Ben_Graham - 12:04 am on Jun 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

As a merchant, I despise sites occupying our industry's SERPs when the site is just a collection of junk pages full of adsense and affiliate links. The fact that search engines aren't able to tell that "widgets.thebestcoolsites.cz" is not a valid page for an American web surfer looking for widgets is disheartening. The fact that you can put AdSense ads on a page full of CJ links is insane. Pages with stolen content just shouldn't be able to rank.

I believe that Google has ruined the Internet with AdSense, and Overture, EBay, and everyone else are pitching in. While there are great content sites that have benefitted from AdSense, they are just a few drops in the bucket compared to the spammers and trash domain owners who are generating the real profits.

Let me say it first: Google is writing cheques to the spammers that they say they hate. As long as Google's making money off it they will not stop. If there was no CJ, and no AdSense, the vast majority of spammers would stop in one week. The genie's out of the bottle, though, and it will never be corrected. Only the search engines, who created the problem in the first place, have any chance of fixing it.

As a Google user, I have to agree with jamesa when he says that he doesn't care how he gets there, as long as he gets to the right destination. I would say most search engine users are just trying to get where they're going. They don't know that they ended up on a splog that stole copyrighted content in order to jam in AdSense ads. They probably don't care, either. They just eventually want to get to a site that sells red widgets, and they'll keep blindly clicking on things until they get there.