Greed before malice (a variation of: cockup before conspiracy). Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time.
So I'm not sure why we'd be targetted for massive SEO-ism.
Of course stupid SEO-ers might assume the site gets more hits than it really does. Even so - there must be easier and more lucrative blogs to try to hijack.
But, it is spam-free, and ET links often turned up high at least in my searches. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
As I understand it, SEO-ers get more of a return from mass-market searches for mass-market items like grills and domestic doodads.
The audience for economic deconstruction and heavy rail is likely quite a bit smaller than the audience for fat-free cooking items.
Plus, by a glimpse at the sitemeter, we get a lot of traffic from the google image search, maybe even more as through the normal google search. We post a lot of pictures, and google is as kind to index us even when we do it stealing other people's bandwith.
ET links often turned up high at least in my searches
And it's not hard to autocreate seemingly genuine content either - as long as you have a little bit of control over the environment (such as in a diary of your own, with several sock puppets for first comments), you can automate the whole thing and it will take time and effort to catch. I remember a couple of spammers we had a while back which did precisely that. They got caught because they smelled like astroturfers, but the ET has an unusually developed nose for astroturfers, so it's entirely possible that they would have gone below the radar on other sites.
It's not improbable that the creeps in this round built their exploit with Kos or some other higher-traffic Scoop site in mind, but when you've got the software, it is comparatively easy to simply let it run around on the internet.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
