Dec 05 2006 at 12:17pm
The W3C supporters page
Take a look at the W3C supporters page. It costs $1000 to become a supporter of the W3C and get your link on this page. This page is a PR 9. That’s right, PR 9. Now check out all the sites that are listed.
I’ll give you a sec to skim through that.
Didn’t I see some of those in my spam folder the other day? “Cheap Hosting Provider”, “Wholesale Childrens Clothing”, “Dubai Furnished Apartments”, “Online Gambling Guide”??? Many of the links appear to be for legit but it’s these spammy ones that caught my attention. The W3C is effectively selling PR 9 linkbacks from a highly respected site for $1000 apeice.
Just disgusting. And sad. You’d think that google would recognize that as a spam page with all those shady links on it. Maybe it does, I don’t know.
(This was pointed out to me by this post about digg spamming which really has nothing else to do with this post)
Adam Audette December 7th, 2006 at 12:26 am
Interesting…I found this on the page:
“4. Will the link from the Supporters page improve my ranking by search engines?
W3C makes no assurances that sites linked from the Supporters program will see improved ranking in search engine results. W3C instructs search engines to ignore links from the Supporters page.”
… and in the source:
Adam Audette December 7th, 2006 at 12:27 am
Whoops, the blog snipped out the rest of my post. Here it is:
… and in the source:
meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”
Megan December 7th, 2006 at 10:51 am
Ooh, I knew I was missing something with that! It looks like they added that in September after they realized all the spam they were getting. Many other posts in SE-Land have talked about this back in July.
The first surprising thing to me there is that I never heard about it. Why was nobody in design-land talking about this? Because they don\’t associate with SE people? The second thing is that it seems that the W3C was so clueless about SEO that they didn\’t realize that people would use this to buy high PR links. Or they didn\’t think there would be a problem with selling links???
It seems that they did consult with google on what to do with this page (Do your research before posting, Megan!)
Adam Kinder December 7th, 2006 at 8:42 pm
Eeesh, the page looks like one of those really bad link farms you’ll hit if you misspell a domain, or punch in Google.com with 30 O’s