Here is the answer to all your questions. Nice Dad who is too busy to buy his kid a birthday present.
Media Duped by Fake Story About Boy Who Hired Hookers By Betsy Schiffman EmailMay 23, 2008 | 1:07:56 PMCategories: Media A good fake news story calls for fake hookers, and nobody knows that better than Lyndon Antcliff. The internet marketer whipped up a phony story about a 13 year-old boy in Texas who used his father's credit card to go on a $30,000 spending spree, culminating with a game of Halo at a motel with a couple hookers. (The kid convinced the hookers he was a midget traveling with the circus.) The story was nothing short of genius, and it got picked up far and wide -- it made it to the front page of Digg and into a segment on Fox News (in which Jeanine Pirro made a passionate argument for the prostitutes' arrest). It didn't seem to matter that the story was made up. "The thing is, I tried to make it as ridiculous as possible so it would be obvious that it would be fake," says Antcliff, a writer by trade. (Indeed, the story now has a disclaimer that it's a parody and "not to be taken seriously.") Antcliff, who wrote the piece on behalf of a client, estimates it garnered roughly 6,000 inbound links. "It's been a lesson in the power of social media and the power of people suspending their disbelief. [Traditional news organizations] are always banging about how inaccurate blogs are, but in this case, it was the opposite," Antcliff says. We didn't get an official response from Google about how the search engine might treat fake content that's used as a marketing tool, but search quality guru Matt Cutts implied that the company frowns upon this sort of practice. "My quick take is that Google's webmaster guidelines allow for cases such as this: 'Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites)," Cutts wrote in a Sphinn forum. "It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it.' There's not much more deceptive or misleading than a fake story without any disclosure that the story is hoax." http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/05/fake-story-abou.html
*sigh* shows you how much effort the mainstream news puts into researching their stories instead of promoting ratings these days -_-
