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168 Comments
- NateDog, on 04/08/2008, -16/+98Wow. This is a prime example of the dangers of the internet. This guy who tries to come off as an expert doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. He certainly doesn't know how to use adwords. Adwords right now gives you a ton of control and a ton of tools to see EXACTLY what domains are sending you traffic, how much it's costing you, how the traffic is converting, plus it allows you to block any domain. It's good to see so many clueless advertisers like this guy because it means the rest of us that actually take the time to use the tools properly have a leg up. The title should be changed to "Stupidy still rampant amung so-called internet advertising experts".
- doshindude, on 04/08/2008, -7/+72Link Farms are worthless pieces of *****. Why do they even exist?
- inactive, on 04/08/2008, -16/+53Author seems pretty torked. But I can't say i don't blame him... Since Google went public, their financial bottom line is all that matters anymore.
- Arkanjal, on 04/08/2008, -7/+39How did %30-40 turn into Half?
- checkacheck, on 04/08/2008, -4/+24It's a hangover from about 6/7 years ago when it was much easier to fool search engine algorithms with piles of links. No point for them now though... all they do is clog up the net.
- Elliuotatar, on 04/08/2008, -1/+20Where have you been? I hit these link farms every day. I have to refine my searches over and over to exclude them until I find that one website buried way at the bottom which has the information I need.
- Olfster, on 04/08/2008, -7/+26Very interesting. As a person contemplating starting to use google for advertising, I am learning a lot about just how "gamed" this advertising medium is. Good article.
- Elliuotatar, on 04/08/2008, -3/+21I too advertise on Google adwords. I recently had a conversation with one of their techs via email that went as follows:
Me: Hello good sir. You have presented me with this data which shows many websites generating two downloads of my software for every click, and one click for every single impression, even though this is statistically impossible. Here too are several websites which have your code in the page but the ads are not even being displayed even though I'm generating impressions for them. I have spent over $5,000 avertising with you and I would like a refund of the $100 of that which I have been able to detect that I paid for this most obvious fraud.
Google: I apologise for any inconvenience. I understand you had a problem with [preprogrammed response]. I also understand you had a problem with [preprogrammed response]. I too undetstand you had a problem with [preprogrammed response].
These are not problems. These are totally intentional, and totally not fraud.
Me: I would also like to complain about these websites which are fraudulently displaying my ads with no real content on the page. These pages are worthless to me as an avertiser and worthless to the users of your search engine. Nobody would want to arrive at these pages, and the clicks generated by them are highly likely to be fraudlent and at the very least worth very little to me as an avertiser, and here are the statistics I have gathered which show that clicks from these websites download by product 10x less and purchase it after they've downloaded it 4x less often.
Google: I understand you had a problem with [preprogrammed response]. Google considers these websites to be valuable. Look at this page on our website which shows you how valuable these "parked domains" are: https://adwords.google.com/select/afc/casestudies/ ...
Me: That study was done by an ad agency which was trying to impress their clients with all the "value" they're providing! But those conversions are relatively worthless! They're caused by people being frustrated by a page full of ads and keywords instead of content and just clicking the ads to get off the page as quickly as possible, or accidentally clicking the ads because they look exactly like all the rest of the "content" on the page. My sales statistics, which you have access to, prove this is the case! Just look at them! - sdpenner, on 04/08/2008, -3/+20This guy seems a little naive. Do you just assume that all the clickthroughs are good leads? If I'm paying for an ad I would typically want to track the efficacy of the ad. That is why analytics are so important.
Google doesn't make it the default (of course), but it is very easy to limit your ads to specific markets and time periods. For instance, leads from India aren't worth much to someone selling vacuum cleaners in the U.S. Or, serious car buyers aren't shopping at 4am...
