I like a lot of the blogs on the Gawker network. Kotaku, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, and Valleywag are all blogs I read, with Valleywag being the one I must read everyday. One thing that infuriates me, however, is their use of “SEO” tricks to up their pageviews. Almost every article on the Gawker blogs will have links to “Posts tagged as” whatever, which links to a tag list.

I noticed on the actual sites that they change the color of internal link to blend in, and the external links look like links. That’s good, except that I read the blogs in Google Reader. So an article ends up looking like this:

valleywag-sucks.jpg

Holy Crap! 8 of the 12 links on that page are directed to a fucking tag list! First of all, this is incredibly annoying. If a person clicks on a link entitled “Facebook” then maybe clicking on it should take them to FACEBOOK!!!

Second, linking to internal “search results” for SEO purposes is frowned upon by Google. Of course, they’re not just doing this for the SEO, but also for crazy-insane inflated pageview stats.

I was gonna write a greasemonkey script to remove the annoying links, but before I could, I found an existing one. Unfortunately it doesn’t work in Google Reader.

A lot of other blogs are starting to do this, and it’s really starting to annoy me. I’m sure others are annoyed too. Maybe if enough people complain, these sites will ditch the annoying SEO tactics. Maybe we should report their evil ways to Google?

If I do end up giving up reading Valleywag, at least there’s a better (yet less often updated) successor, Uncov. Long live Uncov!