My latest at the Guardian: can you remember if Blog Readability is a scam to point to a loans site?
With scams all in the news now, my latest feature at the Guardian (online only) looks at the rather strange case of the Blog Readability page, which has done the online equivalent of walking into a police station and said that it’s lost its memory of how it came to be hosted on a completely unrelated site.
Let’s say you’re a site offering cash advances - better known as loans. You want to be on the top of Google’s results when someone searches for “cash advance”. How do you do it? Easy. Get bloggers to point to your site. For free. Bloggers have too much self-esteem, you cry - they’d never push a loans site up the rankings. They’re too canny, too cynical.
Wrong. Bloggers today offer a great resource for the clever to exploit. If you’re a loans site looking to boost your ranking, you can probably do it for about the cost of drawing up a few graphics in an afternoon and seeding a suitably influential blog. Pretty soon you’ll have hundreds of people copying it.
So you create a web page saying it’ll tell people their Blog Readability… and people come and start using it.
Anyway, once you’ve input your blog’s URL, you’ll quickly get a graphic showing your blog’s “readability” by school age - elementary school, high school, undergraduate, postgraduate, genius and so on. It seems to happen really fast, given the sort of linguistic analysis that must be needed, but computers are fast these days, aren’t they?
Then you have an image, which you can - if you’ve got the time and energy - copy, upload to your blog, and display; or a bit of HTML, which is much simpler, to paste in your page or profile. No muss, no fuss.
I was looking at this when I started wondering about the HTML. It has an image link - img style=”border: none;” src=”http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/readinglevel/img/junior_high.jpg”. All well and good. But then there’s the ALT tag - remember, the stuff that search engines actually index: alt=”cash advance” Get a Cash Advance”.
And that phrase “cash advance” has a link to an entirely different site…
Lots to read. And there’s even a graph…
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- The potato PC scam (23 February 2005; score: 73.29%)
- In The Independent: why we're all reading slower than 10 years ago (9 November 2005; score: 62.5%)
- Ten signs you're in a recession (13 April 2008; score: 51.56%)
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December 8th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Search engines index alt text? I would have assumed they’d ignore it nowadays, given that it’s generally hidden and thus easy to stuff with irrelevant nonsense without alerting users.
December 8th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
If you don’t believe me, try searching Technorati for blog readability - a lot of the excerpts have the phrase “cash advance” in them precisely because of this.
I think Google does the same. Given the low number of inbound links to the loans site from actual sites according to Google’s index, compared to the high number from bloggers, I think Google does indeed analyse alt text. It would be bonkers for them not to, when you think about it: there’s text attached to a specific picture - it might be useful, mightn’t it?
December 8th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
That’s a hell of a good story.
December 14th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
That’s not the end of it… The “Blog Film Rating Test” (http://www.justsayhi.com/bb/blog_rating) which I saw a few months back when it was posted on Balloon Juice does the exact same thing, with the exact same link to the Cash Advance website. And like the Blog Readability Test, it appears to be hosted on a completely unrelated site — this one, dating — in fact, it sits in the same /bb subdirectory. I wouldn’t be surprised if every other test on “Just Say Hi” had that spammy link, but the site is running too damn slow to see if it is so.