Gotta Love the Dark SEO Team
Danny Sullivan's Daily Searchcast from Friday reminded me of the hilariously smart group known as the Dark SEO Team. I checked out their PR10 project a while back. They managed to hijack (or something like a hijack) Google's own PageRank. A great example of issues with the whole PageRank system.
Now they have taken on another Google problem—duplicate content.
It seems that to make a point about Google's fairly random choice of what is the "good" copy of duplicate content and "bad" they have managed to get content on Matt Cutt's blog deindexed by, presumably, creating duplicate content pages.
At SES San Jose 2005, Matt Cutts basically explained that if Google finds multiple copies of the same content the computer tries to pick the "best" version of the content. Interestingly, he admitted that the computer is just taking a calculated guess, but a guess none the less. Scary stuff for the "white hat" crew who are spending time and money trying to create great online content.
In the end, the Dark Star Team has found a way to take out other site's pages by making duplicate pages that are "better" than the original. Hopefully this kind of mischief will motivate Google to find an innovative solution to the duplicate content problem.
Props to the Dark Star Team.
