I'm not going to desphinn this, in fact I sphunn it, but I don't exactly care that the NY Times didn't link to the company that generated the fake reviews.  After all that company is simply providing false advertising to the public.  Why should they get link love?  Why should anyone want to help them?  Maybe the company/website that was accepting the obviously faked reviews shouldn't get link love either.  They are pretty much co conspirators in this spammy game.Its bad enough that the SE's weigh endless reviews and use it as a sign for higher rankings.  Its clear when looking at Google Maps, based on what spammers have done, that a large volume of reviews helps w/ Maps rankings.  Why encourage the SOBS that feast off of this.  It only makes life harder for any business that tries to operate with a modicum of honesty within a brutally competitive world.Andrew:  Its interesting how you discerned a possible "bias" based on where the links went.  Its also revealing how you identified that some of the links go right back into keywords for which the NYTimes is trying to get rankings.  That is quite inciteful.  Frankly all sites do this.  I don't see any reason to give link love benefit to the sc*m bags that make life harder for other businesses though.

pearl, the issue I am pondering is not whether or not the spammers were worthy of a link, but rather that the journalist seemed to be making a judgement that they were not which seems outside the scope of reporting objectively on the news.

Hmmm This one is a tricky one. Should I give a link to the fake review site or not???Or am I missing something?

I agree with Andrew, if they were reporting objectively they should either link to all the sources, including the spammer, or, if they decidied it was not in the publics best interests to link to the spammer, who would recieve benefits out of the link, then they should have opted to link to nobody. Except maybe hoarding their own internal links, as they do.

niche, it's not about should I give a link to a spammer - the withheld link was for the spammer's site, the site where the spammer wrote the fake reviews got a link.  To me it's about why did they withhold a link to the main subject of the article?

As I wrote on my blog: "A journalist deciding that they should not link to a spammer from an article about the spammer because they are “evil” and they want to deny them SEO benefits is akin to deciding not to show a photo of Kim Jong Il in an article about him because he’s batshit crazy and you don’t want to provide him with the promotion."

One notion that might get the NYT off the hook IMO is if they thought they could incur some kind of bad neighborhood penalty by linking to the spammer.

No idea if it was a judgement call or not or anything to do with bias, but I do have to wonder why anyone thinks the NYT is an unbiased newspaper?

It's my understanding that they haven't been unbiased for a long, long time. It seems that most newspapers, and TV news for that matter, have lost their unbiased-ness many years ago.

Totally agree Jill.  That's why they should be called out every time they reveal their biases, even if the bias was against an evil spammer.