Yesterday I was using that Hub Finder tool I had made.
In not so competitive industries it can help find some good resource pages & potential links, but in some competitive industries I was amazed at how many scraper websites were running AdSense. I knew it was going to be a ton, but sometimes you just have to see it to appreciate it. When I called out their AdSense product manager at the SXSW conference he used the whole concept of people and technology to say that is how they are dealing with bogus AdSense sites.
I think a friend of mine recently described the AdSense quality control process a bit better:
and they dont even kick out that scum when its reported!
I would guess there are probably hundreds of thousands of sites which are nothing more than AdSense on top of a search engine results page.
Google says you should control who you are linking to and then adds autolink to your site & Google News displays Nazi news. hmm...
They also are funding a ton of useless clutter. In some cases I am seeing both Yahoo! and Google cache live Google search results through caching the AdSense for search program.
Some Google search technologies are a bit more advanced than some of their competitors, and perhaps that gives them a bit more of a competitive edge to be profiting from sites that undermine competitors relevancy algorithms? And maybe they want to clutter the web up with junk so it is hard to sort through it?
Any way you slice it, it is hypocritical for a company which has the mission statement:
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Not so long ago GoogleGuy spoke on the coop ad network leaving this comment:
Seems like a very ill-advised program to me, because it's quite likely that as spam creeps into this link network, it will greatly affect the reputation of the people that link to the spam. Just my hunch though.
replace the word link or link to with ad and advertise on and you get:
Seems like a very ill-advised program to me, because it's quite likely that as spam creeps into this ad network, it will greatly affect the reputation of the people that advertise on the spam. Just my hunch though.
Google does not let advertisers opt out from being seen on individual sites and generally ignores the concept of publisher quality control. This
- limits how much good publishers get since companies will be more inclined to opt out.
- could hurt the advertisers brands.
- may lead to quicker text ad blindness.
- tarnishes the Google brand.
What am I missing? I thought the whole point of AdSense was to help fund the creation of quality content?
Then again, Google did give me a black hat and maybe I am seeing things wrong ;)
I have done more stupid things than most people who are still alive, so I am not going to pretend that I am better than anyone. Admitidly this whole incident is a bad deal for WordPress, but I am amazed - and perhaps even perplexed - at the lengths some people will go to in order to describe their actions or the actions of their friends as legitimate.