For years Google has successfully hid behind the “don’t be evil” mission statement and aggressively blurred the distinction between SEO and spam, fraud and other illegal activities while ignoring the fact that Adsense is the single largest source of revenue for spam and that Adwords makes millions of dollars each year from ads for fraudulent products or services. Spam is bad and hackers are a problem, but the primary vector for many criminal activities are the ad networks themselves, not professional SEOs.
Its time we stop complaining and actually start doing something about it. The ROIguy is pleased to announce a new idea we are calling “White Knight SEO”, which aims to protect users from these scams by dominating organic search results with consumer protection information. We hope that we can place advisory content to take over the top 10 results in Google for searches related to common scams and online fraud with a particular focus on areas which are using adwords & adsense to snare victims.
The first target is “Google Cash” and related terms. If you are interested in writing about this topic (or any other type of spam/fraud that is being perpetrated through Adwords), we invite you to join our crusade and protect consumers from fraudulent offers around “Google Cash Detective Review – Scam Alert”. In turn, we will do our best to publicize the articles and hopefully earn some links to help them rank.
Update, August 19. David Rodnitsky of PPC Associates is the first official White Knight (even if he isn’t an SEO) with his Google Cash Review.
Update, August 21st, 2009. Jonathan Hochman offers his take on Google Scams
Update, September 3rd, 2009. Jonah Stein weighs in with Slaughter Google’s Cash Cow