mayor - 8:52 am on Mar 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

How much does it cost to submit spam reports? Here's one illustration:

Let's say your professional labor is worth $100/hr. and opening a Hotmail account so you can email a complaint without getting your own dodgy site eyeballed takes you 15 minutes, then that first spam report costs you $25, and maybe ten dollars for each additional report from the same Hotmail account. Lets suppose there are ten sites outranking you, then the initial spam reports are costing you $115. Your chance of success at getting anyone booted is only 10%, so there's still nine sites left outranking you and it has cost you $115 to move up a notch.

You open another Hotmail account under another alias and repeat the cycle. Finally, after about ten cycles you've moved up to number one, at a labor cost of $1000 or so.

After the next Google update, you drop down five places because those spammers you got booted expected it an had new sites in the pipeline.

Adwords starts looking like a bargain if you can't deal with frustration and don't want invest in learning how to beat out the spammers.

Maybe my illustrated techniques and numbers are all wrong, but running an effective spam report campaign is going to cost you and my point remains you have to spend to move up ... it's just a matter of deciding what route you want to take.