It's a systematic problem: often one wants to reward some good behavior X, but X is very hard to measure so one finds some measure Y that is highly correlated to X, and then measure Y. The problem is that once people know that it is Y that is being rewarded, they seek to do Y as cheaply as possible. And if "seeking to do Y as easily as possible" does not involve doing X, then the system breaks.

So in this example, X is producing high-quality content, and Y is getting a lot of links to you. Other examples include X,Y = (knowing the material, getting correct answers on the test) and (needing money, spending money).

This has a well-known analog in economic circles known as the "Lucas Critique" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_critique

Consequently, measuring Y is a good proxy for measuring not only when high levels of X means high levels of Y, but also when high levels of Y means high levels of X. Next great search engine should take that into account.

The fake blog is probably from a Markov generator. I've always liked that as a blackhat SEO strategy. However, it seems like it isn't that much more expensive to generate real content -- like the recent post about eHow and bingo cards -- so there isn't a point in taking that risk

I thought Markov generators synthesize text? The text from this blog appears to be stolen from other sources.

This is the key phrase from the article:

"It looks like the “blog posts” are fragments from places like Wikipedia run through some obfuscator"

A Markov generator will create text based on the text it's trained on, and because of the way it works you'll end up with little snippets from the text sources. Here's an online one you can play with:

http://www.beetleinabox.com/mkv_input.html

You can even write a scientific paper! Try this http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ :)

That may be unlikely to be frame-ups hoping to be NYTimesCo's subsidiary. It deserves more expensive to a blackhat SEO strategy. If having spammers link farms pointing at them. This is why Google would be careful when making these situations

The fake blog is probably from a Markov generator. I've always liked that much more expensive to generate real content like it isn't that as a blackhat SEO strategy. However, it seems like the recent post about eHow and bingo cards like it seems like it seems like the recent post about eHow and bingo cards so there isn't that risk The fake blog is probably from a Markov generator. I've always liked that risk The fake blog is probably from a blackhat SEO strategy. However, it isn't that as a Markov generator.

uh....clever?

NYTimes pollutes web with garbage text to boost search rankings of its ConsumerSearch subsidiary?

That may be the real story here. If in fact the craptastic linkspam copy was laundered through some affiliate program, giving NYTimesCo plausible deniability, they still bear responsibility.

You have to be careful when making these kinds of leaps, because anyone can link to a website. If having spammers link to you is an indication of guilt, it would be trivial to destroy your competitors by setting up link farms pointing at them. This is why Google would be unlikely to penalize consumersearch in this scenario, even if they detected the spam. They'd likely just not take that link into account.

Not saying that this happened here, just that it's not a story yet. More information is needed.

Absolutely agreed: these situations could also be frame-ups hoping to trigger Google sanctions. But then the suspects are those sites ranked below ConsumerSearch for these terms.

Someone's up to no good, and it might be NYTimesCo's subsidiary. It deserves more research.