Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

techyjeremy.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 103 posts

Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#91

Post by mercurial »

mikeash wrote: post #63
ultimoo wrote: post #19

I still find it strange at times to wrap my head around the fact that for decades we championed a distributed and an open world-scale system - The Internet. And now, we are going back to policies controlled by 'guidelines' and rules and terms and conditions of large corporations -- Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Blackberry. Either we as a developer community got lost somewhere; or this was a careful, well thought-out…

I'm not sure how much things have really become worse here, as opposed to just shuffling things around. 20 years ago, a lot of people would have owned a Nintendo system or similar, which had all the things you discussed and more. 10 years ago, most cell phones could run third-party apps, but the requirements were so strict that almost none of any interest were available. The PC was theoretically an open system, but M…

> 20 years ago, a lot of people would have owned a Nintendo system or similar, which had all the things you discussed and more.

This is still the case for consoles nowadays. But as much as I find it regrettable, there is a big difference between a single-purpose device like a game console and a general-purpose computing device like a smartphone.

> The PC was theoretically an open system, but Microsoft was doing their best to close it up with business measures that were about as effective as these technological measures are today.

Microsoft's famous abuses of its position have been sanctioned (not that it did poor Netscape any good, obviously...). It's a valid comparison with the AppGratis situation, where the corporation does not tolerate competition, but there never was the kind of full-spectrum filtering and mandatory corporate approval you see from all players in the smartphone space.

Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#92

Post by jacquesm »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #84
AJ007 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my friends in the mobile space told me about some app doing this, but I don't know if AppGratis. At least one mobile app was offering a free app of the day and charging thousands of dollars for the placement. Not my strong area, but I will point out that the rest of the blogger's post is fantasy . If you are correct, then nothing he wrote is right. - Paid links is not blackhat SEO. Blackhat SEO involves buildi…

"Paid links is not blackhat SEO" Of course it is. Blackhat SEO is SEO that violates search engine guidelines. Here's the link that documents that paid links that pass PageRank violate Google's guidelines: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38...

Paid links are simply ads.

That you happen to rely on links for your rankings and that you can't distinguish between paid links and non-paid links does not make every paid link blackhat SEO. Blackhat implies malice. You'd have to distinguish between a paid link that is an ad versus a paid link that is there just to improve search engine rank.

Good luck with that.

I can see why google has a problem with this but let's face it: short of looking at the books and being present during meetings you'll never know whether a link is:

(a) paid (b) not paid

(c) just an ad (d) an attempt at increasing search engine rank

Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#93

Post by jacquesm »

dools wrote: post #78
AJ007 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my friends in the mobile space told me about some app doing this, but I don't know if AppGratis. At least one mobile app was offering a free app of the day and charging thousands of dollars for the placement. Not my strong area, but I will point out that the rest of the blogger's post is fantasy . If you are correct, then nothing he wrote is right. - Paid links is not blackhat SEO. Blackhat SEO involves buildi…

Couple of points: Paid links are black hat SEO. If you sell links you should be putting rel="nofollow" on them. Also Google does do a pretty rigorous job of combatting paid ad spam. They have many ad text and landing page policies designed to weed out sneaky affiliate deals and the like. They also reward advertisers that provide more popular user experiences through their quality score mechanism which is a direct (an…

> If you sell links you should be putting rel="nofollow" on them.

Is there a law that states that you should do that?

Is this 'best practice' without which clients no longer function?

Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#94

Post by PavlovsCat »

windsurfer wrote: post #11
alxbrun wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"AppGratis simply served a need, both on the consumer side (App discovery) [...]" How can you call "discovery" a process where users receive everyday a push for the app that paid the highest bid to AppGratis ?

How can you twist words like that? You get paid by a marketing company to steer discussions on social networks in favour of your brand.

"Steering discussions"? Sounds like something that could use killing with a stake.

Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#95

Post by mvasilkov »

Don't know about black hat, but nothing of value was lost, that's for sure.

If not for Apple regulating signal-to-noise ratio in the App Store, we'd have nothing there but these SEO "click here free download viagra enlarge your everything" scams.

Look at emails. I don't see many people complaining that GMail filter sends many messages straight to the Spam folder. And it sure hurts SEO firms, think App^W ViagraGratis or something.

And the argument about AppGratis being "too good at what they do", oh wow, I wholeheartedly call bullshit on this. Are spammers "too good" for email?

Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#97

Post by likeclockwork »

ig1 wrote: post #24

It's important to note that both the US and EU you cannot legally make a paid-for recommendation look like a real endorsement. For the FTC guidelines on this see: http://www.scribd.com/doc/20635261/FTC-Guides-Concerning-the...

And yet the media still exists as an industry.

Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#98

Post by programminggeek »

Meritocracy in search results? Are you kidding? I'm sorry but search results are not a meritocracy and to think otherwise is just plain foolish.

First of all, if results can be hand ordered is it a meritocracy? No. Because it's a select individuals opinion. Can their opinion be bought? Yep.

Second, can you buy popularity? Yep. Then is it a meritocracy? Nope. If EA or Zynga puts out a game and spends $10 million promoting it and uses their other apps to make it popular, is that a meritocracy when it shows up at the top of a search result? No. It isn't.

Search engines aren't a meritocracy. The best results don't win. The most relevant thing isn't always given. They are an attempt to return relevant information, but how that relevance is determined is not necessarily merit related at all. It just has to solve the user problem. It can be done in any order that the search engine provider deems fit.

For example, Google shows ads alongside the search results. The top ads aren't merit related. They are profit related. Google puts paid results above real results. Google puts money above relevance.

When you are talking about millions of dollars being thrown around, it is no longer about merit, it's about influence and those are not the same thing.

Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#99

Post by think33 »

anoncow wrote: post #55
jacquesm wrote: post #8

AppGratis simply served a need, both on the consumer side (App discovery) as well as on the corporate side (app promotion). What ratio paid apps to free apps they were running is guesswork but I'd imagine if they would fail at the mix they would fail in the marketplace. The bigger problem is that they were simply too good at what they were doing and were competing with Apple on Apple's turf. Apple would like to contr…

>AppGratis simply served a need, both on the consumer side (App discovery) as well as on the corporate side (app promotion) This exactly. I am sorry to say this but the submission appears lopsided. The submission accuses appgratis of being "black hat", but doesn't explain how. Does AppGratis run botnets which download apps? If it is genuine users downloading apps - the business is white hat. It doesn't matter if the…

It is black hat because they were charging developers for their service, which amounted to gaming the top-download charts.

This is also, against Apple's terms, and Apple has been going after companies that do this for over 18 months...which means they shouldn't be surprised that eventually Apple pulled them from the store.

Apple cares about the integrity of its charts, and will not abide people manipulating them dishonestly.

Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#100

Post by GhotiFish »

derefr wrote: post #87
mikeash wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how much things have really become worse here, as opposed to just shuffling things around. 20 years ago, a lot of people would have owned a Nintendo system or similar, which had all the things you discussed and more. 10 years ago, most cell phones could run third-party apps, but the requirements were so strict that almost none of any interest were available. The PC was theoretically an open system, but M…

To put it another way: everyone (except Richard Stallman) has always wanted to use both open and closed systems. There is room for both, and neither will kill the other.

Oh? Only Richard Stallman? You mind including me in that list?
Post reply on HN