marketing Archives - Smackdown!

Google Says “Fuck It” For The Christmas Season, Removes The Ability To Report AdSense Violations

November 22, 2011November 22, 2011 by Michael VanDeMar

It has to be tough policing a program like AdSense. It must be exceptionally difficult during the holiday season, when the payoff to running scams grows so much more. It is so tough, in fact, that this year as the holiday shopping season grows near, with Black Friday just a few short days away, that apparently Google has finally decided to say “fuck it”, make it easier on themselves, just remove the ability for anyone to report any violations of the program whatsoever, and allow the scammers to have a field day in the mean time.

While Google may want to give the impression to their stockholders and the public that they have both the search engine spam and advertising program cheaters fully under control, the truth is that they rely quite a bit on reports from the community and consumers for both spam and AdSense violations. For any spam that they find, Google asks

How Matt Cutts Leveraged The Stack Overflow And Hacker News Communities In Redefining The Phrase “Content Farms”

February 1, 2011January 31, 2011 by Michael VanDeMar

A little over a week ago, on the Friday before last, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web Spam Team, wrote a post on the Official Google Blog titled “Google search and search engine spam”. This post, and the upcoming changes it discussed, were most likely in response to a growing trend of dissatisfaction with Google’s results that have been cropping up around the blogosphere. In the post Matt talks about how Google feels that things are in fact not as bad as people are saying, and that “Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.” He does say that recently, due to increase in both “size and freshness” that of course some spam did get indexed, and also states that as the old, tired, run of the mill spam decreased in Google’s index that Google will now be shifting it’s focus on to content that just sucks:

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. – Matt Cutts

Whoa. This, especially coming from Matt Cutts, is huge. For those who don’t know, “content farms” are

Matt Cutts Criticizes Deceptive Ads, Doesn’t Realize Google Is The One Serving Them

January 30, 2011 by Michael VanDeMar

Yesterday over on Daggle.com Danny Sullivan published a post titled, Of Misleading Acai Berry Ads & Fake Editorial Sites. In the article Danny discuses a rising trend of deceptive marketing practices involving fake news sites, the way they rip people off with products they are selling, and the fact that authority sites such as the LA Times are the ones carrying these ads, lending them some credibility in the public eye. Danny states in the post that the ads showing are being served by Zedo, and that he wishes the ad network should raise it’s standards and not allow such blatantly misleading advertising:

Personally, I’d like to see Zedo up its standards for the type of ads it will accept. This type of junk shouldn’t be allowed. – Danny Sullivan

He’s right, too, the ad networks should be policing this type of deception, by all means. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of the web spam team, agrees. He tweeted about the story, and also

The Mahalo Paid Link Evidence Trail

June 17, 2010March 13, 2010 by Michael VanDeMar

Matt Cutts asked me in a Sphinn comment the following question relating the my post on paid links on Mahalo.com:

Apparently Jason Calacanis Knows He’s Spamming – He Just Thinks It’s No Big Deal

June 17, 2010February 22, 2010 by Michael VanDeMar

Last month Jason Calacanis wrote a rather sarcastic post aimed at Aaron Wall, which I am assuming was written in response to Aaron’s post, “Black Hat SEO Case Study: How Mahalo Makes Black Look White!“. In it Aaron discusses how sites that are composed largely of nothing more than auto-generated pages wrapped in adsense can get accepted and even gain authority in Google if they have enough financing and press. In Jason’s rebuttal to this was a claim about rankings that Mahalo had “earned” (and I use the term loosely) for “VIDEO GAME walkthrough”. I originally misinterpreted what he was trying to say, and thought that he meant rankings for that exact phrase. I commented how that wasn’t exactly a great accomplishment before realizing that what he actually meant was rankings for [{insert video game name} walkthrough], and that Mahalo has a couple top 10 rankings for that genre of search phrases.

Jason sent me an email to correct me on what he was talking about. We replied to each other back and forth a couple times, and a few very interesting things were revealed in that conversation: