[fluid]

The Escapist has an article about corruption in the EVE world, where there is a twisted plot of cheating developers giving benefit to their avatars and others within the game. The annoying part is that the Escapist is calling the scandal "Jumpgate". Totally confused me when I read the article.

(via Slashdot, which has a few posts regarding Jumpgate the game. Might be worthwhile to go chime in.)

[Jump]

Arrogance is to be expected from a large game like EVE. Still, Netdevil should get council to issue a cease and desist order on that article title as it is apparent that it would be harmful to their product.

[Supermax]

Interesting reading nonetheless. I believe that almost every MMOG that's been around for some time have similar skeletons in their closets; even Jumpgate was haunted by those demons back on the EU server.

PS. Isn't The Escapist run by Themis?

[vorlon31]

GM's play best buddies, cheat and are arrogant - whats new? And those demons werent and arent limited to just the old eu Jumpgate.

As for netdevil needing to issue some sort of control on the situation... WHY? this is the best free advertisement money cant buy. Everyone knows about EVE but not many know about jumpgate as a product. Trust me the two games wont get confused and Eve's corruption will stick to eve not Jumpgate whilst Jumpgate does get the hi profile attention for zero bucks effort.

[Algore]

I imagine quite a few people will type Jumpgate into google regarding this and that can only be a good thing imo.

[Jump]

You guys obviously don't understand how search engines and SERPS work. They will type Jumpgate into a search and instead of finding the game we all love they will find a zillion references to this article that is getting lot's of back links. This is keyword hijacking at it's best. With this type of attention, within weeks the keyword Jumpgate may no longer be relevent to the game Jumpgate.

[Algore]

Weird that Sir Jump. I type Jumpgate into google and it brings up my favourite game.

[Jump]

As well as a whole list of non relevent results. If enough sites link to that discusion with the word Jumpgate in it then that will eventually take over the top spot. That is how the system works. This is why people spend thousands of $$$ for keyword relevent backlinks to take their sites to the top of the SERPS. I have done the same for my other sites. It's a battle to stay on top.

Of course, Jumpgate has the age of it's domains going for it. But when Authority sites like /. start linking elsewhere with that keyphrase it's just a matter of time. Unless it dies off real quick. Then the age of domains may win over. But if it persists for a length of time then it's a matter of numbers.

[Jump]

I added nofollow tags to the link in the first post so we won't be participating in creating new relevence for the term Jumpgate.

[fluid]

Originally Posted by Jump

I added nofollow tags to the link in the first post so we won't be participating in creating new relevence for the term Jumpgate.

Wouldn't the search engine still associate the context of the link for its search database, though? All nofollow would do, to my understanding, is request that the crawler not include that page in its otherwise recursive scan.

Nonetheless, there's a good chance that there are enough people decrying the misuse of the term to generate some interest in the real Jumpgate. We'll just have to hope that all those crazy people posting the link on various blogs and forums don't water down the search results.

[Jump]

nofollow is a standard introduced by google. It means the link on this page is not from a trusted source and this site will not be giving any weight to its content.

Having a nofollow link to your site makes that link absolutely useless for anything other than the traffic you get from those that click it. You will not get any PR from the site with the nofollow link and it is not counted as a backlink in Google.

And your right. If enough people post in those articles comments with links back to here or Jumpgate or any Jumpgate related site then that will help combat the keyword theft.

[fluid]

rel="nofollow" actually tells a search engine "Don't score this link" rather than "Don't follow this link." This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: "Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document."

Wikipedia explained away my confusion. I was thinking of the metatag.

Hooray for topic hijacking.