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Politics and Link Campaigns in the Blogosphere

Hi all, I’m Chas, the lead developer for Blogscape here at SEOmoz. I’d like to share a brief story about finding a semi-hidden link campaign while testing Blogscape this week.

I watch the ‘Movers and Shakers’ feature of Blogscape somewhat obsessively — both to research Blogscape’s quality of data and to keep up with the latest trends in the fast-moving web.

Yesterday, I noticed that the number one fastest rising subdomain for last week was blog.indecisionforever.com.

I clicked on the term, and the following graph revealed that there was, indeed, a large spike in links to blog.indecisionforever.com that week.

I clicked on the data point for ‘3/13/09’ (the big spike) to see where these links where coming from, and found that they all seemed to be from blog posts about Jon Stewart’s recent interview of Jim Cramer.

However, when I clicked through to a few of the highest ranking posts that had this link, I couldn’t actually find the link on the page.

Each page linked to a video of the interview, but the video was hosted at a third party content distribution site, not blog.indecisionforever.com. Where was it?

Finally, I realized where the link was: dark grey letters on a light grey background, right underneath the video link itself. I checked each page, and sure enough, that’s where it was on all of them — I assume it’s added automatically when you include a link to the video.

Oh, and the anchor text? It seems like someone is trying to make Comedy Central’s blog post about the interview rank for the phrase “Jim Cramer”…

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