Contextual advertising makes it easy for people who are not good at selling but good at building an audience to profit from their traffic stream. But the traffic stream that contextual ads work best for are search referrals, especially since

• the contextual ad networks are extensions of the search ad networks

• regular visitors learn to ignore ads
• the contextual ads typically have little to no editorial pre-sell

Sorry, You're Done. Thanks for Playing Webmaster

As mentioned on Sphinn, without warning Robin Good recently had his Google search referrals wiped away. In a post about the event he stated:

Google keeps changing and refining its own approach and policies to improve the quality of its results and in this effort, it appears that it may have become more restrictive and intolerant of issues and deviations from the official standards that it didn't bother about before.

The Difference Between Large & Small Publishers

If you monetize via Google's ads, much (perhaps most) of your revenue comes from Google searchers landing on your site, and thus you are stuck with Google's editorial search guidelines, which sometimes shift arbitrarily. In spite of Robin being a premium AdSense partner he was punished without warning. Google does it to their business partners large and small, though typically with more vengeance if the partner is small.

Likely because of Robin's distribution and influence (and the damage it would have cost Google to not fix the issue), Google started ranking his sites again, but that still doesn't change the experience from being unjust:

the fact of the matter IS that GOOGLE CAN and DOES arbitrarily penalize sites without being transparent about the reasons it does so.

Is it right that Google has so much power over my ability to "exist" as an entity over the internet? Isn't this the case, as Fabio Masetti says, of Google being able to play with the same net neutrality issues we fear from large telcos, for by having the mere possibility to switch off any content without official justifications, while asking me to plead guilty before I am even re-considered?

Some of those with a smaller following found their problem never had a chance to be cleared up.

When & Why I Stopped Trusting Google

If you have read this blog for the last month you could probably tell Google recently killed one of my sites as well. While it may have seemed my posts were due to anger, they were more to show how my perspective changed as I discovered and experienced how sleazy Google's business practices are firsthand. I still speak truth, but as my experiences changed so did my understand of truth. I still like Gmail and some of Google's other services, but I am finding it incredibly hard to trust them as a company.

Imagine re-branding a site you built over 10,000 organic links to, only to have Google view it as a deceptive redirect and KILL ALL OF YOUR LINK EQUITY while paying spammers to steal your content.

A single Google engineer can decide to kill the viability of a site because of who owns it. Then they pay people to steal your work. It is a long, drawn out, perhaps endless process to protect work from theft, especially if Google decides they would rather pay a thief to steal your content than to pay you directly. How could they do that without expecting you to speak publicly about how unjust that is?

If I wasn't an SEO they might not have taken vengeance on me so heavily, but because I know SEO, and I shared too much honest information they decided the only appropriate thing to do was to punish me by nuking my site. I respect that perspective, but it doesn't mean that I have any respect left for them.

Google: the Ultimate Parasitic Business Model

The more you trust Google the harder you fall when the day comes that they have a technical error, or one of their engineers is having a bad day and decides they no longer need you.

Relying on them to build your business is like relying on self-destructing genetically modified seeds to boost your harvest.

For a few years maybe the yields are a bit bigger, but then the seed prices go up, and so does the cost of the fertilizer required to make the seeds grow. Your margins keep going down until you are financially insolvent, while the engineering team gets a raise every year.

Why You Don't Need Google

To maximize Google AdSense earnings you have to place the ads front and center, which scare visitors away from your site, and make people less likely to read your site, trust your site, revisit your site, link to your site, or subscribe to your site.

If you don't plaster Google ads all over your site then your site is likely going to be viewed as being far more credible, and easier to link at, subscribe to, trust, etc. As your industry grows you grow faster than competing sites that use AdSense do.

To appreciate the difference between mediated growth with Google and natural organic logarithmic growth you can compare the sites Google just killed versus the growth in earnings of SeoBook.com. A couple years ago Google created a poor relevancy algorithm that filtered out thousands of websites for their official business names. Even when they filtered out SeoBook.com the site still earned 85% of what it made the month prior, and that is with a business model that sold information on how to rank on a site while that site was not even ranking for its own name!

