Apparently some ringtone affiliates managed to spam all three major search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN and the situation is really bad. (The following cloaked page ranked no. 4 in Google. )
I accidentally noticed this when I was reading Jeremy’s (a.k.a Shoemoney) post about his ringtone experiments. For example, if you do a search for “verizon ringtones“, 9 of the top 10 links are affiliate links on the first page of Google. And a good portion of these affiliate links are ‘hosted’ on EDU domain, presumably giving them more weight on Page Ranking. While these guys achieved an amazing thing by ‘beating’ Google on the SEO game, the implication for this kind of stuff is pretty profound. Basically this is bad for everyone except the spammers. It is not about who gets to make money and who does not. It is much worse for the internet marketing industry. If people start losing confidence in the major search engines, you can bet that the whole search advertising business and everything else is going to falter. What do you think?
Smart Google engineers, it’s time to fight back!
Update: Google has a page for you to report Spams here http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. But a manual process is always at a disadvantage in this game.
2 responses so far ↓
1 shashi.d // Apr 10, 2007 at 10:03 am
Ringtones have a become playground for some “pirate affiliates” How many ppc ads are there claiming “free ringtones” & “totally free”. I have noticed .edu ringtone sites from early 2007, when I first advertised ringtones.
Yes, It’s a problem Big G should address, but automating spam reporting process may open up another stream of abuse, to say the least. One other thing this does show is the weight G puts on edu domains even for such competitive keywords.
2 Reached Page Rank 4 in Two Months // May 4, 2007 at 4:11 pm
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