O’Reilly joins the search engine spam parade
You growled at the thought of The Stanford Daily advertising “diet pills” next to articles about their dangers.
You roared in outrage when WordPress let a search engine spammer onto wordpress.org.
So, how do you feel about this?
O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com site, home of tons of interesting articles on Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl/Python/PHP over the years, now also features (at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar, under the “oh, but it’s related, really” headline “Travelling to a tech show?”) eight links to the sort of garbage hotel sites that make it utterly impossible to find any useful information about hotels on Google.
O’Reilly’s OSDir.com, where amusingly enough I was looking to see what had happened to Danny O’Brien’s To Evil! column, is brought to you by things like Cuban cigars, mortgage refinancing, Jack Daniels (no, I didn’t click to see what sort of scam involves wanting to be highly ranked for “Jack Daniels”), online degrees, and cheap hotels: basically, the same folks who are spamming your comments, minus the rape porn.
O’Reilly’s XML.com, a site I used to take very seriously, because of all the scary-smart people who write there? Brought to you by hotel spam, mortgage refinancing spam, and one of those “directories” that only exists to feed off confused searchers by sending them right back around through Google’s AdSense division when they arrive from a Google search.
How horribly low have we sunk, that I’m not willing to link to O’Reilly sites without a rel="nofollow", because they are a bunch of low-life search engine spammers? X-bloody-ML.com, something that I won’t touch without a nofollow condom? This just sucks.
I’m curious why certain people think that the internet is the only advertising media where all advertising must be entirely within a narrow topic range?
Also, seems to presume that search engines don’t have automated ways in which to devalue such links.
I don’t know, maybe if you find those people you could ask them?
Rationalizing that search engines are perfectly capable of recognizing and discounting this particular form of spam makes for a rather different ethical dilemma, doesn’t it? Or is it perfectly okay to sell something that should be harmful, as long as it doesn’t actually work as intended?
The beef with the O’Reilly text ads is they appear to be a scheme to exploit O’Reilly’s high reputation to unnaturally boost other sites that would not be so boosted except for the exchange of money. The subject matter of the sites isn’t really what the search engines care about.
Fact of it is, most search engine spam is relevant, i.e. mortgage spam tends to target mortgage/finance queries, not travel queries. The trouble with spam is it’s pollution, it displaces better answers.
”and one of those ”directories” that only exists to feed off confused searchers by sending them right back around through Google’s AdSense division when they arrive from a Google search.”
WTF does that mean Phil? You make no sense.
I really think you need to explain this. It really makes no sense.
Well, do you find Tim’s description any easier to parse?
And when the AdSense ads are actually contextual for the whole set of breadcrumbs down to the category, plus some other scattered words, they aren’t even ads for the category, often as not.
Phil,
Why can’t you answer the questions and not point out what Tim wrote? I looked at that site and I see adsense ads and lots of sites listed in that directory.
Are you blaming adsense for displaying inncorrect ads? I’m not sure what you are getting at.
Dan
Just curious to know if you think there’s significant difference in the blogosphere between notion of advertising in the commercial, buy-this and advertising in the ”turn toward”, look-at-this sense.
…and which applies to comments, and didn’t this use to be slashdot…
And now onlamp.com has those nasty javascript-added pseudo ”intellitxt” links that really annoy me elsewhere. Hmm, but you can disable it at http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/general/intellitxt.html
Posted for Ian Davis, since my comment form refuses to let him comment:
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I surfed to those O’Reilly sites mentioned but couldn’t find any links to spam sites. Did they remove those links?