Zombie Newspaper Sites Rise from the Grave

What happens when a newspaper dies? Apparently, in some cases, its digital ghost lives on in mysterious, unrecognizable forms. From a report: Minneapolis neighborhood newspaper the Southwest Journal shuttered at the end of 2020, but its web domain continues to post fresh content under the auspices of a Delaware "SEO company" whose leader lives in Serbia. Though the site still includes a few legacy Journal articles now under fictitious bylines, all of the most recent posts are more or less junk content evidently designed to manipulate search engines. There's a Feb. 10 article about handling raw chicken. Another article highlights the "10 most popular bitcoin casino games."

While there is a recent article on creating "a breathtaking rock garden" written from the perspective of someone purportedly living in the East Harriet neighborhood, the site's content, generally speaking, is no longer in line with the Journal's longstanding coverage of South Minneapolis neighborhoods. The "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the site pointed to an email address connected to an entity known as Shantel LLC. According to its own website, Shantel LLC is an "SEO company" from Delaware, and, as of Feb. 17, its homepage read, "Let's make the internet a great again!" The company said it specializes in "writing services, SEO optimization services, and similar SEO-related services." (Shantel LLC's website was utterly emptied of content around the time this article published, but archived versions of the site include that same company description.)

Shantel's apparent CEO and founder is Nebojsa Vujinovic, a businessman living in Belgrade, Serbia, per his LinkedIn profile. When I reached out to Vujinovic via LinkedIn on Feb. 10, he said he had only owned the Journal's domain for a matter of days. He confirmed that he uses a mix of artificial intelligence and human writers to create new content on the sites he owns. As he puts it: "AI + human correction." [...] The Southwest Journal isn't the only site under Vujinovic's ownership. Several other former news sites have begun listing a Shantel LLC email address as a primary contact. That includes the Missoula Independent, which was at one time the largest weekly paper in Montana, according to archived versions of the website. News conglomerate and former owner Lee Enterprises shut down the Independent in 2018. Like the Southwest Journal's website, the Independent's site now includes a few legacy articles on local politics and culture, but all the articles posted after June 2022 have taken a strange turn.

SEO

[TechyImmigrant]

Anything offering SEO is a scam. [eom]

Re:

[guruevi]

Because people visit those websites off course. Those content farms literally generate hundreds of ad views per page and force people that want to follow a story to click through 10-20 different pages.

It's basically the same as People magazine or any of the other rags you used to see in the corner stores, tantalizing headlines, lots and lots of ads.

Re:

[jythie]

I think the idea is that they use all these zombie sites crosslinked to each other to raise the profile of sites that pay them.

Re:

[TechyImmigrant]

My post is not offering SEO. So it says nothing about itself.

Not new

[DarkOx]

This is trick spammers have been using for decades (SEO firms are just spammers) you buy a recently abandon domain from a defunct company with a good reputation and rock-and-roll until the RBLs catch up.

Using old news paper sites specifically probably has added "value" for disinformation operations; but this is hardly earth shattering.

Re:

[CAIMLAS]

Oh, it's much older than that.

Journalism, on the whole, has been historically "yellow" since the beginning of time.

Arguably, it all largely still is, and it was merely that they'd managed to gain a high degree of confidence in the early 20th century due to their ability to reach more people at once.

I think it should be pretty apparent in 2023 that that's the prevailing state of things, and the Internet simply made it more evident with competing views, opinions (and yes, science) being able to gain traction.

Outdated

[phantomfive]

"its homepage read, "Let's make the internet a great again!"

The "great again" meme was outdated already by last election.

How is this news?

[jonadab]

All IT people have known since 1996 that if you let a domain's registration lapse even one second past the renewal deadline, it immediately gets gobbled up by the pod people and used for some particularly stupid form of advertising or another. It isn't always SEO specifically, but it's generally something just about that worthless. You cannot get the domain back.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

All IT people have known since 1996 that if you let a domain's registration lapse even one second past the renewal deadline, it immediately gets gobbled up by the pod people and used for some particularly stupid form of advertising or another. It isn't always SEO specifically, but it's generally something just about that worthless. You cannot get the domain back.

Wasn't it Dicks Sporting Goods that eventually needed to buy the shorter version of their domain name, which had to be manhandled away from some stiff competition in the adult-oriented market?

I'm bettin' that domain will spring back up again if the sporting goods business continues to soften. It'll most certainly be recycled with the economy of flesh growing once again.

To many people forget!

[oldgraybeard]

It is the Internet! The Internet is not to be trusted!

Reason

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Vernor Vinge, in his science fiction, called the galactic internet the "net of a million lies". I wonder if he even realized the extent of it.

In addition to stories warping as they are retold and passed through not just different cultures, but different species, often with radically different senses and communicion (think Darmok and Jalaad at Tanagra, but with spiders and clicks or creatures with frond touching, 1000 translations) as well as different motivated jerks twisting things.

But industrialized lying is a whole new ballgame. State organizations with the money to generate and dominate ideas feigning honest commentary out of the blue. It has always existed but the ability to hide and mass produce is now beyond all reason.

AI's having been writing content to years

[Puls4r]

If you ever do a search looking for the 'best of' something, you will find hundreds of websites with (generally) Indian named bylines that are clearly generated by either an AI or someone with the communication ability of a 5 year old. No conclusions will be drawn in the articles, they will literally copy the product's advertising print.

The internet has become worthless for looking for reviews of products. Believe or not, you stand a far better chance of getting realistic results by searching forums and reddit.

So, they are making something along the lines of

[williamyf]

"Display Advertising. Targeting matters. We build and target unique audience segments for every direct and programmatic advertising client. Business Software"

SEO and more SEO

The quote comes from this site:

https://slashdotmedia.com/ [slashdotmedia.com]

Never abandon a domain

[manu0601]

Never abandon a domain. In the worst case, the next owner could seed malware at previously published URL

Of course, keeping it costs money. There should be a gravestone status, where the domain cannot be recycled.

Re:

[Baloo Uriza]

That's what the expiration, redemption and pendingDelete periods are for. Theoretically. Sucks that the big registrars will sell domains that are expired or in redemption period when they shouldn't be.

it's called 'link farming'

[0xG]

The more links, the higher the Google page rank.
Been happening for years.