Perhaps you’ve heard of the play or seen the movie Six Degrees of Separation. One of the elements of the movie was that everyone is no more than six people (degrees) away from anyone else on the planet, the trick of course is finding the right six people. This led to the (in)famous game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, where the object was to connect any other actor to Kevin Bacon in six steps or less.
So what does all this movie trivia have to do with search engines, well thanks to Jeremy Zawodny a large portion of the web just got one step closer to lesbian porn. WebGuerrilla broke the story of A-List blogger Jeremy Zawodny selling text links without a link condom. The ethics of the whole debate raged across the web (threadwatch, seoroundtable, oilman, searchenginewatch, John Jonas) . However as search engine engineer Matt Cutts from Google points out one of the websites he links to is a lesbian porn scraper website.
Matt Cutts: Text link follow-up
Let’s take a concrete example. Jeremy vetted his sponsored links trying to remove anything reminiscent of blog comment spam, but take one of Jeremy’s sponsors, www.thisisouryear.com. Can you get from that site to the “Lesbian Gay Sex Positions†site at www.gay-sex-positions.com in two mouse clicks? Looks like there may be some scraped content on that porn site.
So now that Jeremy is two clicks away from a bad neighborhood lets take a look at who’s now three links away according to Yahoo Site Explorer [link:jeremy.zawodny.com]
Spread Firefox | Igniting the web
Scripting News: 12/13/2005
Official Google Blog
CamWorld
Jon’s Radio
John Battelle’s Searchblog
Yahoo! Search blog
Waxy.org: Links Miniblog
The Unofficial Yahoo! Weblog – yahoo.weblogsinc.com
O’Reilly Radar
Well for all these folks, congratulations you’re now all within six degrees of a lesbian porn scraper!