Should Google Penalise Fake Stories - May 28th, 2008
In recent weeks there has been much debate within the seo industry as to if Google should penalise fake stories. By fake stories we mean stories that have been written for the purposes of linkbait. As a frequent visitor of sites such as Digg and Yahoo Buzz I know that there are many stories like this about.
The topic of fake stories for link bait was highlighted last week when a story entitled ‘13 year old steals dad?s credit card to buy hookers’ was picked up by major news agencies and hit the front pages of sites such as Digg. The benefits of such a tactic are plain to see as the webmaster received over 1500 in bound links. So what could Google do about it?
One of the most popular suggestions floating around in the forums is that Google should downgrade the quality or power of inbound links gained from fake stories. It would obviously be difficult to implement this technique as much of it would have to be done manually, unless Google could come up with a clever technique. Some believe that you could add some sort of code to your story to tell Google that it is in fact a fake story. This would be a bit like the no follow system for links. Another way could be to report fake stories directly to Google but again this would be unlikely to be effective. Using such techniques would mean webmasters would still receive all the necessary traffic but would not gain any benefits in terms of ranking. This would be seen as a fair system.
The fake story debate will undoubtedly continue to burn for some time and it looks likely that Google will implement some sort of system to combat the problem. Webmasters should simply remember to write relevant articles to their topic and try and target specific user groups. Well written and targeted stories can be a great way to gain high volumes of traffic.
SEO Programmer
Mark
