Recently a guy trying to win an SEO contest literally dialed up Robert Scoble and begged for a link to his site. Scoble decided to be a nice guy and link up the site since he doesn’t get many phone calls like these. And in his blog entry Scoble pointed out that he doesn’t want to get many phone calls begging for links heretofore, so put the phone down (I’m joking).

Besides the fact that generally speaking these type of SEO contests leave a bad taste in my mouth, I took a look at the guy’s site and noticed he had an infringing copy of Paul Neave’s Flash version of Pacman which Namco had asked Neave to take down. How did I know about this? Am I just a Namco cop? No, awhile back I enjoyed playing Neave’s Pacman on another website (and held the high score too) and was bummed to hear that he didn’t get the rights to use any of the licensed images/sounds/characters from Namco. A port of a game I liked turned out to be illegal. It is the best Flash version of PacMan out there, bar none (that I’ve played anyway, anybody seen better?), and Pacman is one of my favorite games of all time. Namco should have worked something out with Neave, but that’s another post for another day.

[Aside: similar infringement is happening with one of the GoogleModules by someone named Kim Schultz who fit this unlicensed, unauthorized game inside a Google module, claiming it was “freely available on the web” when in fact it isn’t according to Namco and the game’s creator, see here: “… due to legal constraints surrounding its misuse of Namco’s trademark and copyright. Sorry about that.”]

Anyway, the main concern wasn’t Pacman, it was the SEO contest. I pointed my questions out about these SEO contests — are they cool? — to Scoble thinking he might be willing to approach the MSN Search team and get their feedback. Still no word on that one, but it’s the weekend so maybe he’ll ask next week. Being I’m one of the recent Search Champs, I probably should just ask myself (and maybe will do just that). Also, I thought he might want to know what he was linking to. The guy quickly took down the DMCA violating Pacman and refuted my concerns about the SEO contest being any sort of blackhat activity.

I remain curious about how the search engines treat these SEO contests. When they are for nonsense words like the contest in question, I can’t see them doing much harm, but when they target common terms like backgammon (different contest), it makes me wonder. These SEO efforts in some contest could knock down the legitimate results for these keywords and thus degrade the search results experience.

In a later comment, another one of the SEO contestants poked fun at my comment by writing:

Creativity is the opposite to writing comments about trademark issues for old pacman games that´s no one intrested in hearing. Lol

Of course I can see the smiley and lol and realize this individual isn’t that serious, but the “oh it’s no big deal” nervous laughter is ironic. My comments weren’t intended as some pedantic rant. I’m starting to believe that this is how more and more people really feel about copyrighted content on the internet these days.

Although I loathe to side with the MPAA or RIAA on anything, because I think they have been bleeding consumers and artists dry, they do have something at least partly right: some people act like all content on the web should be and is in the public domain.

This is why a copyright message is pretty much meaningless as a deterrent on the web. Take Perfect 10 vs. Google recently and you have the splog effect piling up on people. I spent some time in the comments of that recent post trying to explain the case which on its face sounds like Perfect 10 is trying to stop indexing of the web (they’re not).

Solutions?
So how does this end? If each publisher — each webmaster — can be more responsible, myself included, by carefully examining what we are linking to will that make a difference? Given the current environment, I don’t think so.

When you link to a site and then they change or redirect the page you linked to and point to something you would not have linked to (like some illegal content, or redirected to an unrelated affiliate program, etc). This is the part of the web that is broken and always has been, that linked in content can be changed or disappear literally overnight. I’ve complained about mainstream news sites doing this frequently to bloggers. Just go back into your favorite blogger’s archives and you are bound to find dozens of broken links.

Which unless the blogger does a good job of restating what is in the link instead of just pointing to it means broken context. Then you have the search engines pointing to the blogger because the original content is broken and all is left is broken context.

Broken context.

Yes, caches do help and maybe that’s the direction the real next iteration and advancement of the web will move. The current web 2.0 crop (argh, I said a dirty word) isn’t doing anything about this problem, but it’s a big one I see that needs solving (and I freely admit not having one). I’ve written about this before but I believe this fundamental flaw in the internet will continue to become increasingly significant if some sort of larger caching scheme doesn’t come into play. Some fallback position that will cause every link that’s changed to revert to a cached copy instead of the new/redirected destination, thus maintaining the original intention of third party links.

The old cliche you are what you eat, doesn’t apply here. Neither does you are what you link — because links can and do change. And so we’re left with: you aren’t what you link.

As a means of preparing content for tomorrow today, bloggers especially might want to make sure they create posts which don’t rely too heavily on the content they link to, otherwise a lot of their content in the years to come will be worthless. And the search engines that are filled with links to their blog entries? Worthless too.

Any smart readers have a solution to this issue? Or do you think I’m making it a bigger issue than it really is? Just look at the term “permalinks” for blogs. Ask yourself, seriously, are they really permanent? How can anything be permanent on the web? Misnomers everywhere.

Related posts
May 27, 2005: When 3rd Party Links are Changed and Broken
Feb 2, 2006: Dynamic links are newspaper’s weapon against unwelcomed deep linking

• When 3rd party links are changed and broken
• The downside of embedding video posts from third parties using third party hosting
• Pill-popping Pac Man junkie anti-drug video
• Dynamic links are newspapers weapon against unwelcomed deep linking
• When complaining about internal links don’t forget Wikipedia
• What is Search Engine Optimization? Defining search engine optimization