Pirillo: Microperfusion or Microconfusion
Duncan Riley> Media tart Chris Pirillo, he of Lockergnome fame has gained praised from high profile PR blogger Steve Rubel in relation to a strategy that Rubel describes as “brilliant”.
The strategy basically involves hijacking name mis-spellings/ or corrects as suggested by Google to obtain traffic from those seeking to find a website.
Basically, Pirillo typed the name of Rubel’s blog into Google (Micro Persuasion) and Google asks “did you mean Microperfusion?”. He then posts with the word “Microperfusion” as the post headline as Google picks up his post as the Number 1 result for the term, presumably on the basis that there is only 14,100 other references to the word on Google (a relatively small number) and that Pirillo’s blog has a lot of pulling power. Never one for modesty, Pirillo describes the strategy as “Lockergnoming” and describes the result as “Driving traffic to a server”.
Later, Pirillo defends the tactic by saying he was trying to drive traffic to Rubel, not steal it.
One problem though, he’s just provided written instructions on how to manipulate Google and basically hijack people’s key words. Whilst not illegal, the tactic, when utilised with personal or corporate names verges on immoral and can only lead to confusion. Whilst there are many out their, particularly in the SEO field who already know that this is one of a number of tatics that drive traffic to sites, spreading the information on such a highly trafficked site such as Pirillo’s can only lead to further use/ or misuse and people unfortunately being hurt. I’m sure Chris wouldn’t like his links, which he relies on for his enormous Adsense Revenue, to be hijacked, mis-spelling or not, so why encourage or provide instructions to others?