Large, popular websites are starting to engage in search engine spam. This has been a problem since pay-per-click advertising became popular, and has been especially driven by the PageRank algorithm, which has increased dramatically the value of a link. Sites like Forbes.com and UCSD Guardian have spammy pages set up on their domains, usually with links at the bottom of all their pages that are meant not to deceive users, but still lead to pages that are filled with keywords, no useful content, and lots of AdSense ads. These sites are cashing in not on their content or any merit on their part, but just their site’s popularity, PageRank, and rankings.

via webguerrilla