11 replies to this topic

[Scottie]

http://www.pandia.co...s.html#more-334

Some really good requests there, but my favorite one is one I've harped on in the past:

There’s no doubt in our mind, you are best in class when it comes to fighting search engine spam and irrelevant results.

Nevertheless, there is still too much junk in search results.

We know that this is an arms race you will never win. The spammers will probably always spend more resources on outwitting you, than you will on beating them.

Still, it is ironic that you are contributing more to the proliferation of automatically generated nonsense pages than anyone else by allowing spammers to earn money on “scraper sites made for Google Adsense”.

Blogger is also actively used by spammers to generate useless junk. Stop them! You are clever people. We know you can do it!

Amen to that!! You go, Pandia.

Matt Cutts has taken notice of the post and responded... sorta... with a promise of a mug for the Pandia folks. I'd love to hear their response to the paying-people-to-muck-up-the-results issue.

And one more kudo to Pandia for the proper spelling of "scraper." When I see "scrapper" I think of wiry bantam-weights swapping punches.

[mal4mac]

http://www.pandia.co...s.html#more-334

Some really good requests there, but my favorite one is one I've harped on in the past:
Amen to that!! You go, Pandia.

Matt Cutts has taken notice of the post and responded... sorta... I'd love to hear their response to the paying-people-to-muck-up-the-results issue.

Shouldn't there also be a plea for more people to learn some basic white hat SEO? I can't see how a scraper site could beat anyone making a serious white-hat effort to beat it in the rankings. So come on folks, work harder at SEO and stop carping! Don't leave it all up to Google, and drop the victim mentality.

[Jill]

It's from a searcher's point of view that people complain about this mal4mac.

[Scottie]

Who has a victim mentality? I missed that part, I guess. I don't see any whining in their request.

Mal4Mac, you think it's a good idea to continue to reward people for putting up nonsense pages filled with other people's content? I just don't know of another industry where people are rewarded for lowering the quality of the product. I know Google makes a lot of money from click arbitragers (especially the ones who DON'T have rankings but use PPC to drive traffic to their sites) but it also makes their results crappy.

Just my opinion, and apparently shared by the people at Pandia.

[Jbrookins]

Shouldn't there also be a plea for more people to learn some basic white hat SEO? I can't see how a scraper site could beat anyone making a serious white-hat effort to beat it in the rankings. So come on folks, work harder at SEO and stop carping! Don't leave it all up to Google, and drop the victim mentality.

To be perfectly honest, black hat SEO is typically more effective in the short-term than white hat. The problem is that people running scraper sites don't really have any long-term plans for a domain, so they don't care what happens as long as they get to the first page. If they get banned, who cares?

Is understanding that victimhood or being realistic? Like any game, cheaters win unless they are penalized. In this particular game, the other "players" are powerless to do anything. Ultimately, it's up to Google to police their own index. They make the rules, so it's their responsibility to take care of those that don't play by them.

[Randy]

The part that I always wondered about is what happens to the Float.

Meaning Adsense spammer finally gets nailed and Google withholds payment to them because they broke the TOS. Normally it's more than just a few days worth of payments. More along the lines of weeks. But at the same time the Advertiser has already paid for those clicks at the moment they were clicked. Given how the Adsense-turn-and-burn sites are set up, likely several hundred or several thousand advertisers have already paid for 10's or 100,000's of thousands of clicks.

Does Google even try to back track all of that to make sure the right advertisers get a credit? Does this float end up back where it should be, or is it conveniently forgotten?

Sorry, just had to ask because I've never seen any official Googler lay out what happens to the click $$$'s when those seemingly rare times they do catch an Adsense Spammer. It's a question that's always bugged me for some reason.

[Martin C]

The part that I always wondered about is what happens to the Float.

Meaning Adsense spammer finally gets nailed and Google withholds payment to them because they broke the TOS. Normally it's more than just a few days worth of payments. More along the lines of weeks. But at the same time the Advertiser has already paid for those clicks at the moment they were clicked. Given how the Adsense-turn-and-burn sites are set up, likely several hundred or several thousand advertisers have already paid for 10's or 100,000's of thousands of clicks.

Does Google even try to back track all of that to make sure the right advertisers get a credit? Does this float end up back where it should be, or is it conveniently forgotten?

Danny Sulliven's posting The Abridged Version: Independent Report On Google's Click Fraud Detection Practices had this:

And this interesting tidbit on how when someone gets kicked out of AdSense, advertisers apparently get refunds:

Finally, I would like to point out that when Google terminates an AdSense publisher, all the clicks generated at that publisher�s site over a certain time period (valid and invalid) are credited to the advertisers whose ads were clicked on that site....

The problem is like the global burger chain that was reported to have a public policy that said that any burger dropped on the floor while in preparation would be thrown in the bin and never served to a customer. That was fine until the branch managers started to count up the number of burgers thrown away in an evening and if too many started penalising the staff - result being that burgers dropped on the floor were picked up and served to the public.

You can have a public policy - but that is not to say it is being followed and how would anyone know?

[Randy]

That's good to hear that they've actually said something to Danny. But it doesn't really help out with their total lack of transparency with their paying advertisers.

One would think they'd at least notify the advertiser of the credit and hopefully why it was being received. I've never gotten any such explanation, though I have at least gotten some credits. Goodness knows there's never going to be any sort of independent 3rd party looking at these things.

I can certainly understand why they don't come completely clean since their competitors don't either. But it would be a nice change of pace.

[projectphp]

The problem with transparency is legalities. lets say www.myreallyreallyreallyspammysite.com gets kicked out of AdSense. Google naming them is more than likely legally iffy. They are pretty much stating the site in question is bad, wiithout that being established in any fair and independant way.

Personally, the lack of control with AdSense is the real issue. Bidding for a phrase and this showing everywhere equally is crazy. The ads on www.myreallyreallyreallyspammysite.com are not worth the same as www.nytimes.com, even if www.myreallyreallyreallyspammysite.com is actually a good site. AdSense should really be easier to opt out of, or more specifically, advertisers should need to opt in to the "masses" of new sites.

[Martin C]

That's good to hear that they've actually said something to Danny. But it doesn't really help out with their total lack of transparency with their paying advertisers.

I agree about lack of transparency.

Just to be clear Danny was reading/commenting on an independent report on how Google deals with click fraud that was published as part of the then ongoing Lane's Gifts v. Google class action lawsuit over click fraud.

Although a number of Google employees were interviewed for the report and the consultant was granted access to confidential information Danny points out in his assessment of the report's findings that no advertisers were interviewed and the consultant also wrote that

none of the team members I interviewed were even around or involved in the click fraud effort when the AdWords program was introduced in February 2002.

I don't think that Danny is suggesting the report was a whitewash but he does question that some of the consultants conclusions seemed at odds with the evidence as presented.

[Lakshmi Narsimhan]

I am skeptical about the Google algorithm that advertises the ads on different sites with a different set of advertisers. But then this is a good idea to be passed on to Google Adwords team, and if they could implement this type of filter then it would be great.

[redsonia!]

Welcome to the forum, dziningspot!