Guest Blogger: Doug Pierce

This is a guest post by Doug Pierce, the Co-Founder and Head of Research at Digital Due Diligence, a boutique Internet equity analysis firm.

It’s a curious yet common practice at the bottom of Chinese websites. A selection of curated hyperlinks that go by many names – “friendly links”, “cooperative partners”, “enterprise promotion” – but have one purpose: to manipulate search engines.

While ostensibly there to help visitors navigate the web, the evolution of the Chinese Internet has turned this otherwise benign footer element into a commodity bought and sold by savvy web entrepreneurs and shifty SEO consultants for their own gain and to the detriment of the Chinese Internet as a whole. While it’s easy to blame shortcomings in the algorithms, a more well rounded explanation for their persistence is a fundamental attribution error by search engines toward individual expression that doesn’t deliver the same utility when applied to China. [Read more...]