I also stumbled upon a cool trick. You can search for your own adword text. Then, check out the first 2-3 pages of google results. If any of these pages are farms, just block the site. I spent about 2 hours doing this a while back and my ads dropped off by 50%, while my conversion rate went up. 2 hours every few months does not seem like a lot to spend on your business... - skipdog172, on 04/08/2008, -4/+21Yay, another "I am the champion of the internet because I use adblock!!!" comment! Congratulations!
- Trention, on 04/08/2008, -10/+25Anecdote != data
- shinyhappydan, on 04/08/2008, -1/+15When the author got headline-envy
- loopis, on 04/08/2008, -8/+22Invest your money/time in a solid SEO practice and get free traffic!! For new businesses, however, adwords is the only real way to get traffic to your site right off the bat. I was paying 50-75 on adwords when I first opened last year. Worked on my SEO for the next 6 months, cut the adwords budget in half. Now a year later I only use adwords for special campaigns. My 2 cents.
- ly4u, on 04/08/2008, -15/+28I think author contradicts himself:
"...So Google's answer to get around this problem: Block the sites in the AdSense manager. IOW, let me figure it out. Since there are literally hundreds of sites and that the sites keep changing that's hardly practical..."
"...The fact that I see the above domains repeatedly and consistently..."
While I'm all against worthless MFA sites, this is business, go and learn how to profit from Adwords. - sgtpppr, on 04/08/2008, -0/+13It's also what happens when someone is simply out there to get ad revenue and has no real purpose for having a site...so they create hundreds of them. It's basically Web pollution.
- jeremyduffy, on 04/08/2008, -3/+16Snapping up a domain only to park a useless ad page there should be ILLEGAL. ***** them all. I can't get a good domain because some choad has swept up every possible domain that someone would actually want and doesn't do DICK with it.
- DeadBabyFloat, on 04/08/2008, -0/+13Alot of these link farms are created by "work from home" Business opportunity scammers. The tell people they can make money with their computer by buying these prefab link farm websites, then they hit them up for more services, like search engine optimization and other traffic generating BS. Its really sad that people will pay for this crap, but it happens nonetheless.
- thailand1972, on 04/08/2008, -1/+13MFA (Made For Adsense) websites are EVERYWHERE these days - you must be mad if you think this was some fad 6 or 7 years ago. It's getting worse, and Google's doing nothing about it because they make too much money from them.
- SillyRabbits, on 04/08/2008, -2/+14Is the information you're looking for related to naughty cheerleaders? I don't have nearly that much problem finding pertinent information in my searches.
- dobluth, on 04/08/2008, -3/+15Wow, welcome to 3 years ago. This guy should be shot for putting an 80 cent bid into the content network unless he is making a few hundred per sale of his software. Everyone knows that the content network's traffic is about 1/10th of the quality of the search network, but the clicks can be a lot cheaper. Like everything in life, you get what you pay for!!
This is exactly the reason huge Search engine marketing companies exist. Really they do little for the advertiser than protect them from doing really dumb things like bidding 80 cents for a software niche on the content network. Does google know the content network traffic is CRAP? Yeah they do.... but their adsense publishing program made up 34% of their total revenue in 2007. Imagine the panic in the stock if they pulled the plug on this!!
I am sure Yahoo's YPN would love to jump in and take everyone if google left the market!! - MrViklund, on 04/08/2008, -12/+23And that's why Google are going after Link farms aggressively.
- fireman8871, on 04/08/2008, -0/+11Use the search ads and not the content ads then. You can easily only target Google search results. My experience with both content and search ads with google have been phenominal
- Nougat, on 04/08/2008, -3/+12Anecdote = a datum
- Elliuotatar, on 04/08/2008, -0/+9I've been playing the google ad game for a while, and I've beaten it.
I was having a problem where I was using pay per action to pay people 20 cents per download of my software, but I was not generating sales from it, and I found out there was some click fraud going on, when I compared the number of bytes downloaded on my website to the number of times downloads of my software were started. There were 2x as many download starts as actual downloads, going by the numbers. So I looked at the data from my clicks on Adwords and found some sites that were clearly committing fraud and contacted google about it... And they refused to do anything.
