The Internet is a continual learning process -- it brings with it -- like any business -- the good and the bad -- and with it the creativity of both. I will share with you some of the scams and spam that travel the Internet last year. It is always wise to keep abreast of the scams and spam because the creative folks who partake in such ventures always find a different twist to the basic scam. But realize, the basic scam is just that -- the root of the twist and turns. Thus, if you can identify what looks like a scam or smells like a scam, then it is best to step back and research. Yes, even if you feel (that's what they are hoping) that it is right.
SCAMS AND SPAMS ARE ALIVE AND WELL
By Vickie J Scanlon
In this last year, I have found that scams and spams are alive and well, and needless to say, in every form and make. What types of scams or spams hit the Internet this year? Here only some of the ones that I encountered or heard about.
EMAIL SCAMS
You typical email scams – the sender trying to convince the recipient that there is something wrong with their Paypal, Banking (Yes, I said banking) account, and Ebay account and to please click the link to resolve this messy problem. For those who do not know, please do not click the link, open a new session and manually type in your link information to get the results.
And for those in the US, and for many and most who have to pay taxes – be aware of an email scam that will suggest that you have a refund waiting for you—and to please give them your Social Security number, and of course, gives you a link in which you can connect with them. DO NOT--delete--this is a scam.
ADSENSE FRAUD
Now, how can you have adsense fraud? Some ingenious souls have found ways to have other click the google links on their site – to make them oodles of money. And – that, I’m said to say, can distort the Google rates for those of us that use it for advertising.
CHARITY SCAMS
Ah, yes – the ones that pull at your heart strings. The most effectively, because you are leading with your heart and not with your intellect. Take a moment and step back, do not give to the caller, go locally to the Charity instead.
I don’t know if this is a scam, but I must say, it really is a shoddy way to increase your leads and profit margin on the Internet – that is by saying – “If you buy so and so product I will contribute a percentage of the profits to the Charity “ – in this case – Katrina Charity.
SEARCH ENGINES UNEQUAL PLAYING FIELDS
Yes, even in search engine optimization people have attempted to find ways to push their sites to the top. It is called “black hat search engine optimization”.
It is said to be a fairly common practice, where the webmaster will build multiple sites on a general theme then cross-link to other sites in the same network. The whole purpose is to give one or more of their sites a stronger showing in the search engine results , and, thus, greater increase in traffic flowing from the various network sites to their site or sites.
SEO Spamming
SEO spamming is designing a web page in an illegal manner so that its rankings are improved. One such way is keyword spamming. The designer will put relevant and irrelevant text in the ‘keywords’ meta tag and often on the visible page text as well. Many words are added and repeated, in an attempt to get a higher ranking for a page. They will make the text look irrelevant to the viewer, by making the font small and the color almost invisible
As you can see, all is the same, only the color of the beast has changed. And what does that mean for the Internet Marketer or the novice Internet Marketer who is just getting their feet wet – be aware and do not partake at the drop of the hat. Pause, and take a long look before departing with your money or your identity.
Vickie J Scanlon Visit her site at: My Affiliate Place for tools, how to info for affiliates, Report Your Scams, business computers, software, tech accessories and more.
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Showing posts with label adsense fraud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adsense fraud. Show all posts
Sunday, January 1, 2006
Monday, November 7, 2005
Learn What Splogs, Scraping and Adsense Fraud Is
New terms and new events -- good and bad -- are always happening at a record clip on the Internet. The first and most important element of any affiliate business or website is to stay informed at what's going on, on the Internet.
Have you been hearing words like, splogs and scraping? Do you know how it can affect you, and your website and blog? The article by Jim Hedger answers these questions for you.
If you are supplying quality content, then this article is important to know about and to learn from, because if your site is scraped, it can adversely affect your website/blog in the search engines and everything that you have honestly worked hard at achieving. So read, and store the information in your memory banks. As you know, awareness is one step toward prevention.
