Agylen

First, it was Matt Mullenweg, now it’s Syndic8’s turn to be caught in the act of playing fast and loose with Google’s PageRank in order to gain some more ad revenue.

Good Morning Silicon Valley: How’s this for PageRank: Goodbye: “Gaming Google’s ad network is never a good idea. Case in point: the experiences of Syndic8, a popular RSS index that was booted from Google’s index after the search leader noticed it was hosting over 194,000 bogus articles, designed specifically to serve Google AdSense text ads. ‘Do people really think this is a legitimate form of advertising revenue?’ asked Waxy.org’s Andy Baio. ‘Jeff Barr and Bill Kearney, the two Syndic8 leads, are both smart guys and they seem to support the practice. But why? Gaming search engines makes the Web less useful for everyone.’”

To be fair, Syndic8 did not use any “cloaking” technique in order to hide links to spam pages. Links were visible, only in tiny print at the bottom of the home page.

What did they get out of this? PageRank nullified, all pages removed from Google’s index and AdSense account terminated. This could mean, for a business, going from profitable to broke in no time.

At the same time, spammers should be aware that Google’s getting better at detecting spam.