The point being here is that if you use Google you set yourself at a specific spot on the value chain. If you try to maximize those earnings you prevent yourself from growing as quickly as you could/should. If you move yourself up the value chain Google not only controls less of your traffic, but they also only touch the least valuable portions of it. Unless you use Feedburner Google does not control your brand evangelists.

Should you trust your business to Google? Do you trust them more than you trust yourself? If so, submit a job application.

In a world dominated by .coms an ad agency decided to promote a financial services company as being different by highlighting the .org in their name to show their non commercial / non-profit nature. 99 times out of 100 a .com is better than a .org, but if you can get a name that costs a million for the .com and only pay a few grand for the .org version and then add $998,000 of marketing to it I think the .org comes out on top.

Using a .org can also make your business look more trustworthy if you are offering a free service and/or are a quasi non-profit. A large part of the current price differential between .com, .net, and .org names is that those who are the biggest domain buyers do not have much development talent or intent to develop them. As a PPC lander page it is hard to earn much as a .net or .org.

An SEO older than dirt by the name of Bob Massa recently started an seo blog. Peter DaVanzo also started a new blog on link building, and Teeceo started a blog on programming and SEO.

A friend recently sent me a link to this Google Video about the history of copyright law, where Karl Fogel, of Question Copyright.org, debunks some myths surrounding copyright. MYTH #1: Being an Artist was unprofitable before copyright law existed.
FACT: Completely false, see below:

MYTH #2: Copyright was created for artists.
FACT: It was the exact opposite. When copyright was created in the Middle Ages of England, it was about censorship. The printing press had just been invented, and people were publishing of all kinds of writings and reprinting text from throughout history. Parliament feared it, so it set up a corporation with powers to enforce an exclusive printing monopoly.

MYTH #3: Copyright protects artists.
FACT: It protects the publishers, and few artists earn the majority of their income from it. In fact, many artists see no money from it at all--it all goes to their publishers.

MYTH #4: Copyright prevents plagiarism.
FACT: Thanks to technology like the Internet, attribution of original authorship is easily detectable, especially when works are published. In many cases, plagiarism (e.g. taking the successful work of one artist and re-selling it under your name) is even EASIER to detect by performing a Google search than via the United States Copyright Office.

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Copyright laws made more sense in the age of printing presses, but in the age of the Internet it is irrelevant. Distribution does not require significant investment by publishers. In the video Karl also said the following quote about what he thought fair copyright law should resemble:

Your name can not be stripped and no one else can claim credit for it. That is credit, reputation is a non renewable resource. It can not be replicated. It can not be copied. To the degree that someone takes credit for your stuff, that's the degree to which you lose credit. It is always proportional.

I agree that current copyright law is messed up, but so is the way that Google handles what they deem to be search spam.

A work can be a collection of keywords and a navigational structure as much as it is a set piece of content. Trusted sites keep building more trust due to their visibility while untrusted sites have to send email spam or do other types of buzz related marketing to gain awareness.

If Google pays someone to steal your work and sets your (non-transferable) reputation at zero search is not a honest business model, especially if they have any hope of changing the world's perspective of copyright law, which they may need to do if they want to keep their current profit margins.

A large part of the search marketing game that gets little discussion is perception. Are the search results relevant? Are the search results fresh? Is there adequate result diversity? Is that particular result worthy of that ranking? What techniques did they use to rank there?

User vs Engineer Perspective

Gord Hotchkiss does a great job covering the searcher's perspective, but rarely do you get to see how a search engineer thinks of the results. This NYT article offered a snapshot, but that has been filtered through the public relations team. The results show not what the engineers want, but the best they can do given their current mindset and computing resources.

