Re: [xml-dev] Re: Abuse of this list

[Robert Koberg <rob@koberg.com>]

Does anybody even use their products? Other than those who are
affiliated with them? Somebody must??? I mostly hear about them when I
get 150 emails from them announcing some new release of their product.

-Rob



On Thu, 2007-06-21 at 17:13 -0400, Jonathan Robie wrote:
> This is something I couldn't have weighed in on publicly while I worked 
> at DataDirect.
> 
> The search engines love sites that have a lot of phrases related to 
> specific topics, distributed among many different files. From my gmail 
> account, I infer that Google also knows about the names of people 
> associated with specific topics, so messages from people like us add to 
> the credibility of an XML site.
> 
> Stylus Studio and DataDirect XQuery have managed to get very good search 
> engine ratings - if you search for acronyms or phrases we use in XML, 
> you'll see what I mean. But like you, I find it objectionable when an 
> email I send gets changed into a source of links into the Stylus Studio 
> site to improve their search engine ranking. It makes it look as though 
> I were referring to their software at times that I am not.
> 
> You'll notice that the Stylus site also includes many of the W3C specs, 
> other mailing lists, and anything that might tell the search engines 
> that it contains a large body of credible data related to the things 
> that they sell. I don't like this strategy. It does seem to be an 
> effective way of increasing page rank with the current Google 
> algorithms. I wouldn't do it. I especially would not modify people's 
> messages or existing documents to refer to products I'm trying to sell. 
> I think Stylus and DataDirect are great products, but this strategy 
> always bugged me.
> 
> One thing has gotten better: at one point, Google would sometimes prefer 
> the Stylus copies of information to the original; for instance, if you 
> Googled on "xml-dev", it would take you to their copy of the archives, 
> or often to their copy of a document. Now that does not usually happen.
> 
> Jonathan
> 
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