Removing all links from the articles just lowers their utility. And it is not a good longterm business practice if they want people to keep linking at their articles.

We are also now including editorial links. Originally, we had disabled links because on evergreen or archive stories many links were broken and we decided it would be a better user experience without so many dead ends/404 errors.

After further consideration and discussions with our customers we made the decision to restore the links.

We still do not think it is an ideal user experience to have so many broken links. However we have not implemented a comprehensive solution to that yet.

James I don’t know who you are but your comment is right on!

Several of us from Perfect Market are at SXSW if you are here and want to talk to us, feel free and give us a shout on twitter. We are @perfectmarket

Have you looked at Violet Blue’s actual complaint, which kicked this whole discussion off? I don’t think you have.

The link removal is the part that is more bizarre (and gray).

They are not scrapping or duplicating anything. The articles are their own, looks to me like they are just moving them and republishing them in an archive template. They might be changing the title of the page based on some auto process but that is not spamming. Just often writers and bloggers have vague headlines which are fine in print but on the web you need to use titles people actually search for. So Dog Bites Man not Canine Snacks on Human.

The pages have less ads than their main pages, jsut htey are mostly Google Adsense ones.

They might be stripping out some repeat text like biogs and such as that would make the pages less focused in terms of search. But that is a good practice, search engines want to be able to find relevant articles of high quality.

There seems to be no change in the actual copy so they are not keyword stuffing.

I would say the worst offenders for spamming are blogger with every SEO plugin swditched on and generating thousands of emptyish tag pages.

This is a non-story.

Death is rarely pretty.

Someone build me a spambot-app that lets me spam every website that offends me. In moments the offender will be calling his lawyer to drag me into court to explain why I did it.

“It easy, your honor. The SOB stole my time, my attention, and directly or indirectly, cost me money -to make money he has no intention of sharing with me.”

If such a retaliatory spambot-app existed, I would pay the app store a handsome price for that bot. They would pay a handsome royalty to the app developer. Legitimate business interests would lobby for legislation to “ban the avenging spambot app.” Odd that they wouldn’t think to stop the offending practice first. “Oh, what tangled webs we weave….” -dh

This is a really interesting topic that helped blow up a Windy Citizen discussion thread last week following an interesting post from a former ChicagoNow blogger. We invite you to check it out, because there are many examples and anecdotes relevant to what you’re talking about here.

Thanks!

Interesting point of view. Why do you say that? I mean if this is clearly a breach, why would Google let them get away. I would love to know more about your reasons.