Google’s dirty little secret
I did a search for prstorm.com, and found an interesting link. When I clicking on it, there was nothing pertaining to prstorm there. So I checked the cache, and found the reference in a disgraceful place. Google Adwords at the top of the page. The cache was dated October 13. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that’s after Steve bought the site/software?
And of course, Google’s dirty little secret is that they don’t have adequate checking of Adwords. One arm of Google is vehemently opposed to linkspamming, and another department hasn’t even caught/removed one of the worst commercial linkspamming applications when they started buying Adwords.
Matt, are you listening?
October 23rd, 2005 at 2:29 pm
Googling for “rss2blog” and “rick butts” reveal whole lot of blog spamming tools advertised via Google’s AdWords. No wonder these spammers actually believe that they have the right to spam blogs. I think I’ll write to AdWords support and tell them about this to see what they say.
October 23rd, 2005 at 2:36 pm
Could you include prstorm in that letter?
October 23rd, 2005 at 4:13 pm
This is just more evidence that AdSense supports spammers. You would think that Google could share its blacklisted domain list with AdSense.
October 23rd, 2005 at 4:48 pm
That’s an excellent idea. I saw months ago an article about how easy it was to fool Adsense managers. And obviously, Adword managers are no better. I think Google needs to speak up. Do they really WANT this kind of business partners? Because right now that’s the word on the street, fair or not. If they (the policy makers) don’t want this kind of thing, they need to communicate this clearly to the people in that department.
I don’t know how many times I complained about the jaja-jak-globusy. It took forever to get that Adsense off there. And I’m still not convinced. They’ve been referrer spamming a blank page for the last month or so. I’ve seen the bait, and I’m still waiting for the switch. To be fair, that was Adsense for domain parking. And that program must be a bitch to administer. Think about it. You’ve got a mega big system of parked domains. One or two of the parked domains have owners that spam. Try and get the Adsense off there. The only way to do it is to either revoke the whole agreement with the program for the whole thousands of domain parking system. Or pressure the domain parking system to kick out those individual domains.
There have been other sites I’ve complained about repeatedly as well, and nothing has happened. And there’s ABSOLUTELY no doubt they were spammers AND building pages with no other content than Adsense.
So something’s wrong, and Google better figure out how to fix it.
October 23rd, 2005 at 5:10 pm
This is tough, because an AdWords person looking just at the ad would think that this sounds valid–the ad doesn’t talk about what the site does.
October 23rd, 2005 at 5:55 pm
I don’t see AdSense for Domains as anything but spamdexing anyway. I don’t care if the domain owners aren’t link spamming, the whole system is filling up search engines with garbage.
October 24th, 2005 at 2:09 am
Hi Matt, good to see you’re still reading.
I guess that’s what AdWords managers need to do - look at the site as well as the ad. If they don’t at least glance at the site the ad is for, then you could sneak ANYTHING past them! I mean, kiddie porn? No problem, just use an ad with unrelated but interesting search words. You see what I mean?
You know what to look at our, I think you need to sit them down and teach them what not to allow. That would save you some embarassment later on. I mean, do no evil? Come on, the AdWords managers haven’t been taught properly!
October 24th, 2005 at 9:49 am
I often find myself looking back at Google’s AdWords Content Policy, https://adwords.google.com/select/contentpolicy.html . Though it’s interesting what the page doesn’t cover. For example, try a Google search for [firefox]. The first (only) ad promotes a site that tries to sell a Firefox download — even though Firefox is (of course, we all know, but others don’t) free. This doesn’t quite fit any of Google’s stated Content Policy prohibitions. But it’s awfully sleazy.
If I were in charge, I’d probably ban these outright rip-offs that merely prey on user confusion and naivete, without adding any bona fide value. Might be a bit tricky to draft the rule rigorously, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t try. (And the “miracle cures” and similar entries, already on the list, show Google’s willingness to add similar know-it-when-we-see-it restrictions.)
October 25th, 2005 at 9:32 am
Recently Mozillazine added AdSense ads when you click on posts on their front page. One of the first I saw was for downloading Mozilla. It looked like it was a free download, but I think you had to give them your email address.
The problem is, as long as they aren’t charging for the download it probably isn’t against the licences Mozilla is under. I am not sure what Google can do in that case. It is certainly really slimy, maybe that is enough.
October 25th, 2005 at 1:39 pm
FightSplog has a post related to this you need to read (especially Matt). Ratcliffe is promoting solving the splog problem by doing enough AdSense click fraud on blogspot splogs that Goolge takes some action or advertisers stop allowing their ads on blogspot sites or just quit AdSense.
October 26th, 2005 at 3:49 am
My post on the Ratcliffe idea.
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Moderator: I edited out the active links.
November 1st, 2005 at 5:00 pm
This comes back to the broader issue of how editorial policies are implemented and enforced across the whole advertiser community. This isn’t an unusual situation or a scandal; rather, simply one person’s view of the appropriateness of the ads, and of the “seriousness” of “bad” ads slipping through.
This debate takes place in every vertical, because there are potentially misleading or “bad” ads in every vertical.
There will never be 100% rejection of all “bad” ads. First, because the definition of a bad ad is subjective; second, because enforcement of policies always relies on the use of policy instruments with varying degrees of effectiveness in achieving policy outcomes.
If cost of enforcement were not a factor and if a single person’s view of what the policies themselves should be were used as the sole guideline, you might get to 99.9% or so effectiveness in keeping the baddies out.
Google relies on a combination of policy development, policy reviews, policy enforcement by people, algorithmic/automated checks, quality scores, and so on. Any such system is fallible.
Policy-making is also not an exact science.
On this specific issue (types of spammers advertising), in fact, Google has placed accounts on hold completely while they review a whole category. Presumably that’s while they develop practical guidelines for the category.
This isolated case is just part of the overall scenario which is basically that you can only coherently reject/ban advertisers if you do it based on a consistent policy. Because such policies risk raising the ire of legit advertisers, those policies are calibrated rather loosely in most industries. You can’t go around declining ads in certain product categories just because they “seem unsavory”.
June 25th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
[…] But is Rick Butts a bad guy? Read this, or this, or this, or this, or how bout the Wall Street Journal Yaro?, and I quote: […]