Pathetic Post of the Day, calling PPC buying publishers con artists
Its very true that you should take anything a blogger says with a grain of salt. Typically I don’t care what bloggers outside the publishing & affiliate marketing circle say, but this post is just silly.
Brian White over at WeblogInc/AOL’s BloggingStocks.com calls PPC arbitrager’s “landing page con artists” “fraudsters and criminals” while accusing them of exploiting Google “in hopes of building a small fortune.”
Message to Jason Calacanis: exercise some quality control over your bloggers for hire.
There is nothing wrong with buying traffic from one source and sending it someone else. That is not fraud, its efficiency.
But Google do see it as a problem, as they are implementing their landing page quality control and as a result pushing up the price of obtaining those initial clicks. Google are looking to protect their income base by enforcing a degree of quality control.
What this should lead to is an improvement of the landing pages on an improve or die type basis, which should be a good outcome for those looking for good quality traffic from Google and for surfers looking for quality results.
However I agree that “fraudsters and criminals” is a little strong.
Comment by Charlie March — July 13, 2006 @ 4:10 am
He’s really talking about bridging pages, isn’t he? Pages that offer no useful content, with the sole purpose of sending the user on to another site as quickly as possible. After feeding them up with some tasty affiliate cookie, of course
Not sure why he’s moaning about this now as it used to be much more of a problem. Google’s been clamping down on this for a while now - and rightly so.
Gotta disagree with you on one point though Andrew, if you’re buying traffic purely to send it on someplace else without giving the page some other value, then that’s not efficiency. That’s inefficiency. It just adds another needless step for the user.
However pages that offer some extra value to the user, like a comparison table or something, that’s a completely different matter. Nothing wrong with those at all.
Anyway… Even if the PPC’er is using bridging pages, calling them con artists, fraudsters and criminals is just laughable. Who exactly are they conning or defrauding? So, to Brian White, I’m genuinely interested in how you came to this seemingly ridiculous conclusion?
Comment by Chromate — July 13, 2006 @ 9:52 am
Chromate - its efficiency because you are only doing it if it turns a profit. The reason why Shoemoney and other affiliates buying PPC ads make so much money is because these companies haven’t yet figured out how to do exactly what they are doing. The bottom line is advertisers want pageviews and affiliate companies want sales.
If Google really thought this was wrong why wouldn’t they just ban it? Thats what I want to know.
Comment by Andrew — July 13, 2006 @ 11:45 am
Andrew:
This is the first time I stumbled upon your site, and I’d like to say that I’m finding your site very interesting. I wanted to point out, however, that I believe the article you referenced refers to bogus search-engine-like sites whose “search results” and links are all just pay-per-click advertisements. The issue behind this type of site goes much deeper and the author, Brian White, fails to explain why these sites could be classified as criminals. Although I agree that the word criminal is harsh, their tactics are less than acceptable and very much resemble those of scams.
Most of these sites that I described above conduct Domain Kiting. Nobody explains what domain kiting is better GoDaddy founder, Bob Parsons, on his blog. I strongly encourage you to read his entire post at: http://www.bobparsons.com/MayKiting.html
The main problem I see with these sites is that they do not provide anything beneficial to the internet and the online community. They also register domains that could otherwise be used for beneficial use or legitimate business purposes. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to register a domain just to find out that it was already registered, then visit the site and find a bogus search-engine-like site with PPC ads plastered all over it. You know most of them don’t even pay for these domains!
Comment by J-P — August 28, 2006 @ 2:49 pm
[…] As you may or may not know, Google offers a domain parking service for high-traffic domain investors. As an Adwords advertiser a lot of traffic comes from these sites. While some people consider a web site with no content but ads a con or scam, I have found domain traffic to work modestly well. […]
Pingback by » Google Domain Parking - Search or Content? - Web Publishing Blog — September 13, 2006 @ 5:48 pm