Paid Link Reporting and the Fall of the Machine
Friday, May 29th, 2009When Google introduced paid link reporting via Webmaster Tools in 2007, in marked the second time human informants were solicited to help the search engine. The first - less contentious - invitation a year earlier was the spam report, by which conscientious website owners (or their minions) could report such things as sneaky JavaScript redirects, doorway pages and even "misleading or repeated words." These share with paid links the characteristic that they are potentially hard to detect, and indicate that the machines crunching through all those web pages are still occasionally outsmarted by some upstart human.
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