Shoemoney and Graywolf in Forbes.com
December 7th, 2006 by Michael Gray in Google, SEMIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Shoemoney rocks the house, but I managed to get in a name drop and few sentences in an article on Google Arbitrage Bitten By The Google Spider - Forbes.com
Critics say the new restrictions have missed the mark, punishing people like Kris Jones who run legitimate Web sites. Search engine marketer Michael Gray says Google’s new scoring has led to an uncountable number of “false positives,” particularly for coupon and shopping-review sites like Jones’ MarketShareBuilders. “It’s frustrating,” Gray says, “because you don’t even know why you failed the test.”
Sphere It
December 7th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
HELL YEA. Nice job man. Now you can raise your rates. lol
Too bad they couldn’t link to you guys.
December 7th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
Dude, I am not sure how cool it is being associated with “cloaking” — at least algorithmically that is…
December 7th, 2006 at 6:11 pm
I don’t know if I would consider MarketShareBuilders a false positive. There are multiple types of arbitragers and it would qualify as one.
I guess it all depends on what Google considers bad arbitrage. I bet BizRate, Shopping.com and so on where not hit and they are definitely arbitragers.
December 7th, 2006 at 7:20 pm
hrmm want to say so much but cant….
December 7th, 2006 at 7:54 pm
Nice press MG - you da man!
December 7th, 2006 at 9:11 pm
I quote:
“Schoemaker says he sets his web pages to automatically display legitimate content to the Google spider, while giving other users the ad-filled arbitrage page.”
I assume the wording here is inaccurate? I mean, the ads on the landing pages are served by Google anyway… so both the bot and the user’s browser get the same adsense code served or not?
Either you:
- serve different content to the bot, but you still have the same adsense code in your pages as in the page you serve to the browser
Or you:
- redirect normal users from the pages you served to the bot
Or is there another mechanism?
December 8th, 2006 at 1:07 am
If you are hiding/redirecting your affiliate links then you would be hiding the “ads” from the Google spiders. If you are cloaking to the point that you are showing completely different stuff to the spiders than you are to the users is another story completely.
Really, if anything this “quality score” only encourages cloaking. Google forcing advertisers to throw a bunch of content on the landing page and not giving us any real answers on what constitutes “quality” only makes us push the boundaries even further.
I’m surprised that these quality score issues haven’t got more mainstream coverage, but I guess people are content to see Google’s revenues increase and call it “growth” instead of “gouging”.
December 8th, 2006 at 9:30 am
Cloaking is the easiest thing to detect. Google could blacklist all the sites that use cloaking. But they don’t want to do it yet. Why to kill the goose that laid golden eggs?
December 8th, 2006 at 12:15 pm
>> Cloaking is the easiest thing to detect.
Really? Then why do all the major SE’s really, really suck at it then?
Granted, a professional search engineer can generally work out when a specific site is using some form of cloaking, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to hand-check every page in the index, and there’s still the issue of whether it’s “good” cloaking or not
December 8th, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Michael - I wouldn’t mind your comments…
http://www.caydel.com/in-other-news-shoemoney-gets-his-adsense-account-banned/
January 11th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
>> Really? Then why do all the major SE’s really, really suck at it then?
They don’t. The reason is they don’t want to make the required step (and I’m glad they don’t). Detecting UA-cloaking is easy, just change your UA. Detecting IP-cloaking is easy, just change your IP. And Google has a million spies ready with a great variety of UA and IP. Think toolbars. Think browser extensions. Or any other software they distribute. They could report what they see and the bot doesn’t.