mashraqi

[ This is my personal blog so all opinions expressed here are mine. I am a product, scalability, operations and monetization advisor and currently employed as Director of Business Operations & Technical Strategy for a top 50 website that delivers billions of page views per month. I was a keynote panelist for Scaling Up or Out keynote at MySQL Conference and speak regularly at conferences and user groups. ]
Farhan "Frank" Mashraqi

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Verizon forcefully putting links in messages

Verizon Wireless has started doing something that I consider really unethical.

It seems they are implementing black hat SEO techniques to increase their site's visibility in search engines.

I have been using blogger's mobile blogging feature using Verizon Wireless. Recently when I tried to blog about Korean Barbeque using my phone, I was shocked to find out that Verizon had forcefully injected the following crap into my message. Worse, they didn't even make the links "nofollow."

Having all this blob of crap is only going to get your blog penalized by search engines as all those media posts will be considered duplicate content.

A quick Google search reveals that Verizon Wireless's nasty act is already on hundreds of sites.

What Verizon doesn't realize is that this will be considered spam by search engines as the same text and link will appear on all user sites that use Verizon Wireless for mobile blogging.

I guess I am going to stop blogging using my Verizon phone.

Shame on you Verizon!

The spam message forcefully injected in the posts follows:
This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!<br /><br />To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit <a href="http://www.verizonwireless.com/picture">www.verizonwireless.com/picture</a>.<br /><br />To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime® 6.5 or higher is required. Visit <a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download">www.apple.com/quicktime/download</a> to download the free player or upgrade your existing QuickTime® Player. Note: During the download process when asked to choose an installation type (Minimum, Recommended or Custom), select Minimum for faster download.

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