Reading Changes in the Search Results

If you can learn to read changes in the results you can see what they are trying to fix right now, what issues will become a big problem, and what issues they do not care about. For example, right now, Google does not care for result diversity. They are so afraid of small spam sites that they:

• allow garbage search results from authoritative domains to rank for a wide array of keywords

• allow category leaders to own the first page of search results

Why You Should NOT Trust a Search Engineer's Blog

You can't really trust the perspective of a blog posted by a search engineer because they typically discuss the view of search from an ideal world. In addition, the role of the search engineer blog is to control and manipulate public perception more than it is to share useful information. In some cases they tell you how going off topic is wrong, while they are proud to cite your off topic marketing and praise it if you are syndicating their spin.

If You Were a Search Engineer, Would You Lie?

When you look at how they try to manipulate people you can see the holes in their algorithms. They are nothing but an algorithm, an ad network, marketing, and how they manipulate people to cede power and authority to their fickle relevancy algorithms. If they are hypocritical in their view of the web then manipulation is a large and important piece required for them to keep what authority they have.

How to Spam Google Right Now

A few tips they don't want you to know the truth about:

• Buying old sites works amazingly well.

• Buying and redirecting sites works amazingly well.
• Paid links work amazingly well, and you have a strong brand or can tolerate a bit of risk you would be an idiot not to exploit that hole.
• Exact match domain names play a good role in helping a site rank for the associated keyword phrase.
• The supplemental results suck, but they don't want the portion of the web they throw into it to realize just how bad it sucks.
• The search results have a lot of hand editing in them. Hand editing is gratuitous for smaller websites, but they are afraid to edit out large corporations.

Why might Google refer to some of the above techniques as spam? Simply because they are effective. We don't write the algorithms. We give the search engines what they want.

Have You Ever Been Hand Edited?

Search relevancy algorithms change depending on what types of spamming are popular and effective at the time. After experiencing your first hand edit on something you worked hard to build it changes the way you perceive search engines, and how much you are able to respect them. If you are a professional you are not supposed to take it personally, but it is hard not to if you have to fire all of your employees.

Why is it that one person can review your site and kill your business model, but they wrap their ads around people stealing your content and it is a long drawn out process to get them to fix that problem? It is just an extension of how Google thinks of consumers. If you don't have lawyers they don't give a crap about you.

What is Spam?

Spam used to be irrelevant, but now that the web is a direct marketing channel spam is typically more seen as being focused on who was paid to achieve the results. Search relevancy algorithms are based on ad sales. Something that is spam is perfectly acceptable if Google gets a buck a click out of it. Ad networks dictated by automation and economic efficiency also push a lot of fraud. Consider the following:

• McAfee conducted a study showing that paid search results are at least twice as likely to scam consumers as organic search results

• many of the most profitable ads are profitable because they are misleading or exploit common psychological weaknesses. Google's CPA ads are virtually unmarked, and Google opted publishers into the program without even asking for their permission.
• Google sold AdWords ads promoting preteen sex
• Google sold AdWords ads promoting Ponzi scheme investment fraud
• Google syndicated ads on the largest Warez site
• Google removed disclosure from many of their syndicated ads
• Google has placed unmarked ads in their search results
• Google funds an overwhelming majority of copyright and trademark violations
• Google sells AdSense ads on sites they removed from their index for spamming
• Google recommended HMOs carpet bomb consumers with deceitful educational messaging

Much of their profit margins come from supporting fraud, but most people do not realize the extent of it.
Why is Google's ad centric view of the web viewed as more honest than any other business model?

How to React to a Hand Edit

The way to look at search is that they want their techniques to be robust and scalable. Anytime a search engineer does something to you that is unjust and draconian it is because they have a huge hole in their algorithm. After you get hand edited the four strategies worth exploring are

• how to obfuscate your identity

• how to scale exploiting the holes which required a search engineer to try to destroy your business
• how to make your "spam" fit their view of relevancy so they don't go out of their way to keep hand editing your businesses
• let others know if you think something is dishonest so you can help them avoid trusting it too much