VW Caught Up Using Blackhat SEO

[1] VW was busted using invisible divs in their flash site to further their campaign for a top Google ranking. [2] Barry points out the VW site was featured on [3] Google’s Enterprise blog with a screen capture smack-dab in the middle, before any of this came about. This makes you wonder if they hadn’t already known what was going on before VW got busted? If it were you or I who would’ve got caught doing this kind of thing– our sites would be thrown in to Google hell for eternity(de-listed, or de-indexed), but thankfully VW obviously has some connections, since Google simply recommended to move their sly SEO keywords out of their invisible div and in to a META tag, which will greater accommodate Google’s Terms of Service.

I’d like to see exactly what text this scuffle was about. It brings up some great points– if the keywords or phrases were legitimate reproduction of the Flash presentation, shouldn’t they be allowed by Google? It’s tough to design a Flash website that ranks or places well in search results. I have a feeling this was a little more black hat, though.

MySpace Buys Photobucket

MySpace shocks the world with its decision to purchase [4] Photobucket for around $300m. Yes, you read right– 300 million dollars for a photo album website. Photobucket reports show the site receiving 17m uniques per month, but regardless of what Photobucket wants to believe; most of those were leached from MySpace. This is a big development considering MySpace only just recently lifted the ban on the embedding of Photobucket videos.

What good is Photobucket to MySpace? Honestly. Was it worth 300 million dollars? I don’t see the worth. Maybe if Photobucket was receiving those 17m uniques without the aid of MySpace. Is this an effort by MySpace to infiltrate other social sites with embedded images and video? Are they finally deciding to try to monetize the widget ecosystem of their service? Lots of questions to be answered. [5] Read what Mashable has to say about it.