As I could not make money on my product if I was spending all my profits on ads every month because 50% of the clicks were fraudilent and I had to spend the other 50% to get the ad impressions I needed to make sales, I changed tactics. Instead of paying 20 cents per download, I worked with share*it to get a google link on the page which is displayed when I complete a sale. Now, I pay only when someone who clicked buys the product, which means it is impossible for any click fraud to occur. Initially my impressions dropped from the 2mil a day I was getting with a bid of 20 cents per download, down to just 40K a day, but as soon as one of those $15 payoffs occured (I bid half my product's price for a sale, which is the ideal amount to spend on avertising, where the law of diminishing returns is balanced with increased cost, accoridng to my sources) the number of impressions went up to 200,000 and then to 400,000. They now sit steady there, and the equivlent price paid per sale is now like 7 cents, which would normally get me almost no impressions if I bid that per download. (But perhaps that was because I didn't leave it at that price long enough when I tested that back in January.) Also even if 7 cents per download would get that many impressions, with fraud it would be more like I was paying 14 cents, and I would be spending all my profits on ads.
I've also found out how many sales I really make from those ad impressions this way, and it's a lot less than I thought. I make one sale a day, but from march 23rd to today, when I started this campaign, I've made only 3 sales as a result of it. Yet I've sold 15 copies.
I do run some other good ads with pay per click on several websites I specifically selected which have to do with my product though, and I spend more on them, and I'm pretty sure those are generating at least half my sales. But I also know there's a significant number of people finding my product with plain old google searches. - drig, on 04/08/2008, -2/+10As someone who has managed over $1million/month in paid search spend, I can say that the author has the right to be mad, but is misinformed. You CAN opt out of paid parking. Also, I always encourage clients to OPT OUT of content clicks and only bid on Google Search traffic (except their brand terms). Also, the author uses "Google Adsense advertising," which is silly, because Google Adsense is not advertising, it's ad publishing.
- Elliuotatar, on 04/08/2008, -0/+8No they're not. I have pointed out ten different link farms to google and they haven't done a thing about remvoing any of them from their search or from my advertiisng campaigns. They only want you to think they're working agressively to get rid of them. But they want their advertisers to think they're valuable places to advertise. They can't have it both ways, and the advertiser thing is a load of ***** going by my own sales numbers.
- sgtpppr, on 04/08/2008, -0/+8Most Webmasters just aren't that into improving the quality of their sites. The minute you tell them they need better content and a better layout, you get the big SIGH and "can't we just do adwords?". People are lazy. Adwords are there for 1.) new sites and 2.) sites that aren't authoritative enough on their topic to get good organic exposure. Creating a good site with good content that people want to see is hard work...adwords is easy....and of course Google pushes it very hard cause it's their main revenue source.
- stix213, on 04/08/2008, -1/+8Because they make $$$ for the owners, and Google only allows them because Google gets their cut.
- inactive, on 04/08/2008, -4/+11Google Adsense? more like Google NONsense
- account12, on 04/08/2008, -15/+22This was informative. Because ever since I've been using Adblock Plus, I'd forgotten that the internet has ads.
- Jaziek, on 04/08/2008, -1/+8We need wider tubes!
- mathie, on 04/08/2008, -0/+6Google ad networks are too big now, they become the major target of these cheats and scams. Click quality has gone down significantly
- petergerickson, on 04/08/2008, -2/+8I didn't see it as a contradiction. "Repeatedly and consistently" is referring to the domain parking sites in general, not specific domains.
- inactive, on 04/08/2008, -0/+4Maybe your sales staff are doing a poor job optimizing your campaign. Are you still using the Content Network? What about including prices in the Advertising Copy so that only users who are interested in spending money will actually click through? Are your sales staff certified by Google Adwords or YSM?
The truth is, unfortunately, this....
