[grey-area]

I suspect datadial know exactly what they're doing here - as revenge for this alleged petty act by the lawyers they're now google-bombing the term shopzilla (by deliberately including so many refs to shopzilla in this new blog post), and hoping to teach them a lesson about who is in control of links. They're already on the second page for a simple search for shopzilla, and I'd expect them to move up closer to the top if this gets more publicity and links in from other sites. Does it deserve it?

A very strange attempt by Shopzilla in the first place to control links to them, so it would be interesting to hear their side of this story. I looked up datadial - they're a London SEO shop, and their original blog post is typical of SEO blogs - lots of links to random sites strung together into a blog post to boost their blog's ranking for that topic - ecommerce in this case. I have to wonder if this little storm in a teacup isn't more beneficial to them the more absurd it sounds and the stormier it gets - even if it dies down later the benefit will still be there for them.

It's strange to see the court of public opinion function on sites like reddit and HN - the more controversial and snappier the original post, the more traction it gets, and nuances and truth are lost in the rush to condemn based on a very limited set of facts.

[acomms]

Very strange indeed - people don't take legal action lightly. I don't understand why a simple email asking to remove the link wouldn't work. And if that fails you can always just use the Google Disavow: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

[scrabble]

I caught on to that about halfway through the article -- as I'd imagine most readers did.

It seems a bit much to me. Someone from Shopzilla responded in the comments with an apology and explanation of what had happened. Seemed good enough for me, mistakes do happen and I'd be surprised if this was started by Shopzilla with malicious intent.

[darkarmani]

> We flag up thousands of backlinks that are potentially spam

I don't know if this is good enough. Isn't he basically admitting that they send out thousands of C&D orders for linking? He's just apologizing for picking on someone with the means to fight back against this bullying.

[notatoad]

Yeah, that sounds like a pretty bullshit apology. He's admitting that this is standard practice for them, and apologizing for getting caught.