Google Aggressively Enters Make Money Online Niche
Even if you are in a seedy vertical that you think Google wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole, Google may still be gunning for you!
Recall that when Google bought DoubleClick, Larry Page wanted to keep running the Performics SEO & SEM shop:
Google would spin Performics out of DoubleClick, and sell it to holding firm Publicis. Only one major force inside of Google hated the plan. Guess who? Larry Page.
According to our source, Larry tried to sell the rest of Google's executive team on keeping Performics. "He wanted to see how those things work. He wanted to experiment."
A search engine selling SEO services? Yep.
And now they are aggressively entering the make money online niche. Both Prizes.org & YouTube are in the top 3 ad slots for "make money online"
And I am seeing some of those across portions of the content/display network as well. I just saw this in Gmail today.
How does this align with the Google AdWords TOS?
To protect the value and diversity of the ads running on Google, we don't generally permit advertisers to manage multiple accounts featuring the same business or keywords except in certain limited exceptions. Furthermore, Google doesn't permit multiple ads from the same or an affiliated company or person to appear on the same results page. We've found that pages with multiple text ads from the same company provide less relevant results and a lower quality experience for users. Over time, multiple ads from the same source also reduce overall advertiser performance and lower their return on investment.
Google doesn't allow advertisers or affiliates to have any of the following:
- Ads across multiple accounts for the same or similar businesses
- Ads across multiple accounts triggered by the same or similar keywords
Well, as it turns out, the Google AdWords TOS doesn't actually apply to Google.
Search is a zero sum game.
Google is just getting started with breakfast. I am afraid to see what the last meal looks like!
Comments
Well spotted Aaron.
"Don't be evil" is what made Google rise to fame and I believed this motto. Has this been forgotten?
Joe
Maybe one day someone will start doing it better than Google (or at least the same) so we can use something else for search.
...in terms of quality Bing is likely at least on par with Google. (After all, why else would Google engineers bother spending their time conducting a smear operation on a smaller competitor?)
The big issue is not just competing in terms of quality, but you have to multiply (quality * economic yield * brand). If your brand isn't as strong then you need to buy market share if you want to go mainstream, but if your economic yield is not similar to Google's you have to be willing to lose money to buy that marketshare. Bing is losing billions of Dollars per year.
Consider Google's dominance in mobile search, how fast the Chrome browser marketshare is growing, all the crapware bundling Google does on new computers, and how aggressively Google cross-markets their products.
Defaults are powerful & Google is an *amazing* economic engine!
"well, as it turns out, the Google Adwords TOS doesn't actually apply to Google." yeah, no kidding.
The only way they'll ever stop is if enough people bitch about it, and I think most are afraid to do so, for obvious reasons. Google is the abuser and we're the beaten down victim afraid to leave or say anything to anyone, for fear of retaliation by the abuser.
that Business Insider article you referenced in the beginning was a great read. I didn't know Larry Page was that uhhh... out there? It will be interesting to see if any antitrust lawsuits happen in the future. I personally hope so. Adwords is a seriously fucked up system with many of their policies. And of course, we all know that QS won't apply to their campaigns [insert pic of angry face]
Good job Aaron, I love how you call out Google on all their bullshit. Consistently.
John
Hi Aaron,
I want to bring the following fuqup by Google and it's stupid Panda update.
As you may know, Making Home Affordable is the most important program addressing the tide of foreclosures. It covers all the loan modification and foreclosure assistance programs sponsored by federal government.
If you do a search on google for "making home affordable" the results are a big FAIL.
The government website is at makinghomeaffordable.gov and it is no where to be seen in the freaking 100 results. I'm not sure why but this is the biggest goof up I've ever seen in search results.
Bing shows the site fine, but why did the mighty and super smart Google not only miss it, but banish it from their great repository. Please highlight this as this exposes some fatal flaws in the non-evil search monarch.
You keep it real.
...is Google doesn't even show any pages from the site in their index, whereas Bing has over 2,000 pages from it in their index.
Why o Why. It's been like this since the latest update to the index last week. While Google tweaks around and acts as the great gatekeeper of information, lives are getting ruined and houses are getting fuckclosed. It's a strange world, indeed.
This can be national news. We need to get this out there.
Well, it looks like Google did index: makinghomesaffordable.gov, but something is obviously fruity there. I wonder if someone accidently removed their main domain within GWT. I've seen that happen quite a bit this year, just ask RoR
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