When Google bought blogging software pioneer Blogger last year, it probably didn’t expect that its new technology would be used to goose the page rankings of porn sites.
But that’s exactly what’s happening, as an outfit called CyberQuest has recently set up a few dozen cross-linked, porn-themed Blogspot blogs (powered by Blogger), all of which link to three of its for-profit porn sites. According to a couple of experienced bloggers, the purpose behind the cross-linking strategy is to artificially raise the Google rankings of the three porn sites.
"It’s the latest sleazy porn marketing scheme," said John d’Addario, the editor of Gawker Media’s porn-themed gossip blog, Fleshbot. "It’s clever. You have to give them that. And it’s another example of porn folk being sort of ahead of the curve when it comes to technology and marketing."
He added that the blogging strategy reminded him of early porn-marketing techniques in which porn operators used meta-tagging as a method to outwit search engines.
CyberQuest’s usage of (not safe for work) Blogspot blogs, many of which have titles with commonly searched-for terms such as Janet Jackson, Cameron Diaz and Jenna Jameson, is particularly effective because of Google’s algorithms, which reward sites with many cross-links with high rankings in search results for a particular term. Thus each of CyberQuest’s Blogspot blogs includes the same set of related links to blogs such as Free Full Hilton Paris Video or pamela anderson boob.
"In this day and age, it’s all about subtle manipulation of page rank," said Cameron Marlow, the creator of Blogdex, a service that offers real-time rankings of the sites most talked about in the blogosphere. "I think that what they try and do is create artificial pockets of page rank so that they can push that page rank arbitrarily wherever they want."
Google declined to comment for this story. CyberQuest did not respond to requests for comment.
What’s clear about the CyberQuest blog strategy is that it’s not built around activity that anyone would recognize as actual blogging at all. Instead, each of the outfit’s blogs follows a general pattern of including several hard-core photos from one of the company’s three porn sites, as well as direct links to those sites and a series of sexually oriented stories lifted verbatim from a wide range of erotica sites.
Yet because anyone can create an unlimited number of free Blogspot blogs, and because Google’s page-ranking system is predisposed to give high rankings to widely linked blogs, Google’s own technology is a sitting duck for being exploited by outfits like CyberQuest.
"Porn site operators are finally getting savvy to the power of weblogs," d’Addario said. "Blogspot (blogs) are the easiest to set up. You can set one up in a couple of minutes. You can just make all these (blogs) and make them all cross-link to each other. It all comes into trying to finesse the Google rankings."
Another clever element in the use of Blogspot blogs for porn-site advertising is that some parental, business and library Web-filtering systems look less at the content of a site than at its top-level domain name, or where it’s hosted, both d’Addario and Marlow said.
"Most of these parental control systems depend on IP addresses as the basis for banning sites," Marlow said. "So maybe (the CyberQuest Blogspot blogs) slip under a lot of the parental control and business control filters."
CyberQuest is not the only outfit to figure out how to use blogs to advertise porn sites. But d’Addario said it’s important to distinguish between those sites that are strictly built to game Google, like CyberQuest’s, and others which at least use their blogs to tell a story, albeit one that is trying to sell porn-site subscriptions.
For example, on Porn, the author purports to be a photographer or producer of porn sites who writes regularly about the shoots he does and the women he meets and beds in the process. To be sure, his site contains links to paid-content porn sites, but d’Addario said this kind of blog is different than those of CyberQuest.
"There’s (a) fine line between these blogs which are just set up to filter all traffic toward one particular member site," d’Addario said, "and blogs which are set up by people using porn-affiliate programs to try to make some money."
D’Addario admitted Fleshbot itself often employs such an affiliation strategy.
"Just because it’s porn," he said, "doesn’t mean it’s sneaky or underhanded."
While companies like CyberQuest may initially enjoy a boost in business due to their blogging strategy, d’Addario argued that it may well be short-lived.
"The only silver lining in all this," he said, "is that (it’s) just like (when) the first couple of people who got the idea to try to manipulate the meta-keyword thing might have been successful, but then everyone jumped all over it…. These things run their natural evolutionary course after awhile."
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Tags: CyberQuest, Google, pagerank, SEO
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