Dear Daily Dot interviewer who is reading this thread:
You want to call out BHW and make us all sound like a bunch of unscrupulous spammers? If you think some young guy having a bunch of Pinterest accounts is spamming, you aint seen nothing, honey. Call out Amazon.com, the biggest spammers and black hatters on the internet. You want to talk about black hat methods? Let me tell you something. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of pages, if not millions, of products that are not even for sale. The products are from former merchants who have left Amazon and closed their accounts. The products show on Amazon as "no longer available." Amazon claims that they have no way of taking the pages down. Bullshit. Every webmaster can take the pages from their site down. Amazon chooses not to. Why should they? The products show up in Google. And get this. Sometimes the products show up higher in Google's search results than where the product is really for sale, which is at the former merchant's website.
Another thing is that once a person clicks on the link for that product, they are on Amazon's website. The person sees that the product is no longer available, and they are right on Amazon to find something else to buy. The merchant's feedback also stays on Amazon, even though the merchant has been gone for years. Amazon won't remove that either. They say they have no way to. So if you put the former merchant's store name in Google, the Amazon profile page is right on page 1 of Google's results.
Pictures of the former merchant's products are also in Google images and direct to Amazon. And Google's shopping link? Yep, there too. The "no longer available" product is sometimes ranked higher in Google images and Google's shopping than it is at the former merchant's website where the product really is available. Interested googler clicks on the Amazon links and former merchant loses sale because interested googler is now on Amazon's site.
Let's talk about keyword stuffing and hiding keywords. An Amazon merchant can put about 40 keywords into a box when creating their product page. These keywords are hidden on the product page you see, but the keywords show up in Amazon's search results as well as Google's search results. This includes the "no longer available" products that Amazon won't take down from their site. So we have keyword stuffing and hidden keywords for products that will never be available on Amazon again because the merchant has left years ago. Amazon dominates Google's search results at every turn, even for products that they will never have for sale. That's not only sneaky, but it's dishonest.
If any of us did what Amazon does, we would not only be penalized by Google but probably thrown out of the search results. But why would Google penalize Amazon when one report claimed that Amazon gives Google five million dollars a month for Adwords? All this kind of makes someone putting a lot of pictures on Pinterest very minor, huh?
There are many wonderful people here who are always willing to help others. Not everyone here is bad, and the one who did or didn't use Pinterest in an aggressive way is not bad either if he did do it. Look what every webmaster and blogger is up against. We are up against the real black hatters and spammers. You've pissed off the woman black hatter now. Go after Amazon, and Google for allowing this to keep happening.
Sincerely,
redrubies
