Violet Blue has discovered, the hard way, what the dead tree newspaper industry (or, at least, a substantial fraction of it) has seized upon as its grand strategy for surviving in the second decade of this fast-moving 21st century. Turns out the answer is…

… wait for it …

Search engine spamming! Yup, Violet has documented how a bunch of newspapers are duplicating their online content like crazy across a nest of subdomains, after stripping out most of the links and stuffing with ill-considered keywords. Apparently the brilliant idea is to lure search engine visitors into these virtual crab pots, hold them there until they start to drown, and then hope they click on the advertising links as they struggle to escape.

There’s only one little problem: it’s not an original idea. People have been doing it for so long that it’s been prohibited by Google’s webmaster guidelines for years and years. Anybody still dumb enough to try it will eventually find that their sites don’t show up on Google’s search results at all … or not, at least, anywhere in the first ten or twenty pages of search results.

Game over, guys. Enjoy whatever it is you decide to do next.