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Confusing pollution with evolution

<![CDATA[A List Blogger Openly RecommendS Click Fraud…Who’s Hat is Black? : SEO Book.com: To be honest, I normally think rather highly of Mitch Ratcliffe, but this anti blogspot spam comment is off the mark… Can you believe bloggers are openly suggesting click fraud? Who will be the first blogger to recommend automated click bots? I […]

<![CDATA[A List Blogger Openly RecommendS Click Fraud…Who’s Hat is Black? : SEO Book.com:

To be honest, I normally think rather highly of Mitch Ratcliffe, but this anti blogspot spam comment is off the mark…

Can you believe bloggers are openly suggesting click fraud? Who will be the first blogger to recommend automated click bots?

toxic

I don’t know what to make about the fact he apologizes for thinking highly of me most of the time—am I that disliked?—but Aaron Wall’s suggestion that I am recommending fraud is way, way off-base. And Vernon Kesner is disgusted. Pretty strong language, that suggests to me that search engine marketers are more concerned about protecting their golden goose than recognizing the goose is pouring crap over the whole blogosphere.
Aaron and Vernon say “it’ll get better, it always does.” Forgive me, but having been at the birth of the Net and seen some of the pathetic compromises made to sustain economic models, I speak from experience. It can be better, but leaving the solution to the company at the heart of the problem is sacrificing our power to influence the direction the community is going.
Splogs are pollution. Splogs, at least for now, are part of the economic system and, like the worst industrial production, represent the wasteful, toxic by-products of the information economy. Pollution warps the environment, it doesn’t get cleaned up and disappear. Pollution deserves protest.
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We should pour the pollution back into the source. Relax, Google will survive and the cash from AdSense will still flow.
Sorry, but we can break this system without doing serious damage to anything except Google’s bottom line, which is the only thing that will get Google’s attention. I’ve been saying for a long time this isn’t the gentle, non-evil little company people mythologize to justify Google’s increasingly hegemonic approach to knowledge (heck, Dave and I agree about this point); the company needs to be policed by users, even if it threatens the system of payments—largely paltry—that surround Google, because, like the neighbors of a toxic site, we’re paying a price for their success.
We can call the movement MEMEPEACE.

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5 replies on “Confusing pollution with evolution”

I just want to clarify that I am not disgusted. The tactic mention, I find disgusting. If you run a ‘click war’ you hurt the businesses that are paying for the advertising. In addition, you put money in the pockets of the very people you are trying to stop.
It just seems to me that you are wanting to do something about splogs. The method of clicking a bunch of ads in return seems to be like a ‘thief stealing from a theif’. Wouldn’t those clicks be ‘spam’ clicks. Here’s the next new buzzword… “splicks”… spam clicks.
Don’t be a splicker!

Actually, no, it wouldn’t be spam clicks or any form of theft, as we would not be taking anything for ourselves. They would be protest clicks, or “pricks.” Splogs would suffer death by a billion pricks.
I’ve just registered MemePeace.org….

Mitch, I agree with you. Splogs are pollution. But so were FFA pages, and they have diminished. Of course there are some around with a different name in some form with people blowing link building out of wack. Splogs will go through the same process.
The way I look at it. There has been a recent explosion of the splogs. At the same time as the explosion, Google was bringing us Jagger. Combine the two together and you’ve got a mess.
It will work out. “It always does”. Of course that’s just my 2 cents! 🙂
Have a good one!

>Pretty strong language, that suggests to me that search engine marketers are more concerned about protecting their golden goose than recognizing the goose is pouring crap over the whole blogosphere.
I am not concerned with the blogosphere as much as the web as a whole.
As far as the protecting golden goose goes…

  • I have been making about $50 a month off AdSense, so it has meant next to nothing to me (although this month I will probably make closer to $500 because I put ads on another site…but that still is a small bit of the revenue pie)
  • I recently got sued by an SEO company that promotes what Google has deemed to be aggressive techniques. Getting sued in part for alleged trade secrets others left in my comments section of my blog. So far in the last 2 months I have spent about $15,000 on the whole free speech vs blogs issue because some sleezeball cold called me and I posted about it.
  • I want people to be able to express their opinions and to let their opinions be seen.
  • I realize that the autogen stuff is polluting the usefulness of the web.
  • I think the key difference between you and I is that I think Google could afford to police their network. Hell, I will go so far as to say that is part of their core mission statement statement.

The largest partners provide most of the ad displays and don’t really take much policing if you trust them.
The smaller partners could be given smaller percentages until their site has been reviewed by a human to verify quality, and then the quality reviews can come up randomly every so often.
Google could revoke payment for sites that are outside their guidelines and make it harder to get accounts, especially if they have already operated outside the guidelines in the past.
User feedback will become more readily available and cheaper. Remote raters are cheap.
The autogen sites work on scale…making thousands of them. If they had to get thousands of accounts or got their whole account revoked for having spammy sites in it then it would be harder to make crazy money from thousands of autogenerated sites.
To be honest I am a bit pissed at Google’s AdSense quality. I have been ranting on this CrapSense issue since at least March
http://www.seobook.com/archives/000747.shtml
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001116.shtml
In summary, I think the best ways Google could police their network are to:
– make the cost of getting banned much steeper
– create a remote quality rating program similar to their search rating program (which would be cheap in the grand scheme of things)
The fourth quarter is traditionally strong for Google anyhow, now is as good a time as any to take the one time growth % hit to improve the quality of their ad network !

I think I registered memeblog.com a while ago 🙂
>Pretty strong language, that suggests to me that search engine marketers are more concerned about protecting their golden goose than recognizing the goose is pouring crap over the whole blogosphere.
I am not concerned with the blogosphere as much as the web as a whole.
As far as the protecting golden goose goes…

  • I have been making about $50 a month off AdSense, so it has meant next to nothing to me (although this month I will probably make closer to $500 because I put ads on another site…but that still is a small bit of the revenue pie)
  • I recently got sued by an SEO company that promotes what Google has deemed to be aggressive techniques. Getting sued in part for alleged trade secrets others left in my comments section of my blog. So far in the last 2 months I have spent about $15,000 on the whole free speech vs blogs issue because some sleezeball cold called me and I posted about it.
  • I want people to be able to express their opinions and to let their opinions be seen.
  • I realize that the autogen stuff is polluting the usefulness of the web.
  • I think the key difference between you and I is that I think Google could afford to police their network. Hell, I will go so far as to say that is part of their core mission statement statement.

The largest partners provide most of the ad displays and don’t really take much policing if you trust them.
The smaller partners could be given smaller percentages until their site has been reviewed by a human to verify quality, and then the quality reviews can come up randomly every so often.
Google could revoke payment for sites that are outside their guidelines and make it harder to get accounts, especially if they have already operated outside the guidelines in the past.
User feedback will become more readily available and cheaper. Remote raters are cheap.
The autogen sites work on scale…making thousands of them. If they had to get thousands of accounts or got their whole account revoked for having spammy sites in it then it would be harder to make crazy money from thousands of autogenerated sites.
To be honest I am a bit pissed at Google’s AdSense quality. I have been ranting on this CrapSense issue since at least March
http://www.seobook.com/archives/000747.shtml
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001116.shtml
In summary, I think the best ways Google could police their network are to:
– make the cost of getting banned much steeper
– create a remote quality rating program similar to their search rating program (which would be cheap in the grand scheme of things)
The fourth quarter is traditionally strong for Google anyhow, now is as good a time as any to take the one time growth % hit to improve the quality of their ad network!