An intersting article from Wired details how some bloggers have been noticing some odd behavior relative to articles written that are critical of CNN. No one seems to be sure if it’s a viral marketing campaign, an attempt to de-rank certain blogs from search engines, or whether it’s a negative-publicity/PR sabotage attempt by a third party. The bottom line is, it’s still comment spam, due to the heavy keyword-stuffing tactics being used:
Keyword stuffing was a technique commonly used at the height of the dot-com boom to raise a site’s search-engine ranking. Stuff a site with common search terms, or keywords, and its ranking would rise. But search engines are wise to the technique. Now, when search sites detect blatant keyword stuffing, they often penalize the offending site by delisting it from their indexes, or removing it from the first 100 results.
Lewis said CNN may be keyword-stuffing sites critical of the network, causing the sites to be delisted by search engines.
I might have to revisit the frequency with which I link to CNN articles.