Daily Cal Engaging in Minor Link Farming
Here is a post by Blake Ross on what the Daily Cal is doing:

The Daily Californian, Berkeley’s newspaper, has a link farm of its own (scroll to the bottom)...

In short, you’ve grown a link farm when you include a whole bunch of links on your page that are unlikely to be of interest to your audience and exist only to offer another “vote” for each page that could boost it in the search engine rankings. So for example, most Berkeley students probably don’t care about renting a car in Brisbane, Australia ("car rental brisbane), booking hotels in Italy ("Hotels Italy"), leasing a timeshare ("Timeshare Resales"), or embarking on an African safari ("African Safari")... Link farms are generally identified not only by their irrelevance to the actual page content but by the use of short keyword phrases that are intended to guess what people might search for later on. In other words, the hope is that when people search for “car rental brisbane,” the first result will be the site that the Daily Cal endorses.

The reason you should care is because many of the companies who engage in search engine spam are, lo and behold, the same companies who aren’t morally repelled by the idea of spamming your inbox or your blog. And sites like The Daily and The Daily Californian are effectively helping to fund them. Not by much, but they are contributing. These kinds of practices also lead to a serious reduction in the quality of search results since they undermine the democratic underpinnings of PageRank. This means that instead of spending all of its time on, you know, procuring and immortalizing all the world’s information, or defeating the language barrier, Google has to spend an inordinate amount of time fighting this crap that our own universities are encouraging.

I've e-mailed the Daily Cal for a copy of their advertising policy to see how this relates. Boy it sure would be nice if they had a Reader's Representaive who could comment on this.Email This Post!