It’s all over the search engine web: Google is cleaning house of Adsense arbitrage sites, which I wrote about in The Search and form a cottage industry that benefits both parties. SEW has more here. I asked Google for a statement on this and got this rather tepid, but telling response:
At Google, we are always focused on how we can make the user experience as positive as possible while still providing value to our publishers and advertisers. As part of this effort, we continually conduct automated and manual reviews of publishers and sites that violate our policies. In some cases, violations of our program policies will result in termination from AdSense.
SO … does this mean Google is finally relenting, and addressing its role in the current crop of spam / questionable sites out there? It’s rather ironic that Google tells us to market ethically, and yet so many spam-blogs have been set up with ADSENSE all over them.
It’s good to see Google is finally working to address this. Or, am I mis-reading what’s going on?
I hope they are addressing it. When my company launched a custom search engine in April, after the initial press release and blog articles about it, we immediately saw our site was very high in search results for some important keywords. A few days later our press release was circulated through hundreds, if not thousands, of spam blogs and junk sites with AdWords on the side. We ended up taking a hit in Google because even though we were not associated with those junk sites and did not ask them to post our release, they all had links to our site and it appears our site was penalized temporarily for link spam…