Spam for Adsense Sites are Good for G's Competitive Strategy

Is it G's Trojan Horse?

[Buddha]

Before I state my thesis, I believe 2 things.
1. Y! is easier to spam than G.
2. Adsense Spam sites make a search engine worse

If #1 is true, then you will find more adsense spam sites on Y, which I think is true.

G benefits because it monetizes Y!'s traffic. G also benefits because these adsense spam sites ruin Y!'s results more than their own. Successful adsense spammers are actually financed with their earnings from G to increase their spam.

Since G is harder to spam the Y!, Y!'s results continue to get filled with spam, while G makes even more money to improve their own spam algos.

So from a G business perspective, why should G ban these Y! adsense spammers? They are monetizing G's top competitor's traffic AND ruining their search results.

Sounds like G's Trojan Horse... If G is really smart, they will just penalize adsense spam sites in the G index but allow them to keep their adsense account to spam the heck out of their competitors.

[photonstudios]

You're not making much sense...

So from a G business perspective, why should G ban these Y! adsense spammers?

What kind of question is that? How in the world can Google ban Yahoo adsense spammers? Google has absolutely no control over Yahoo.

So you make adsense spam sites? It sure sounds like it..

[freeflight2]

his analysis does make sense - at the same time the danger of "adsense spammers" ruining G/adsense/adwords's reputation far outweights any potential short term 'gains' by putting trash into Y's serps (Y also just might ban all adsense sites)

[Powdork]

What the Bhudda means is why would Adsense remove their contextual ads from sites that are spamming Y!. Personally I think G does not use this as a trojan horse since if it were a major factor in their revenue stream they would be in effect killing off that stream by allowing Y! to die. Besides, Google and Yahoo are not the big competitors the Bhudda seems to think they are. They work together in many ways and they both benefit from it.

[Buddha]

Photon, I've never created adsense spam sites because I would not want to risk losing my account. But I have noticed more of these sites in my industry and I've seen more and more complaints about them with no action from google. My theory is on why they are taking no action. I have spammed Y!, but I don't use adsense for those.

Freeflight, It would be tough for Y! to ban just adsense spam sites because there are so many good sites, small and large, that use adsense.

Also, the potential gain in market share against Y! far outweighs the potential loss in quality of their adsense network. Market share is more valuable AND if Y! traffic defects to G, and there are less adsense spam sites in G, then the quality of their adsense network actually improves.

Powdork, G would make way more money by taking market share away from Y!. Why?
1. If they gain market share, they make more money off adwords, which they get 100% of the CPC.
2. Wall Street would award google highly and punish Y!. Y!s main rev stream from OV would decrease greatly.

I think it's brilliant.

[Powdork]

Powdork, G would make way more money by taking market share away from Y!. Why?

Yes, but my point is that G and Y! are not the competitors it would seem.
1. Y still uses G's index for searches that the Y! index does not bring up results.
2. Several months ago both G and Y banned many sites simultaneously (the ones using the onmousover redirects).
3. They both share many premium partners who seem to have carte blanche within each's respective directory. For instance imdb has 8500+ dmoz listings and 7800+ Y! listings. They rank in the top five for virtually ANY movie search. Both Y and G make $ with this synergistic approach. There are lots of examples of this.
4. If they were staunch competitors, don't you think the fact (theory) that Google can't handle the amount of urls they have crawled would have made it Y's frontpage?

[Buddha]

Powdork

I have to respectfully disagree with you that G and Y! are not direct competitors.

If I were running G, the only 2 things that might keep me up at night are Y! and M$. I wouldn't worry about anyone else. And if I were Y!, vice versa.

If Y! is not G's biggest threat, then who is? Who is G's most feared competitor?

When you are a huge company, it's inevitable that you do business with eachother, directly or indirectly. Look at M$, Oracle, and Sun. But they each try to crush eachother if they have the opportunity. It's just business...