By Chris Crum via WebProNews
Matt Cutts
Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Jay Rockefeller, sent letters to Google’s Matt Cutts, Yahoo’s Shashi Seth and Microsoft’s Qi Lu about moving company scammers using paid links to game search results.
The committee is conducting an investigation into the scammers, and found paid links appearing to give them better rankings in the search engines.
In the letter to Cutts, Rockefeller says, “My staff has conducted a number of test searches using your company’s search engine. Frequently, Internet moving brokers identified in the investigation, which received high numbers of consumer complaints, ranked highly in the search results. Based upon evidence obtained through the investigation, it appears that some of these companies may be “gaming the system” in order to boost their search rankings. These companies appear to be using paid links to inflate their popularity. For example, one company had tens of thousands of external links to its website and, upon closer review, these links proved to be largely irrelevant. They included abandoned blogs, link directories for unrelated topics, and college student groups and organizations, such as the Cornell Gymnastics Club.”
