Monday, May 04, 2009

Cheater Blogging - how to unethically market yourself

Go here.

What do you see? A start of an academic article on a blog that purports to belong to a translation company, right? Except that it does not make sense as only the first paragraph is included, there is a totally unrelated photo, and no author name.

This is because the person owning the URL is plagiarising articles from other legitimate websites (including Accurapid) to bring in traffic to his/her website at no great effort for themselves. And the more they put, the higher the probability that people like me, who keep an RSS and a Google Alert for publications in my industry field, will be directed to this website.

They are going to be in great trouble if I find any of my academic writing on there!

1 comment:

Dan said...

This site had me intrigued. It just didn't make sense for them to have these extracts relating to translation and then not actually be in the business of offering translating services. That blog did not appear to have any purpose at all. At least not on the surface.

Next place to look is under the hood.The source code revealed a clue. Hidden within the code were links to a site marketing enlargement tools for certain appendages.

Hmmm...why have them there if nobody can actually see and click on them?

It's been a while since I was an active webmaster working for the big boyz in the world, so it took a little longer than usual for the light to come on: the more links there are back to your website, the higher your page will rank in search engines.

According to Google's advice to webmasters, page ranking can be cranked up "by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages". I guess that a site selling devices to extend certain anatomical appendages would be ranked low by Google, and so a site purportedly being about a respectable profession like translator's would count as being "high quality" - naturally! Hey presto! lots of quality pages linking back to the lower quality site.

So, now we know what is going on :)