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Now from where I sit, I can already hear the outrage. How could I "domain squat" on Facebook?!? How could I be so dastardly? Don't I know that I'm just po
by blehn 16y ago
Now from where I sit, I can already hear the outrage. How could
I "domain squat" on Facebook?!? How could I be so
dastardly? Don't I know that I'm just polluting
the internet? What kind of trash am I?
To those people, all I have to offer is my good intentions.
Wait, what? Good intentions? The top search result for "facebook login" (and relevant misspellings) is facebook.com/login.php. That's what it should be. Whatever your intentions are, you are polluting the internet as far as I'm concerned. I don't see any real benefit to anyone in doing this.
- jrockway 16y agoHe's not really polluting the Internet, right? Some people may want to read about logging in to Facebook rather than actually doing it. (Learn by reading instead of learn by doing.) His site is about that. To me, there is no ethical issue here. It's a website with information about stuff. Do I need information about said stuff? Nope. But apparently someone does.
- blehn 16y agoI don't see how having "information about stuff" qualifies a website as non-polluting. efreedom, mahalo — they have tons of information and are almost pure pollution.
- jrockway 16y agoWe're not talking about efreedom and mahalo. They republish other people's content (perhaps legally); this is original content. Is this really more "pollution" than people's blogs about how they went drinking with their friends last night?
- blehn 16y agoYes, because those blogs aren't located at drinking-with-my-friends-last-night.com, and the posts don't reference "drinking" and "friends" a combined 61 times.
- jrockway 16y agoSo in order to register a domain name and start writing, someone needs your approval in order to not be considered "pollution". That makes sense.
- blehn 16y agoI think you're missing the point. This guy saw a very common search term ("facebook login"), created a 15 page site with what is essentially a bunch of filler and duplicate content that is absolutely loaded with keyword spam. Then he hosted it on multiple domains, selected because they are exact matches for that term. The goal is clearly to rank well for those keywords, so that uneducated users click on the search result and then click on adsense links on the site. His claim that it's an "experiment" designed to benefit people is total hogwash. This type of practice is nothing new, and it's much closer to efreedom and mahalo than it is to some guy writing about his new year's eve party on blogger. Again, his research shows no evidence that people are looking for anything other than the login page for Facebook, which they are finding easily via Google if they don't know how do use the address bar.
- ddemchuk 16y agoto be fair, he's polluting Google (and possibly other search engines). Without Google returning his site as one of the possible results for that keyphrase, you'd have no idea his site existed. Most people conflate "the internet" with what Google shows us when we search for things. The bigger issue is that an exact match keyword domain ranks ridiculously well in Google and yet they know that and aren't changing anything. $9 stands between you and a top 10 ranking for the majority of low competition keywords.
- blehn 16y agoThat's a fair point, but those were the OP's words. The important thing is that he's polluting the area (search engines) in which people might encounter his site.
- visakhcr 16y agoHe has hit the front page of Google for 'facebook login help'.