Splogs + Scraping + AdSense=Fraud
The other day, an article appeared in Search Engine Journal suggesting webmasters monetize theirsites using Google AdSense. While the article neglected to mention an alternative webmaster advertising program offered byYahoo Search Marketing, the idea of using one's website as a commercial medium (if possible or practical) makes good sense and can provide a minor side-income. Such minor side-incomes ar often the first ingredients in making the gravy craved by all small business owners.
Since the advent of Google's AdWords grassroots distribution program, AdSense, several webmasters have built businesses outof taking content off of other people's websites and using that content to build pages designed specifically to attract ad-clicks. As the average commission earned by sites running AdSense generated advertising is approximately $20/month,webmasters working this type of scheme need to create hundreds, if not thousands of pages to make a living. In order to create those pages and attract ad-clicking visitors, content must be created, begged, borrowed, or most commonly, simply stolen. Known as Splogs, these sites only exist to game Google in one way or another, mostly for money but also for increased search rankings or as a means of manipulating search spiders.
Splogs most often get their content by scraping, the process of sending an electronic copying bot to take everything it sees, recreating it on an unlimited number of instant documents. By running advertising generated through the AdSense program, the owners of the splogs make money when visitors click on the ads. In other words, literally millions of instant sites have sprung up over the past twelve months, most of which are free-hosted Blogs, containing content scraped out from the original sites.
Before continuing, I would like to make it clear that there are several publications that request permission to reprint content. That's ok. Chances are, this article is being read in one of those publications. Online business runs on such agreements.
Splogs are bad business and the practice is finally getting the notice it deserves. Several search heavyweights have weighed in on Splogs over the past two weeks and a flame-war (the virtual equivalent of fisticuffs) broke out between members of two well-known SEO/SEM forums. As a result, the practice of producing AdSense revenues from stolen content on spammy sites got a little bit harder, starting today.
Matt Cutts, Google's spamfighter and quality assurance czar, has taken an obvious and positive interest in Splogs. In the SEO/SEM community, Cutts' name is as widely known as Page, Brin, and even Gates' names are. Cutts is "the man" when it comes to explaining the state of Google's various indexes and how they work. He is referred to as the Chief Spam Fighter at Google. In a posting to his Gagets, Google, and SEO blog earlier today, Cutts invites Google users to report Splogs displaying AdSense driven advertising.
"You see a low-quality site that is running AdSenseIf you run across a site that you consider spammy and it has AdSense on it, click on the "Ads by Goooooogle" link and click"Send Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw". Enter the words spam report and jagger1 in the comments field."
The name, "Jagger1" is the reference name given the Google algorithm update that is currently causing the present shuffling of Google's search results.
Splog fraud is a big problem for Google and a growing concern for the other major search advertising providers such as Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN. It is also a problem for others working on the Internet. The way content is taken from one site and replicated to dozens of others can cause no end to technical and financial issues for honest webmasters.
Content, incidentally, is not always limited to what the viewer sees on the screen. Stolen content often includes source-code and as anyone familiar with code can tell you, there's a lot of domain and document specific information embedded in source-code.
Over at Search Engine Journal, a funny posting shows how one poorly executed scrape made an honest webmaster afraid of being branded a click-fraud artist by Google. After scraping the site, the splog-artist apparently forgot to remove the AdSense code from the stolen content. That's how the honest webmaster found out he had been stolen from. He was moved to contact Google before his AdSense account status was affected. If the webmaster hadn't been paying attention, he might have been badly branded by Google, burned by someone else's scam.
That's not the only way that scrappers could adversely affect honest webmasters however. The content webmasters create, or have created for them, is the attraction that prompts visitors to their sites. Attracting lots of site visitors is a pretty important step to making money from AdSense or the YahooPublishing Network. If someone is stealing that content, they are also stealing potential visitors. For the webmaster, that content represents investment. For the content creator, it represents product. Either way, the scraping of content is theft.
