Google and Quality Control

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Aaron Wall of SEOBook mentioned this last week, but everybody was to busy grabbing their torches and pitchforks on the way to the WordPress lynching to notice.

Google’s AdSense quality control is a complete joke. (Hosting Content Spam)

You know what I agree with him, but I don’t think it’s limited to just Adsense. I’ve been setting up some news alerts for industries I monitor, and I can honestly say some of the things they let in are pretty questionable. No I’m not going to out anybody, but some of the things I’ve seen are:

• Affiliate links directly in news stories
• Industry blogs with little or no original content
• Flagrant keyword spam articles

Ok I work in the search industry, and I look at things from a very cynical perspective, but I’m also a realist. People want to get the highest dollar reward for their work and one of the ways to do that is write articles for high paying keywords. If you have a good understanding of how consumers/surfers act and think, you can create websites that make it difficult for average surfer to know what’s an advertisement, they click, and cha-ching it’s easy money.

Not so long ago people would set up different adsense accounts for each website, this way if you got banned they would only lose one website, instead of a network of sites. For account management, check distribution and host of other reasons, Google made it against the TOS to have multiple accounts. Since nobody questioned Google back then, people consolidated multiple accounts into one big account. However the unforeseen problem with this was you could now serve ads on a URL without a Google employee seeing it first. Once the cat was out of the bag, the problem spread like wildfire. If you dig around in the nooks and crannies of backlinks like I do you’ll see some pretty low quality things going on. Perhaps one of the worst IMHO is taking search results from another feed and shoving Adsense with it.

Am I making an ethical judgment, no. Am I Google bashing, nope. While my goals may be primarily self centered, they are valid for others as well. Through natural search engine results and adwords marketing, about 60% of my income flows through Google. So it’s in my best interest to see that remain stable, and not fall apart. However if consumers start to notice some of the low quality news websites as I have, they begin to lose faith in Google’s relevancy. When Google becomes less trusted and utilized, the customers seeing my advertisements will decrease, and so will my cash flow.

How can they make the news better, first off, raise the quality bar for letting websites into Google news. Secondly how about an annual or even semi-annual review of the websites that you have let in previously. Lastly how about giving people a feedback mechanism for news websites.

How can you make adsense better? Well I know you’re a big fan of automated solutions, but I think you need to go back to more manual reviews. As an advertiser I can tell you low quality websites are one of my big concerns. When you add in click fraud, well it’s doesn’t seem worth the risk, so I don’t publish any ads to the content network.

Technorati Tags: google, google news, adsense, search engine marketing.

One Response to “Google and Quality Control”

1. Chui Says:
   October 13th, 2006 at 4:15 am

   To play the devil’s advocate: wouldn’t spammy websites actually help drive visitors to advertisers sites? There are some horrid TV shows where the ad is more interesting than the shows themselves. Of course, this is assuming that the visitor is sophisticated enough to realize the advertisers had no inkling what kind of junk sites his ads are going to land on.