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Companies that make money by distributing misleading versions of VLC

blog.l0cal.com

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Re: Companies that make money by distributing misleading versions of VLC

#3

I wonder if there are any SEO people out there, doing pro-bono (is that even the right term?) work for open source projects like this? It should be possible to fight back (or, as was discussed/suggested before, search engines are just broken).

I doubt it would be welcome, see http://jacobian.org/writing/seo-scumbags/

"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

Re: Companies that make money by distributing misleading versions of VLC

#6

I wonder if there are any SEO people out there, doing pro-bono (is that even the right term?) work for open source projects like this? It should be possible to fight back (or, as was discussed/suggested before, search engines are just broken).

I doubt it would be welcome, see http://jacobian.org/writing/seo-scumbags/ "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

The difference there is "I want a link back from your site to my site." That's the point at which the offer loses all possible shreds of credibility.

Re: Companies that make money by distributing misleading versions of VLC

#7

I wonder if there are any SEO people out there, doing pro-bono (is that even the right term?) work for open source projects like this? It should be possible to fight back (or, as was discussed/suggested before, search engines are just broken).

I doubt it would be welcome, see http://jacobian.org/writing/seo-scumbags/ "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

That's not SEO. That's spam. SEO is about optimizing portions of your website for people using a search engine. Lumping all SEO together is akin to lumping all hackers together as criminals. I equate the techniques to those used in journalism. You want to front load the article with the most important information. The least important information should be at the end.

Re: Companies that make money by distributing misleading versions of VLC

#9
Disclaimer: VLC dev and VideoLAN chairman

I think the worse part of all this mess is that Google refuses to act and stop those. This was requested quite a few time and Google told us to go away because we didn't own all the trademarks in the US (even though we still have copyright).

Moreover, the safe-browsing initiative, used in Chrome 12, is a complete joke. Reporting one of those websites make the safe-browsing re-scan the website, and find absolutely no issue with it and white-label it, which is even worse...

I contacted the Safe-Browsing initiative to report the issue and they told me "that their wasn't any issue on those websites...". Right...

Of course, running any of those executables on your Windows machine makes MSE (or other antivirus) scream...

I hope that Google fighting spam initiative will improve the situation, but seeing http://vlc-download.com/ on the first page of "VLC" search makes me wondering...

Re: Companies that make money by distributing misleading versions of VLC

#10
post #9

Disclaimer: VLC dev and VideoLAN chairman I think the worse part of all this mess is that Google refuses to act and stop those. This was requested quite a few time and Google told us to go away because we didn't own all the trademarks in the US (even though we still have copyright). Moreover, the safe-browsing initiative, used in Chrome 12, is a complete joke. Reporting one of those websites make the safe-browsing re…

How likely is it that these sites serve up clean binaries to Google's spider?
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