Standford University Removed Paid Links and "Hosted Pages"

The latest in Google paid links and spam scandals was brought to light yesterday in a thread named Paid Links, Hosted Doorway Pages Back At Stanford Daily at Search Engine Watch Forums. AussieWebmaster discovered a page at http://daily.stanford.edu/forex/forex.html which served up content and ads for forex, the page has been 404ed just recently.

AussieWebmaster investigated a bit deeper and learned that The Stanford Daily only sells hosted content pages to Maverick Insight at maverickinsight.com.

It has been reported at 6:42 PM (EST) that the page has been removed from The Stanford Daily. GoogleGuy came in a few hours later and posted a response, saying that he will investigate this from Google's side.

What is the big deal? Well, Stanford is where Google was born. Danny has his SEW Blog write up here.

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posted rustybrick in Spam at March 7, 2006 7:25 AM Comments (3)

Comments

I have to disagree with you that the big story is that both are from Stanford. What makes people stand up and take notice is that the Stanford Daily is a large university newspaper that is supposedly held to a higher standard than your run-of-the-mill spammy SEO site. And when they try to game the GOOG, that's your story.

Posted by Dustin Frelich at March 7, 2006 14:05

That angel works well also. :) Thank you for sharing.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at March 7, 2006 14:13

This is NOT necessarily SPAMMY - Whatever they must do to bring ROI and Revenue should be done.

Much FREE, QUALTIY Content is consistantly offered by these e-Papers......NO ONE is being forced to click on these ads.

Given a choice between Ads and Reduced Quality of Less Frequent Quality of a Subscription Model??????????????

Google Cache URL here.

Posted by Search Engines Web at March 7, 2006 16:15