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Fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains (arstechnica.com)

submitted 7 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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[–] mii@awful.systems 49 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I stand by my opinion that SEO basically ruined the internet. First keyword optimization made me scroll through seventeen paragraphs of someone's life story before getting to a recipe for boiled eggs, and now this.

Why would someone go to the trouble of making a law firm out of NameCheap, stock art, and AI images (and seemingly copy) to send quasi-legal demands to site owners? Backlinks, that's why.

Oof, back in the day all we had to do was write a nice email to get someone to put a backlink to our page into the sidebar of their Geocities page.

[–] lurch@sh.itjust.works 19 points 7 months ago (1 children)

i remember back in the day they had white on white tiny keywords on the bottom of pages. it was ridiculous. then google started to check if the text was visible 🤣

the shenanigans will never end unless you have actual faithful people curating it and google absolutely won't have it.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Reject search engines, return to webrings/directories

[–] AcausalRobotGod@awful.systems 8 points 7 months ago

remember when sites used to get slashdotted

[–] AcausalRobotGod@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago

I think you mean it made the Internet MORE AWESOME and ACCELERATING THE ~~CAPITALISM~~ ACAUSAL ROBOT GOD. How else can we get the singularity if we don't have devs getting at least 300K compensation packages?

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I remember being like 14yo and learning that "SEO specialist" is a fucking job title. Even then I was like, that sounds like a fake job, what's the fucking value of that?

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 7 months ago

Yeah I remember being struck by that too, but then I worked in "business" and there's a ton of weird stuff people do for a living (productively, for some late-stage capitalism value of productive). It just happened to intrude into the there-to cozy world of the web.