Creating great content that results in massive amounts of traffic and links is the essence of quality content writing. When a blog post goes viral it can generate tens of thousands of visitors for your website, which in turn becomes links, increasing your Google PageRank and eventually your rankings.
This type of blog post is called link bait, as it has been written with the express intention of gaining links for your website. The best type of content for gaining links is usually humorous or contentious posts that cause people to either love it or hate it; either way they feel compelled to comment and tell others about it.
The problem with content like this is that it sometimes backfires and causes you, the website owner, problems. This happened to one blogger in the USA this week when they wrote a list of women in New York they considered to be ‘skanks’.
This offensive (yet probably quite funny) blog post named famous female figures living in New York and critisised them for their way of life, their character and just for the hell of it.
The problems arose when one of the women mentioned in the blog, former model Liskula Cohen, took serious offense to the post and went to court to force Google to hand over details of the person who posted it. Thirty-seven-year-old Liskula Cohen was described as:
I would have to say that first place award for ‘Skankiest in NYC’ would have to go to Liskula Gentile Cohen.
Cohen, a former Australians Vogue covergirl, was a “40-something” who “may have been hot 10 years ago”.
New York judge Joan Madden ruled against the blogger, who claimed that they were using the Internet as a forum for their own opinions, deciding instead that the author should be accountable for what had been written.
Miss Cohen’s lawyer said that they were delighted that bloggers have been told that they can’t defame people on the Internet and expect to get away with it. They will now be taking legal action against the blogger, as details of the person’s identity have been handed over by Google.
This should serve as a warning to anyone, that while contentious posts may be great for attracting links, they can also attract the attentions of the courts.
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[…] week we reported how Google was ordered by a US court to hand over details of the blogger who made libellous claims against former model Liskula Cohen. […]
[…] recently wrote about the former Vogue model Liskula Cohen, and she took Google to court in order to get the identity of a blogger who wrote offensive material about on a blogspot blog. […]
[…] is the second case in as many months where Google has been sued for the identity of someone, after Liskula Cohen sued them for the identity of a blogger who wrote about her in New York. Filed under: Google […]