Mumbrella Bully

Mumbrella Bully - strange heading eh? In a recent post on Digital Citizens Tim Burrowes (@mumbrella) mused that he thought Laurel Papworth (@silkcharm) was trying to rank for that phrase in their ongoing, online very public spat.

Without going into the very boring, tedious, time sapping details on what the feud is about, it's a dangerous thing to do in a social media world.

Back in the late 90's I used to do a daily tech news vid that was syndicated to all the major portals at the time. It received about 50,000 views per month. Those numbers were easy back then as there was not much other video around online. Especially not Aussie content. I regularly used to lambaste, harangue, criticise & insult others whom I thought were making dumb decisions for the Aussie IT industry.

I'm older & hopefully less stupid now. I regularly unfollow people on twitter whose streams are constantly negative or whingeing all the time. I even check prospective employees attitudes via twitter. Yes I twitterstalk them. I'm not interested bringing in staff with negative attitudes or a history of whining about their current employer.

I understand more than most how quickly flame wars can start (as I've started a few). These days I save my public derision for Politicians. I'm not saying you have to be something you're not online but you may want to consider dividing your personality into different Twitter accounts if you are prone to public grumpiness. I look at it a bit like black hat SEO. I don't have any moral qualms with it. We just don't do it here because it would mean dumping our domains & IP once Google discovered what we were up too. The same could be said for Twitter. Your tweets precede you & leave an impression in people's minds. Rightly or wrongly.

 

Fairfax blackhat SEO

Is Fairfax digital doing blackhat SEO? @krigsi was looking at wedding.com.au today & I asked him to check to see what H1 formatting they had on the front page. This is what he found.

 

A Blackhat technique

I've replaced < & > with --
-- h1 -- -- a href="/" -- --span--Wedding - Wedding Supplies, Wedding Dresses, Wedding Flowers & More --/span-- --/a--

When he examined the CSS he found this
div#header #header-content h1 span { clear:both; content:""; display:block; height:0; line-height:0; overflow:hidden; visibility:hidden; }

The first think that jumped out at me was that the font size and the line size were 0. The visibility was also "hidden". Basically they are showing keyword rich text to Google & hiding it from the users. As I understand Google's terms of service, this would breach them.

The code above serves no purpose in the structure of the page. It exists purely for search bots to find. The reason this is probably hidden is that they do not want to have it as part of the design. However Google doesn't want to see it either if it's not there for the users.

In 2007 Google booted BMW Germany & Ricoh Germany for employing a cloaking technique that showed design heavy sites to users but keyword rich text & links to Google. The Fairfax technique is no where near that deception but it is still something Google would not be happy with. @iSamith then found that Fairfax owns 30,000 domains. We checked a couple. concreters.com.au, business.com.au etc etc were all using the same technique. Fairfax owns a lot of generic URLs which rank well for generic phrases i.e. wedding.com.au ranks no.1 for "wedding". When you consider most of these sites' revenue model is advertising which relies on impressions coming from organic search, this could have a major impact on their bottom line should they get booted from the index.

Whether this technique was employed innocently by a designer I have no idea but Google won't care given its past form.

What would you do if it was your search engine? Would you boot them?