Today could very well be a landmark. Two large scale scams were successful put in place; on the top search engine, Google and on the top geek news site, Digg.
Some guy posted a fake story on Digg and got top page. The story was perfect bait for typical Digg user: 650000 PS3 were to be recalled by Sony. He fooled 800 (!) users into voting for him. Two bad he couldn’t bare the traffic and the forum he wanted to boast ended up auto DOSed.
Digg link is now dead, so here is the original complete hoax PR:
TOKYO, Nov 20 2006 (Reuters) - Sony Corp. said on Monday its new video game console, the PlayStation 3, has a fatal flaw in its core graphics processor, and will require the recall of nearly 650,000 units, causing widespread shortages of the much anticipated gaming console throught the US, Europe, and Asia.
Shares in Sony closed down 5 percent on news of the recalls at 3,730 yen, underperforming a 1.64 percent gain in the Tokyo stock market’s electrical machinery index today.
Industry specialists say the glitches appear to be the kind of hiccups that often plague console launches and are likely to have a lasting impact on the PS3 business.
“There are always small sorts of problems at launch … But this is huge. It may be that Microsoft’s XBOX 360 is going to dominate the console gaming market for the foreseeable future.” KBC Securities analyst Hiroshi Kamide said.
The PS3 was going to be launched in North America on Friday the 24th of November, this date has been pushed back until March 2007 at the earliest. Gamers in Europe are bound to be very disappointed as they must now wait until June before there will be enough new units in commercial production to ship to retail stores.
Sony, which has dominated the game market over the past decade, has in recent years stumbled under the heavy weight of competion from Microsoft. A spokesperson from Sony was quoted as saying. “We just can’t compete with The XBOX, it’s cheaper and techologically more advanced than the Playstation, I think this might be the Playstations final year.”
But the most compelling story aroused on WebMasterWorld and has now also been removed.
The post tried to uncover a very successful BFA farm. (BFA = build for adsense)
Here’s is the original post. It speaks for itself:
1 ) The scraper sites have Relevant titles, but the content is not related (is this infringing on any policies?)
2 ) The scraper sites include this phrase on EVERY SINGLE page:
“See the links at the top of this page for you google query
Google has specially selected these links for you”3 ) There is little, to no content on the pages. They pretty much just have AdSense links everywhere.
4 ) They have dominated EVERY keyword. They must have some kind of bot that is constantly scanning overture, picking the best keywords - because I am ON IT when it comes to keywords, and they are DOMINATING me.
When will this end? What’s the point of continuing to spend hours of my life on this if google is going to put this kind of BS so high up in the SERP’s. I literally spend HOURS daily writing UNIQUE, FRESH content, only to be bullied out of the SERP’s by scraper sites that took literally seconds to build - and contain NO CONTENT that was not STOLEN from another person’s site.
This in combination with G’s new Toolbar features is starting to wear me thin.
Of course that, on the day Google shares went over the $500 mark, how could Google let that news out?
One thing is also very true: large scale scams like these are making domain names more valuable each day, from a SEO stand point. You can dup content, farm for links or be flooded with forged baits traffic, but you can never, ever, forge a domain name.
Does any one know how digg does those google ads so they are just one large one at the top?
Jump on to any digg article to see what i mean (cant post links yet)