Google’s Adwords to Adsense double charging trap.
I got an interesting link from a comment at my blog, while typing a reply for that comment I figured its really good enough to be a posting of its own 🙂
The link is for a short youtube video (below) illustrating how some sites abuse the Google adwords program to buy clicks for cheap (or do black hat SEO tricks to show high in natural results) then turn around and make money from high value adsense ads on phantom gateway pages that have no real content to speak of (in many cases these pages are just a bunch of adsense listings or another google adsense search).
Google is not incentivized to track down those fraudsters since Google double benefits from this situation, not only do they get paid for the adwords placement from those fraudster sites, but they get paid again from the adsense ads on those sites.
Without further adieu, here is the video clip:
This is another example of a horrible adsense page:
All that this page has is photos for a couple of well endowed Arab artists (actors, singers, belly dancers, etc), however, the only clickable links on that page are Google Adsense ads (please do not click on any of those ads, don’t want that fraudster to make any more money than they already getting).
This site (single-page really) has been live on Google for ages, not only are they live in the adsense program, they are also the number one natural (algorithmic) web result when you search for some of those Arab celebrities, for example:
http://www.google.com/search?q=hayfa+wahby
Hayfa Wahby is the name of a new Arab pop singer, note that yahoo search does not show that fraudster site as number one and correctly shows a good content site (makes you wonder whether Google boosts web result relevance for sites that use adsense, that would certainly make them more cash).
I am sure the creator of that page is having so much fun getting all the rev share he can get without doing any real work.
How big of a problem is this for Google ? I think its big, and it will soon bite them in the behind.
— amr
PS: I think yahoo does have some similar issues, but since our content-match program is not as widespread as Google’s we do not have as much abuse (yet!). Also, we have the luxury to fix this problem before the cash from it becomes an oozing honey pot (as it is for google now).