Cox has added links for its brand new site osulsu.com all over its subsidiaries’ websites. Not only are links popping up in Ohio and Louisiana, Cox has also added links to the BCS National Championship related site in in Texas, Colorado, and North Carolina. It is spread to big and small alike: Austin, Lufkin, Longview and Nacogdoches. Come on now, Nacogdoches? The oldest city in Texas doesn’t need your link spamming Cox! The links are not links for people to use, only for search engines to see. They are right at the bottom of every page near the normal link fodder at the end of the page.
Call it link spamming, link bombing, or link whoring. It doesn’t matter what the label is, but it is dirty. I really like the term incestuous linking, because Cox is making use of all of its children companies to spawn these links loaded with search terms. In affect, they are trying to spoof Google’s (and other search engines) Page Rank algorithm to believe that lots of sites are linking to them. It is a way to pretend that they are more important than they are.
Is this illegal? No. Should search engines take action? You would hope so. Will they? Probably not, seeing how Cox and all of its children provide so much content on the internet. There are entire communities that exist on these sites and their newspapers. Now, if this was some spammer in China trying to sell Viagra, Google would blacklist them. Since it is a media conglomerate promoting a somewhat dubious but still valid enterprise, it will most likely go unscathed.
This is what happens when local news is owned by a conglomerate. And as a reader and consumer of internet content, you should care. Don’t let umbrella companies insert their unrelated content into supposedly local sites to boost national search results…
Lufkin Daily News
Austin American Statesman
Grand Junction News
