"Car and Driver" Busted in Moronic SEO Scheme

Most companies large and small perform some sort of search engine optimization on their sites. It's natural, as Google is such a tremendous traffic driving machine. When we hear of large automotive publishing firms engaging in pre-school link-building spam efforts, it shocks us. Why? Because they simply do not work, and you'd think a publisher like Car and Driver would know that.

They didn't.

[caption id="attachment_45" align="aligncenter" width="497" caption="How NOT to Build Links"][/caption]

The effort here was to do a link exchange with Techcrunch, a publication that has a Google PageRank of 8/10. To put that into perspective, the LA Times website is a PR 8. It is clear that they are searching for any publication that is posting about "Ford" and trying to optimize their site to be the next Ford Buying Guide traffic recipient.

It didn't work. In fact, Techcrunch sent the email to Matt Cutts, Google's SEO Spam Czar. The lesson here is that if you're going to try link farming and link exchanges, try to use something other than a tactic that comes from the SEO playbook, circa 2004.

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