Google Washing, Dark Forces, and the Sandbox

• Posted by B Jones on November 2nd, 2005 - Comment on this Post »

I may have been a little out of the loop lately, but I actually just found out about the whole Matt Cutts Google washing incident.

If you are wondering what this whole thing is about, read this: Open Letter to Matt Cutts

Its a letter that was written by the infamous Dark SEO Team. If you don’t want to read it, I’ll sum it up. They copied one of Matt Cutts articles (about Bacon Polenta (original post by matt)) and posted it on their site. Google indexed it and it came up in the serps way before the original post by Matt Cutts (screen shot from threadwatch) . In the letter they tell Matt that the way Google handles duplicate content is faulted, and it needs to be fixed.

So in effect, they are hijacking Cutts’ articles (Google Washing) until Google fixes the problem.

So did the Dark SEO Team really hurt Matt’s Blog? Maybe for a few days, but do the same search now and its Matt Cutts site all the way.

For that matter just do a search for [Bacon Polenta] (# 1 in Google), or try [jagger 2] (# 1 in Google). Oh, I know try [google seo] (# 2 in Google).

Wow. Those results sure are good for a site that is only about 3 months old. It pays to be tight with the Google engineers. I think it’s safe to say that they haven’t hurt Matt’s blog. I also think it’s safe to say that the Sandbox isn’t touching Matt Cuts Blog.

I wish I could say the same for seologs.com. Its been almost 6 months and the majority of my Google referals come from the term [seologs] (# 1 in Google). Thank you. Oh no… No need for applause….Oh okay.

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