tad bit overboard, if you ask me.

Read more