The stolen product is then used to create what is essentially duplicate content on another site. Duplication of content can have an adverse effect on the search engine placement of all documents containing the similar items. Imagine losing your placements because someone else took the material you laboured over. Fortunately, Google's historic record of documents is fairly good at weeding through which source first displayed specific content.
Search engines have several other reasons to be concerned about splogs. As many of them are created using the free-blog software offered and hosted by most of the major search engines, the proliferation of so many splogs consumes a lot of resources.They also gum up search results with sites not actually relevant to search engine users. Lastly, they devalue the legitimate uses of blogs as communications and marketing tools, which might lead future blog readers or users away from the growing blogosphere. Citizen's publishing is seen as a major revenue source for both Google and Yahoo. Having invested so much time, energy and money into the establishment of blogs, the major search engines would be loath to let their investments go the way of the dodos without a fight.
Now that the web development community is talking about the issue in earnest, some forms of protections might evolve. As it stands currently, there is little a webmaster can do to protect his or her content from being stolen for profit. You can use Copyscape to see if your material has been nabbed but after doing that, there is little one can do except write angry letters to the thief and a lawyer.
Google is inviting users and webmasters to report splogs running AdSense whenever they are seen. In a just universe, not only would the AdSense accounts of those scrappers be closed, their bank accounts would be emptied after Google sues them for fraud.
=================================
Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing expert based in Victoria BC. Jim writes and edits full-time fo StepForth and is also an editor for the Internet Search Engine Database. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes the opportunity to share his experience through interviews, articles and speaking engagements. He can be reached at"jimhedger@stepforth.com"
Check out my Scam Report Site, which gives a listing for where you can report scams or spam, online or off-line.
Read more...
Have you been hearing words like, splogs and scraping? Do you know how it can affect you, and your website and blog? The article by Jim Hedger answers these questions for you.
If you are supplying quality content, then this article is important to know about and to learn from, because if your site is scraped, it can adversely affect your website/blog in the search engines and everything that you have honestly worked hard at achieving. So read, and store the information in your memory banks. As you know, awareness is one step toward prevention.
Splogs + Scraping + AdSense=Fraud
The other day, an article appeared in Search Engine Journal suggesting webmasters monetize theirsites using Google AdSense. While the article neglected to mention an alternative webmaster advertising program offered byYahoo Search Marketing, the idea of using one's website as a commercial medium (if possible or practical) makes good sense and can provide a minor side-income. Such minor side-incomes ar often the first ingredients in making the gravy craved by all small business owners.
Since the advent of Google's AdWords grassroots distribution program, AdSense, several webmasters have built businesses outof taking content off of other people's websites and using that content to build pages designed specifically to attract ad-clicks. As the average commission earned by sites running AdSense generated advertising is approximately $20/month,webmasters working this type of scheme need to create hundreds, if not thousands of pages to make a living. In order to create those pages and attract ad-clicking visitors, content must be created, begged, borrowed, or most commonly, simply stolen. Known as Splogs, these sites only exist to game Google in one way or another, mostly for money but also for increased search rankings or as a means of manipulating search spiders.
Splogs most often get their content by scraping, the process of sending an electronic copying bot to take everything it sees, recreating it on an unlimited number of instant documents. By running advertising generated through the AdSense program, the owners of the splogs make money when visitors click on the ads. In other words, literally millions of instant sites have sprung up over the past twelve months, most of which are free-hosted Blogs, containing content scraped out from the original sites.
Before continuing, I would like to make it clear that there are several publications that request permission to reprint content. That's ok. Chances are, this article is being read in one of those publications. Online business runs on such agreements.
Splogs are bad business and the practice is finally getting the notice it deserves. Several search heavyweights have weighed in on Splogs over the past two weeks and a flame-war (the virtual equivalent of fisticuffs) broke out between members of two well-known SEO/SEM forums. As a result, the practice of producing AdSense revenues from stolen content on spammy sites got a little bit harder, starting today.
