Early this week I began to notice the URLs of the ripoffreport.com have changed. I covered The Ripoff Report in my post “Black Hat Social Media: What’s Wrong with The Communications Decency Act“. I examined the URL changes and it appears that Ed Madgeson has hired an SEO. The changes are search engine friendly URLs which have the following structure: /%BusinessCategory%/%BusinessName%/%ComplaintTitle%/ . They are supported by search engine friendly redirects (301’s) from the old URLs to the new ones. The URL changes do not appear to be simply the result of software changes; they are very well thought out. Google seems to think so as well.
The URL changes are likely just an attempt to garner more search volume and rank higher on the company names under which reports are filed. Google, however, seems to have missed this change as they are reindexing pages from The RipOff Report that were currently removed from their index pursuant to legal demands. We know this because our phone has been ringing.
My question is do these purposeful URL rewrites and the SEO specific redirects around them put the site outside of the safe harbors of The Communications Decency Act? I guess we’ll have to wait for someone to test the waters.
