Google Gaffe? - cshel lays out the evidence.

I was just talking with cshel on IM about her recent blog post “How well does the Google algo catch spamdexers?” which is quickly gaining popularity over at digg.  Ironically, late last night I found a similar instance of this type of behavior (though not as aggressive) but I was too tired to blog about it and it wasn’t until I read cshel’s article that I even remembered.  (In a “nut-cshell” a company uses hundreds, even thousands of domain names with duplicate content to point a large number of links to their main website - Traffic Power comes to mind.)

I don’t know if it’s pure conincidence but the site I was looking at is in the same general industry/category of Home and Garden (different company altogether though).  I am not going to name the company here as cshel has already given plenty of evidence of the issue and I see no need to “out” another company.  However, the point remains that her find is not just a single instance that slipped through the cracks. 

 So, what does this mean?

• is Google’s algo broken?
• is the “home and garden” industry returning to the wild west days of the internet?
• did a couple of companies get really lucky and have their old spammy sites come back from the grave to boost them back up in the serps?
• will there be a “cute cat fight” between Matt Cutts’ and cshel’s favorite felines?

If the last question in that list doesn’t make sense go back to cshel’s post and re-read the last part.  Great bit of baiting Google’s head spam man to take a look at her post - ha!