[SAC] Regarding: Web Defacement

[Frank Warmerdam]

Dear sir,

This is in regard to the phone call about inappropriate search engine
optimization techniques.

On December 2nd, 2009, someone on the internet registered with our web
site, logged in and added pointers to the cheappoolproducts.com web site
in our "wiki", a user editable portion of our web site.  I believe we
discovered three examples of this, two of which I have handy:

http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/wiki/UsersWikiMain?action=diff&version=48
http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/wiki/UsersWikiMain?action=diff&version=46

We have not done an exhaustive review of our web sites to find if there
are other examples, and it is hard to know how many other web sites have
been similarly defaced.

I presume this was done to take advantage of our high search engine
ranking with engines like Google.  That is, it was an attempt to steal
our "Google Karma" by pointing our web site to yours.

As discussed, this was no doubt done by the search engine optimization
firm you recently had a relationship with.  I would like to stress that
this sort of web site defacement is not a legitimate business activity
and can reflect poorly on you.  In some jurisdictions it could be legally
actionable, though we have no interest in taking legal action.

I would strongly discourage you from paying the firm in question for it's
services, or dealing with them in the future.  I would also appreciate
the name of the firm in question.

Some relavent information on search engine optimization, and the "black
hat" techniques of link farming, and spamdexing can be found on wikipedia.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm

Speaking on behalf of OSGeo, the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (where
I am a director, and a member of the System Administration Committee).

   http://www.osgeo.org/

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent