Article in Forbes about AdWords Quality Score

Quality score not working to stop bad guys. Many small businesses suffering

[RockSolidWes]

Frontpage of Forbes Tech Section Website has an article about Google AdWords and the recent Quality Score. Says that many of the big arbitrageur are getting around the system via cloaking methods.

It also speaks of how many legitimate businesses are suffering.

The part most troubling for me:

Basically, the big bad guys have a team of PhD students working on getting around the system. Small businesses that get hit do not have these resources so the big bad guys stay in while smaller good guys suffer collateral damage.

[forbes.com...]

[eWhisper]

I talked to this reporter while he was working on the article.

He declined to use the stories about how the new system is not hurting some small businesses; and in fact, many legitimate local sites have seen their minimum bids drop over time.

He was writing a story about arbitrage, and so only showed quality score as it applies to that very specific industry. He didn't write about the positive things he's heard about QS.

[La_Valette]

That Schoemaker guy who was quoted boasting of the way he gets around the system is really asking for the hammer to fall, imho...

[Green_Grass]

The point that was being made was the Arbitrage is not going to go away. However Google is making life difficult for the average guy. It is no longer possible to just put up a nonsense page, get the ads from adSense and traffic from adWords.

IMHO QS is still a little unsophisticated. But it is evolving. My small e biz got upgarded after 2 months, so I have hope that they will soon catch the bad guys who use cloaking etc. Once they catch and ban such guys, arbitaging will become even more difficult.

However, I have noticed that if one can create legitimate high QS pages, there is still money in the arbitage game. However the trick is to balance high QS requirements with a decently high CTR. Not really easy but if one gives it a thought, it is possible.

[georgiek50]

I find it very strange how Google can not somehow figure out someone's attempt to cloak. I don't pretend to know much about the subject but isn't it entirely based on IP addresses?

Couldn't Google "fake" an IP address, or spider in such a way as to not raise any flags that it's an actual bot crawling the entire site?

It's a multi-billion dollar company after all!

[La_Valette]

wouldn't even need to fake an IP address - I think just buying up a few other domains and sending out the bot from them instead would do the trick

[Jane_Doe]

I clicked on some Adwords today not as a web site owner but just normal surfing as a potential customer looking for information on a certain topic, and twice got sent to pages that consisted of nothing but 3 or 4 Adsense ad blocks. I'm not an Adwords advertiser, but I'd say the Google Adwords staff has some work cut out for them to get rid of those types of pages. (The pages appeared to be cloaked and from two different domains, but they both went to yet a third domain that had the pages with just the Adsense ads.)

I think over time, getting results like that just conditions people not to click on the Google ads anymore, if they think they are just going to be a waste of time.

[edited by: Jane_Doe at 7:13 am (utc) on Dec. 11, 2006]

[outland88]

Yahoo is loaded with cloaked nonsense MFA pages. If you enjoy some popularity and have at least three paragraphs of real content per page odds are some cloaker has stolen it for MFA sites in Yahoo. Just shorten your searches and you’ll find it. Many of the cloakers will target small business for content theft.