People click on ads?!?
Sacked by a Google algorithm
271–280 of 300 posts
Re: Sacked by a Google algorithm
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be wonderful if advertisers could pipe conversion rates back into Google so that ads would gravitate towards sites that generated greater conversion rates. This way, sites that have fans that decrease conversion rates will naturally sink to the bottom of the pile without much effort and would bubble up as soon as the behavior changes and conversion rates improve. It seems a natural solution to the problem. W…
Other ad networks already do this and are pros at it. AdSense is the king of CPC, but not CPA.
Is there a comprehensive evaluation of competing ad networks for small sites?
Re: Sacked by a Google algorithm
#273Based on personal experiences, it appears that any two parties doing business under an "American" contract are at any time probably in violation of several clauses of said contract. When the waters get a little rough, you can expect the party with the most leverage to bail. Correct me if I'm wrong, but other countries don't interpret contracts so strictly. I remember someone telling me that German business contracts…
You have a good point- the point of a contract, and all that legalese, isn't suposed to create a playground where both parties can fight it out, it's supposed to spell out the intentions of both parties as verbosely as possible so everyone is on the same page. The contract is there to be a written account of what both parties agreed to - all terms should be clear and understood before it's signed.
Re: Sacked by a Google algorithm
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a brilliant idea, really. I wonder how we could generate an economic incentive for Google to adopt it.
I won't weigh in on this specific incident because I'm not familiar with the details, plus it's on the ads side, not the search quality side. But I can weigh in on the "make the action exponential" idea. Regarding the steps that the webspam team takes, we take stronger and stronger action as we see repeated violations or violations with more willful or damaging intent. Hidden text might result in a 30 day removal, fo…
Do you inform people of that? I mean, do you inform people that they will be removed for 30 days and unless they put things right they will be banned for longer?
Or do you remove them and not tell them at all, leaving them in the dark completley?
Re: Sacked by a Google algorithm
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
I won't weigh in on this specific incident because I'm not familiar with the details, plus it's on the ads side, not the search quality side. But I can weigh in on the "make the action exponential" idea. Regarding the steps that the webspam team takes, we take stronger and stronger action as we see repeated violations or violations with more willful or damaging intent. Hidden text might result in a 30 day removal, fo…
Do you inform people of that? I mean, do you inform people that they will be removed for 30 days and unless they put things right they will be banned for longer? Or do you remove them and not tell them at all, leaving them in the dark completley?
Great question, Andrew. We typically do inform people they'll be removed for hidden text for 30 days. We also tell people how to file a reconsideration request to come back in sooner. I did the query ["hidden text" 30 days reconsideration request] and here's an example email from the #1 result: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020315.html
You can read the whole message that we send, but the relevant part would be "In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from somewifi.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.
We would prefer to keep your pages in Google's index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-.... When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=e... to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration."
As infractions get more serious and we believe that the SEO/site owner is more willful, we give less information to the people who do spammier things.
Hope that helps to answer your question.
Re: Sacked by a Google algorithm
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well of course they aren't. They are his videos. He is the one who should be billing google for serving his videos.
Why exactly would Google have to pay him? For the privilege of paying for the storage and bandwidth the videos he uploaded consume?
The situation to me seems comparable to a book writer and a publisher. The writer is the one who is writing the book, he has the copyrights, and earns from selling it. The publisher spends on marketing, printing, etc, and gets a cut, but, the publisher is reliant on the writer. If the publisher want to sell the book without giving any revenue to the writer, then they would have to pay for a license. Otherwise, they are in breach of copyrights law.
So, if google wants to host other people's videos, they need to pay for them, unless people give the videos to google for free, as the video's are the creator's and thus copyrighted.
Re: Sacked by a Google algorithm
#277While this looks like click fraud to the advertisers, is that failure due to the people clicking? Or Google?
This seems to be to be a failure on Google's part to properly leverage a real audience, rather than a legitimate detection of click fraud.
Google's Ad system is assuming a transient audience with little invested in the content, so that sending the same (content targeted) ad repeatedly to the site is the right thing. This is a small audience with much invested in the site. Sending ads from the same advertiser to the same small audience has diminishing returns. This is a failure to capture value, based on the investment of the audience rather than the type of the content.
Sending a wide variety of ads is necessary to properly leverage a small invested audience.
Re: Sacked by a Google algorithm
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Effectively, yes, if you consider keeping secrets to be lying. Saying "clicking on these adds gets me money," could easily be considered indirectly encouraging people to click on ads. And that's against Google's rules... and for good reason. I don't particularly like Google's lack of transparency, but all this stuff is in the terms you're required to agree to before you start using an AdSense account. Yes, it's a big…
> Saying "clicking on these adds gets me money," could easily be considered indirectly encouraging people to click on ads How many people believe otherwise? If you cater to any audience with a 3-digit IQ, they know you get paid when they click. On my current arrangement I have payments on conversion (it's working well enough) but it requires a bit more work than AdSense did.
"How many people believe otherwise?"
That's kind of the point, I think. Stating an obvious fact is often used to suggest some kind of action. And it sounds like that happened here.
I feel bad for the guy, surely. He made a small mistake and paid disproportionately. But once you get branded as a cheater, even if by accident, then advertisers will run away from you.
TV isn't a good analogy, because it's a different business model, so this kind of cheating is impossible.
Re: Sacked by a Google algorithm
#279I've had to deal with AdSense's auto-bans before. The appeal process is slow and very rarely do you get a response from an actual person.
When you do get in touch with a real person, they offer very little additional information besides copy/pasting whatever's on their help site--even if it's not relevant to your situation.
I guess this is akin to Apple's seemingly arbitrary bans of apps, but at least Apple doesn't have the gall to tout that "don't be evil" philosophy.
Re: Sacked by a Google algorithm
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also: If a sailor buys a sailing book by entering Amazon via my website, I get a 5 per cent referral fee. If some-one spends $200 on a Kindle or a camera, [they] get their next three month s subscription for free. That's definitely abuse of Amazon's affiliate program and crosses the line from click-fraud-ish to full blown criminal fraud. Aside from being against the terms of their scheme, his clear intention is to in…
The author abused his relationship with Google. He treated his most important customer as a cash cow. He ignores the fact that many of the advertisers footing the bill will be just like him - sole traders and small businesses barely scraping by. That's unnecessarily harsh. The author of the article had a win-win situation in mind: by endorsing the ads that were being displayed, he would get more money, but they would…
Well, if the author is in contact with the advertiser directly and are selling impression instead of clicks, then why yes, of course the advertiser would be okay with it. Its like TV hosting the ad of the advertiser for a period of time. If the TV wants to tell people buy the advertiser product, then most of the advertiser wouldn't mind.
If however, say KFC is advertising on the TV, and instead of impression, they are taking a cut whenever someone who watched the TV goes to KFC, then the situation would be very different. Which is the case of Google, where each click has a cost.
My advice to him, instead of depending on Google, just get the advertisers directly and just charge by impression, or at least a fix charge for a period of time. Since there are value in the stuff he is doing, I would believe that there would be advertisers willing to pay anyway, just a matter how much.
The only downside going that way, now he has to do the marketing to potential advertisers as well, as opposed to Google doing it for him previously.