Google announced a new product to select publishers today, indicating a move away from their trouble-laden CPC network, Adsense. The new Google advertising program, called the Content Referral Network, will pay webmasters when a user completes a specific action, such as purchasing a product or completing a lead form. This differs from Adsense where the only thing necessary for a webmaster to earn money was to have someone click on the ad. Despite their best efforts, this fraud opportunity methodology lead to thousands of webmasters trying to game the system.

It is easy to fake a click. It is much more difficult to fake a sale.

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In response to the 7 billion page spammer, Google PR reps responded that only a fraction of the billions of pages were actually indexed, and that there is a problem with the site: search operator. If the spammer did not have so many pages indexed, how did he achieve an Alexa rank as the 700th most popular site on the web? From where was all that traffic coming, if not Google? (more…)

If there is one lesson to be learned from the recent exposure of the spammy underbelly of large search engines it is that original content is now deemed worthless.

Any attempt to build traffic to your website by publishing unique opinions or interesting reading material is being discouraged; you cannot compete with a computer script that will mangle and re-arrange your content to re-publish it. You also cannot hope to out produce outsourced teams of low-paid ‘writers’ that have no authority to give opinions on anything, but routinely publish (or re-write) drivel that passes for medical and disease information. With some creative linking, the pages appear in search engine results and average users can’t tell whether it is an authority or not. After clicking through, they are often greeted with nothing but a little copied or worthless content and the requisite three blocks of ads. (more…)

Yesterday’s outing of the 7 billion page spammer has generated an enormous amount of interest. Enough interest that a Google PR rep posted on Digg that this was all part of a “bad data push” and that the error wasn’t with the index, but with the site: operator:

Our engineers recently noticed that our site: queries (number of results listed for a search) were showing bizarre results. This has turned out to be tied to a bad data push, and we’re fixing this right now.

Give us a little bit of credit, eh? This was not a bad data push and while the site: command may have been overestimating the amount of pages, you must admit he was well indexed and the pages were ranking. He gamed Google better than anyone has in a long, long time. I’d wager it worked better than he expected or ever hoped. If he had limited each subdomain to a few thousand pages, he probably could’ve flown under the radar indefinitely (and there are many people who do).

This cannot be faked: (more…)

As most SEOs know, MSN loves the subdomains. You can make hundreds of keyworded subdomains and MSN will think quite highly of the pages. Same goes for blogspot and other blogs– they do very well on MSN and sometimes on Yahoo. Now Google and the new BigDaddy crawler is showing an even more idiotic preference when indexing and ranking subdomains.

Check out this site: search of eiqz2q.org — depending which datacentre you hit, you will see between 3.8 and 5.5 BILLION RESULTS. Even worse… the domain is EIGHTEEN DAYS OLD. That’s right, in under 3 weeks, one person has managed to get one domain 5 billion pages indexed in Google. And they are ranking, too. That particular domain has an Alexa ranking of under 7,000. Another domain owned by the same person, t1ps2see.com, has between 1.7 and 2.4 billion indexed pages and an Alexa ranking of under 2,000… after 4 weeks. Coincidentally, the sites also have 3 blocks of Adsense ads on each page. I wonder how much that one person is earning per day with billions and billions of pages indexed and ranking? (more…)