@nixCraft - this is terrible, but unsurprising. Note the outcome for him, not increased sales, or better brand recognition. No he is only proud of the traffic that he has diverted to his site.

All that traffic just so that they can serve more ads - and the more people that do this, the less effective the ads are, and the harder it will be to sell advertising.

On the other hand, the Internet at large becomes enhittified, but only for as long as these ass-hats can afford to serve pages at scale.

@nixCraft

I guess it's time to find a way how to not allow for SEO.

@nixCraft It gets worse. On LinkedIn he posted a slideshow about it, and it ends with "Follow me for SEO and content tips!".

And then he gets comments like this:
"Wow, that's truly impressive! Your ability to strategically outsmart
your competitor and steal such a significant amount of SEO traffic is commendable. It takes a great deal of skill, knowledge, and perseverance to achieve such results."

What's wrong with people?

@nixCraft @WarnerCrocker

HustleBro culture’s pride in outright theft

Remember how mad cow syndrome (BSE) came to be?

Feeding slaughterhouse offal to livestock, which got slaughtered, unused parts fed to livestock, that got slaughtered…

Has someone brought up "Mad #AI Syndrome" already?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_cow_crisis

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/Would-it-be-thyHNd7fSh6Z0q.8vOqXMw?s=c

@nixCraft

This is just another version of those late night real estate infomercials where some piece of shit is on a yacht surrounded by women in bikinis and saying if you want to be like me buy my course!

@nixCraft "Someone bet us a quarter that we wouldn't shit in the swimming pool, so we did. We shat in the pool so much that the pool had to be drained and no one could swim in it for a week.

We look forward to getting more quarters by shitting in more swimming pools in future.

P.S. Follow us for tips on how to shit in swimming pools.”

@nixCraft don't hate the player, hate the game?

In this case, I'm more than willing to give both parties some of the blame (hate is too strong).

But, since it has become VERY easy to do just what this bright individual has done, content ranking systems will have to adapt to circumvent trolls such as this.

@nixCraft

Maybe he's an anarchist giving us a roadmap to use AI to defeat Google.

#JustWishfulThinking

@nixCraft it's probably the same people that thing ad blocking is theft.

They are just parasites.

@nixCraft if this trend continues it will inevitably lead to curated directories of reliable websites, and bespoke search engines that bring only curated results.

This will take us back full circle to the world of 25 years ago, where if you wanted to find something on the web you would find a (curated) directory of websites, such as dmoz.org - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ

@nixCraft Depends on the motivations.

The fact that he's openly revealing what he did and how (I could replicate this in 24 hours) seems fairly white-hat to me.

We should celebrate those who openly expose faults in major infrastructure. That pushes the owners to reckon with those faults.

@nixCraft I wish I could say his position was an outlier.

I recently sat on an interview panel to hire several “in-house” SEO positions at my company and flat out rejected many because they talked like this.

There’s no strategy or even attempt to try to produce something of real value, it‘s just creating a tool to continuously throw shit into a fan aimed at everyone else.