Matt Cutts, Google's spamfighter and quality assurance czar, has taken an obvious and positive interest in Splogs. In the SEO/SEM community, Cutts' name is as widely known as Page, Brin, and even Gates' names are. Cutts is "the man" when it comes to explaining the state of Google's various indexes and how they work. He is referred to as the Chief Spam Fighter at Google. In a posting to his Gagets, Google, and SEO blog earlier today, Cutts invites Google users to report Splogs displaying AdSense driven advertising.
"You see a low-quality site that is running AdSenseIf you run across a site that you consider spammy and it has AdSense on it, click on the "Ads by Goooooogle" link and click"Send Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw". Enter the words spam report and jagger1 in the comments field."
The name, "Jagger1" is the reference name given the Google algorithm update that is currently causing the present shuffling of Google's search results.
Splog fraud is a big problem for Google and a growing concern for the other major search advertising providers such as Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN. It is also a problem for others working on the Internet. The way content is taken from one site and replicated to dozens of others can cause no end to technical and financial issues for honest webmasters.
Content, incidentally, is not always limited to what the viewer sees on the screen. Stolen content often includes source-code and as anyone familiar with code can tell you, there's a lot of domain and document specific information embedded in source-code.
Over at Search Engine Journal, a funny posting shows how one poorly executed scrape made an honest webmaster afraid of being branded a click-fraud artist by Google. After scraping the site, the splog-artist apparently forgot to remove the AdSense code from the stolen content. That's how the honest webmaster found out he had been stolen from. He was moved to contact Google before his AdSense account status was affected. If the webmaster hadn't been paying attention, he might have been badly branded by Google, burned by someone else's scam.
That's not the only way that scrappers could adversely affect honest webmasters however. The content webmasters create, or have created for them, is the attraction that prompts visitors to their sites. Attracting lots of site visitors is a pretty important step to making money from AdSense or the YahooPublishing Network. If someone is stealing that content, they are also stealing potential visitors. For the webmaster, that content represents investment. For the content creator, it represents product. Either way, the scraping of content is theft.
The stolen product is then used to create what is essentially duplicate content on another site. Duplication of content can have an adverse effect on the search engine placement of all documents containing the similar items. Imagine losing your placements because someone else took the material you laboured over. Fortunately, Google's historic record of documents is fairly good at weeding through which source first displayed specific content.
Search engines have several other reasons to be concerned about splogs. As many of them are created using the free-blog software offered and hosted by most of the major search engines, the proliferation of so many splogs consumes a lot of resources.They also gum up search results with sites not actually relevant to search engine users. Lastly, they devalue the legitimate uses of blogs as communications and marketing tools, which might lead future blog readers or users away from the growing blogosphere. Citizen's publishing is seen as a major revenue source for both Google and Yahoo. Having invested so much time, energy and money into the establishment of blogs, the major search engines would be loath to let their investments go the way of the dodos without a fight.
Now that the web development community is talking about the issue in earnest, some forms of protections might evolve. As it stands currently, there is little a webmaster can do to protect his or her content from being stolen for profit. You can use Copyscape to see if your material has been nabbed but after doing that, there is little one can do except write angry letters to the thief and a lawyer.
Google is inviting users and webmasters to report splogs running AdSense whenever they are seen. In a just universe, not only would the AdSense accounts of those scrappers be closed, their bank accounts would be emptied after Google sues them for fraud.
=================================
Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing expert based in Victoria BC. Jim writes and edits full-time fo StepForth and is also an editor for the Internet Search Engine Database. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes the opportunity to share his experience through interviews, articles and speaking engagements. He can be reached at"jimhedger@stepforth.com"
Check out my Scam Report Site, which gives a listing for where you can report scams or spam, online or off-line.
Read more...
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