As you know, Google’s co-founders launched a new company named Alphabet, which will be the parent company of Google and many of the other companies that were under Google.
They launched a new site at abc.xyz for the company home page but some folks noticed a joke on the site, a joke that is against Google’s webmaster guidelines.
Jack Clark spotted in the source code a hidden link on the period in the sentence that links to hooli.xyz, the Silicon Valley comedy TV show.
Danny Sullivan posted about the irony alert on Search Engine Land and posted a clear screen shot:
The link is still there, 12 hours after Danny posted about it. Yes, it is technically against Google’s guidelines but if Google did penalize anyone for this, even a third-party, it would seem a bit over the top.
Alphabet should leave the link, Google shouldn’t penalize the site. It is a joke, there is no intent to trick Google’s search engine here. That is the key point, it is not with intent to manipulate the Google algorithm.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
