Law blog Concurring Opinions has jumped on the lets bash SEO’s bandwagon with a bizarre post blaming the process of old domains being reregistered and used for other purposes on “Slimy SEO’s”.

They cite in their evidence the case of Crescat Sententia, who moved from a .org name to a .net name and later found the .org name registered by someone else who is now using the site to flog something called “Proactive Solution”.

Hysterically, Will Baude of Crescat Sententia writes:

In September, without my knowledge or consent, our old domain was purchased by a Search Engine Optimization firm that intends to make money by either reselling the domain for a pretty penny to somebody greedy for its pagerank, or by using that pagerank to sell links to sites eager to trick Google. The webpage up there now is not this blog (it’s an old cache that he will have to take down soon), and this blog is the current and future home of crescat.

OMG the sky is falling! But lets think about this for a minute. The name wasn’t stolen or hijacked. Baude didn’t renew the name, plain and simple, and it would appear that he purposely did not to renew it, so we aren’t talking about an accidental oversight. Having decided not to keep the name, someone else legally came along and registered it. There’s no need to gain Baude’s “knowledge or consent” because in choosing to NOT renew the domain he legally gave up all rights to it. And how exactly does he know that a SEO firm bought the name? He doesn’t, he’s just presuming. I’m personally not a SEO firm and yet I’ve previously bought expired domain names…indeed, perhaps famously social news site Newsvine came about as a direct result of a expired domain (Newsvine.com being previously registered to someone else). SEO doesn’t equal buyer by any stretch of the imagination.

Concurring Opinions gives other examples of sites moving domain and finding their old domains picked up by others, calling it hijacking. Every single example they give is identical: site owners gave up their domains when moving to other sites. I’d note: gave up. If someone doesn’t renew a domain (particularly intentionally) and someone else comes along and registers it, they only have themselves to blame. Whipping up some jihad against SEO’s doesn’t change the facts of the matter. And here’s another thing: cost of renewing a domain name: $7-$10 (shop around, you can get cheaper again). So for a very, very small amount these people could have kept their domain names, put a proper redirect on the old name and we’d all live happily ever after, but then again, we’ve got about as much chance of curing stupidity as we’ve got of solving poverty.

The case for the defense rests. The site owner is to blame.

Originally posted on March 4, 2007 @ 9:10 pm

Seen a YouTube video embedded on a another site lately? Of course one of the more popular features of YouTube from the beginning has been the ability to embed videos on your own site, it’s a great feature that allows many of us to present videos without needing to host them ourselves.

But have you encountered embedded YouTube videos lately that either wont play or take for ever to start? I have, on numerous occasions on many, many different sites. Naturally my first thoughts were that the site hadn’t added the include script properly, but as I saw it on more and more sites it got me thinking.

You see, if you’re like me and you’re trying to watch a video on a website and it’s not working, and you really want to watch it, what do you do? Easy, you click on the video frame itself which takes you directly to the page at youtube.com that hosts the video, and 100% of the time the video works promptly at youtube.com itself. I’ve found myself doing this more and more lately. Here’s one example from Gizmodo. I’d note that I hit play on this video 5 minutes ago, nothing is playing:

A quick click on the YouTube logo at the bottom right of screen: bingo! I get a working video.

The question then becomes: is YouTube intentionally stifling/ handicapping embedded videos to force users to visit youtube.com? Perhaps not all of the time, and with all videos, but perhaps through some random or not so random algorithm? Is there any other explanation for the regular failure of embedded YouTube videos not working as they should? Food for thought.

Originally posted on February 28, 2007 @ 9:29 pm

This post was authored by a guest author, my good friend and a great blogger Stan Schroeder.

When Digg formally unbanned twenty or so previously banned sites I kept a close eye on them, just to see how well they will do and will any of them be banned again.

As it turns out, those sites are – for all practical purposes – still banned. Digg Search for URL of any of these sites in the last 7 days will yield no results. But if you include buried stories, you’ll see that many stories from these sites were submitted, and subsequently buried before they could reach the front page.

Now, one could say that it’s to be expected: after all, these sites were banned for some reason, so some Digg users will be likely to bury them again. However, look closely to the results of these searches:

digitalpoint
paulstamatiou
johnchow
seopedia
rockmymonkey
connectedinternet
kineda
lucafiligheddu

Absolutely all stories submitted from these domains are buried (by buried I don’t mean that a couple of users buried them, I mean that they’re gone from all the lists on Digg, and thus have had absolutely no exposure). Furthermore, many are buried at less than a couple of votes. Only two stories, submitted 6 days ago and having only one vote, weren’t buried (that’s 2 in at least 30), which gave me an interesting opportunity. I buried these stories myself (this won’t hurt anyone, since these are old stories with no chance of ever getting more exposure). One vote was all it took to make them buried.

Now, any experienced digger will surely tell you that this is very odd. First of all, it takes quite a few buries for a story to get buried completely. It’s hard to estimate this number but I’m positive that a story in the upcoming section can withstand 5 buries and still get to the front page of Digg (and this is a conservative estimate).

Secondly, the users who Digg through the upcoming stories section are rarely being negative; they’re looking for the good stuff, not stories to bury. Most of the buries (if a story is not obvious spam/racially insulting/porn/political extremism) will come when the story reaches the hot lists in the upcoming sections, or actually gets to the front page.

Thirdly, many of these stories have absolutely no reason whatsoever to be buried. A story about Google Blogger being unavailable, or a story about fast growing occupations for college educated workers might receive a couple of buries – as can every story on Digg, but are they really so bad that several users buried them while there were still at 1 or 2 points? I highly doubt it.

Hypothetical part starts here

So, what’s happening here? My guess (which might not be correct, since I have no insight into Digg’s algorithms) would be that Digg admins introduced some kind of bury-weight system for websites. Domains who were previously banned, or perhaps got many buries in the past, will get buried very easily – perhaps just one or two buries is enough.

If this is true, it’s an awful decision from Digg. Now any digger who holds a grudge against one of those sites can keep their stories from ever reaching Digg’s front page – and he/she can do it alone (or perhaps with a help of one or two friends). The potential for abuse is so big that I’m sure that many a digger will pick on these vulnerable sites just to see how his vote sinks their stories to oblivion.

Now, I’m not going into whether these sites deserve to be buried. But enabling selective abuse with no consequences is no way to treat a community (and websites that get posted on Digg are also a part of this community or ecosystem, if you will).

Other possibilities

There are numerous other possibilities as to why this happens. Perhaps a story can get buried if Digg’s algorithms decide that a group is always voting on a story, as John Chow proposed? Initially I’ve dismissed this theory as ludicrous: it would go against the friends system on Digg, and it would mean that your friends should avoid digging your story, which makes no sense. I still don’t believe that John’s hypothesis is correct, but everything is possible as there’s clearly something odd happening here.

Finally, there’s the possibility that there’s a group of users actively burying stories from these previously banned websites. I find this very hard to believe, though. Some of these websites were off Digg for a long time. Most Diggers have already forgotten about some of them. Furthermore, what group of diggers is so active that they can monitor upcoming stories 24/7 and bury these stories with about 95% success?

Whatever the reason, I don’t like how the new system works. It’s obvious that some stories won’t get to the front page and it’s not going to based at all on their quality, but on a bunch of factors that only Digg admins can understand. I guess they have reasons for changing their algorithms in this way, but I also believe they should be looking at the bigger picture and focusing only on getting quality stories to the front page.

Originally posted on March 2, 2007 @ 12:51 pm