I’ve been following Blake Ross‘s coverage of the Stanford Daily‘s link-farming with some interest since it first popped up on my radar. While it started out with his discovery of the practice at the Stanford Daily, it expands to the discovery that lots of college papers do it and leads to some interesting conversations (for more, see my attempts to discuss ethics with SEOs in the Syndic8 bruhaha). There’s a somewhat happy ending as the Standard Daily has removed their linkfarm.

Now curious, I checked the Daily Trojan (Technorati) and they came up clean. Woo, we’re not evil! Kudos DT!

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a good place to get online college degrees (not to mention licensed Canadian pharmaceuticals, and fish oil), be sure to check out UCLA’s Daily Bruin (Technorati). Yeah, Go Bruins! *snicker*

(College newspapers: yeah, you’re independent entities, but your actions will still reflect on your institutions. Also, stop lying to yourselves, you’re not serving anyone but yourselves in making the web less useful. I hope this sort of pissing in the pool never loses its stigma.)