Blog & SEO Business Models: Hosting Content Spam

SEOs Are Scum:
For a long time many bloggers have stated that SEOs are scum, as said best by Anil Dash.

I've always had a pretty low opinion of the Search Engine Optimization industry. Though there are of course legitimate experts in the field, it seems chock full of people who are barely above spammers, and they taint the image of the whole group.

Content Spam:
Blog comment spam is one common type that bloggers know all too well, but creating tons of rubbish content is another type of spam.

HotNacho hires writers to write low quality articles for $3 each. The articles, being of low quality, have little value by themselves. However, if you can get an authoritative site to host the articles you can make a ton of money from advertising.

Affordable Quality Hosting:
WordPress - an open sourced blog software make which is part of the anti spam brigade - hosted over 100,000 HotNacho spam pages, linking to them from the home page using a negative div.

Hmm... manipulating search results for personal gain by posting complete crap to a hidden section on your site.

What makes that action more ethical / better than actions of the average SEO?

Is this the type of openness we should expect from open source software? Where is the transparency? hehehe.

Google Funds Web Pollution, Again:
Google is funding that web pollution with their AdSense program.

If the stuff is bad enough that it needs kicked out of Google's index then how were they displaying ads on over 100,000 pages on that site without noticing the problem. Why are the ads still there?

I think this is the real story that everyone is missing. Google's AdSense quality control is a complete joke.

Advertisers and content publishers should be disappointed in Google's lousy policing of their AdSense program. Much web pollution would not exist if Google did not lucratively fund it.

The WordPress moto has never been more true:
Code is poetry!!!

Published: March 31, 2005 by Aaron Wall in google internet marketing blogs seo tips

Comments

March 31, 2005 - 6:24pm

I don't know about you and something tells me I'm in the minority but I pull nearly all my ad campaigns from the content because so much of it is low quality. I stick with the search. My new campaign aimed at Malfunkshun I might let go to Adsense sites. No one bothers creating fake Malfunkshun sites since I'm the only one advertising for that word...

September 21, 2006 - 12:29pm

Adsence does, provide a means of generating alot of extra revenue though. Think about all the useful content on the Web that would be left out since bloggers would not want to write articles since it would be very difficult to generate revenue if you are not offering a product or service of your own. Although I do see your point, indeed perhaps google can be a bit more strict on the spam aspect involved.

September 21, 2006 - 12:34pm

Regarding article spam. You would think that it would in fact be difficult to get an authority site to link at a cheap and lousy article. Interesting...

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