1. There is little to no evidence that "link farms" or parked domains bring any less qualified traffic that Google Search results. The spamminess of a page does not lead necessarily to unqualified clicks. On the contrary, it leads more often to bounces (hit the back button).
2. PPC programs like Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing remain far better sources of targeted leads than any other pay-for-use advertising medium available. Could you imagine paying for Television commercials by the number of people who walk into your store? Paying the YellowBook based on a per-phone-call basis? While still imperfect, PPC remains the quickest, easiest, and most targeted form of advertising available. Period. - DRINKxREDxBULL, on 04/08/2008, -15/+20Maybe instead of bitching about how Google sucks because its corporate, he use someone else for advertising.
- diggit08, on 04/08/2008, -3/+8why the hell is he paying upt $1 on the content network. That is just stupid. Stick to the search retard.
- aaroh, on 04/09/2008, -0/+5domain name parkers usually place adword ads and generate inbound links to the site in an attempt to increase the value of the domain name so they can then on-sell the domain at a premium price.
- superunlikely, on 04/08/2008, -0/+5Even if I believed your totally made up "90%"...
The other 10% represents a metric F-load of money. - BobAlmightyX, on 04/08/2008, -2/+7To people who actually use online ad services like AdWords:
Do you see any real traffic?
Do you see any real BUISNESS from this traffic?
Is it worth it?
From my point of view, the only time I click on an advertisement is when it's an accident. Virtually everyone I know is the same way. If I'm looking for a product, I do it by virtually any other way besides advertisements. Word of mouth, recommendations from certain print publications, searching several sites (froogle, or straight up google search). I don't just buy random ***** on the internet, and while I'm sure some compulsives do, I'm betting 90% of the rest of us don't. TV ads are maybe slightly more effective since you can't keep watching your content while the add is going. But internet ads are a minor annoyance to be quickly screened out mentally. - reviF, on 04/08/2008, -1/+6yeah and screw all those bastards who bought up the property in downtown montreal and are just SITTING ON IT - I hate them ALL, I can't have a good piece of property now because some DICK bought it already thinking it was some great idea and all be bought it for was to SELL it for PROFIT.
Capitalism is the tool of the devil. - inactive, on 04/08/2008, -4/+8You seem to have forgotten that you should RTFA. He alks about blocking sites, but says that since there are so many of them, it is impractical.
- thailand1972, on 04/08/2008, -1/+5They are NOT going after MFA sites aggressively.
- Kalimotxo, on 04/08/2008, -1/+5I kind of agree with PANTONE285 - I have never clicked on an adsense ad, not even by accident.
- HonoredMule, on 04/08/2008, -1/+5When he added the 10% of untraceable traffic and clearly called the /total/ NEARLY half.
40-50% qualifies, does it not? - stix213, on 04/08/2008, -1/+5Damn, I read the entire thing but never found out if you got your $100 back
- inactive, on 04/08/2008, -1/+5You don't have to read the entire comment above mine to get the picture, which is this: Adsense works--and works well, for sites that get an enormous number of hits, return visits, and long lingers. If that's not your site, then don't bother with it.
- deadlift, on 04/08/2008, -0/+4Do you understand how market capitalization works? Number of shares x price of individual stock = market capitalization. In all of Google' existence it has not made close to $150bn in revenue.
- Murdats, on 04/08/2008, -0/+4he is correct, its not worth much, but it is still a tiny tiny piece of valid data, should not be used as proof, but perhaps worth enough to indicate something is worth looking into, maybe some trend is present or to compare perception with reality.
- fairviewjim, on 04/08/2008, -1/+5I find that the flip side of this article appears, frustratingly, to be true. If I am looking for somewhere to buy something, a high percentage of the Google listed sites are link farms containing no information about the product in question.
- therealkdog, on 04/08/2008, -4/+8Woah woah woah... you mean to tell me this internet thing creates fake cashflow?
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