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
Let me know how I can help!
Great. So NOW the “White Knight SEOs” come bounding in TEN MONTHS after little sites like mine ALREADY warned people about these scams and helped them file complaints with the FTC, AGs, IC3, BBB, AFTER Google has already been banning advertisers for months, and AFTER the FTC has already file injunctions against some of the bigger Google Cash scams out there?
Plus apparently you forgot your history. The original Google Cash or even Google Cash Detective had NOTHING to do with any of these new scams.
Paul
I am sorry if you feel crowded out or neglected, but since you are selling a product to people who are looking to work at home, I can’t include you in the list of articles exposing the scam. This is about being altruistic, not opportunistic.
For what it is worth, other not so little sites like http://www.SEOBook.com have been sounding the alarm for some time, I just felt it was time to encourage other people to do so as well.
LOL.
Are you kidding me? If I was being opportunitistic I’d shut that whole site down. Do you have ANY clue at all what it takes to help that many people? Believe me, there are MUCH easier ways to make money.
I worked with people on the phone for hours, worked DIRECTLY with a senior litigator at the FTC on one of the cases spending weeks reverse engineering properties and providing 10 pages of dense documentation on the scams, spent weeks of phone calls between the litigator, myself, and the investigator – plus I agreed to testify in their case
I worked with people on the phone helping them fill out FTC complaints, IC3 complaints, and the National Consumers League used my site to issue their warning.
I’m suspecting you’re realizing that you’re little “Publicity Stunt” is going to take a nasty turn.
And you have the GALL to call ME opportunistic?
Why don’t you call my friend Lyndell Edgington who runs EagleResearchAssociates.org and has an assigned federal agent about that?
I sacrificed hundreds of hours of my LIFE helping these people. You think a few measely product sales and paltry adsense earnings is what this is about?
White Hat SEO is nothing more than a cheap publicity stunt, IMHO.
Correction to above: “White Knight SEO”
Paul
I am sorry you think this is a publicity stunt. If it is for publicity, it has nothing to do with me or my business. I have been campaigning against Virtual Blight for a couple years now. White Knight SEO is just the latest chapter; one that I hope will get others in the industry to devote a little bit of time to helping clean up the web instead of promoting their own sites. I also hope the mainstream media will be able to understand the issue and frame it in terms of Google’s (and other publishers’) responsibility for the ads they carry on their site.
As for the question of opportunistic versus altruistic, I am only able to base my opinion on your WorkAtHomeTruth.com site and the fact that you are clearly selling a product along with being an affiliate for a number of work at home systems . I am not sure how to reconcile these offers with your claim, but I do not feel compelled to do so. I am making no judgements about your site other than that it doesn’t fit my definition of White Knight SEO.
I applaud the work you are doing with victims of these scams and I encourage you to publish some of the information you are providing them. I would happily link to that as a wonderful resource and I am reasonable confident others would as well.
You’re not wrong about the “hours” spent on this effort @Paul. Same as me – my hourly rate has cost me thousands if I was charging, ha ha. Still, there are plenty of other dodgy dealings the nurks have got to move on to in order to Realise their Investment…
It’s at this point that your idea @Jonah may work. Personally speaking, though, when I stumbled (quite accidently) into this vipers nest, the single post I made on my blog out-hit all the Chesty-Google stuff for several weeks, and going backwards all the way to the previous November, postings like those on @Paul’s website and others (which we’ve listed), took the same spot, as I discovered.
The problem was not in the difficulty of out-ranking the scammers, it was that Google sat on their hands for so long, allowing hundreds (nay thousands) of websites to post near-identical content all pointing back to the mother-lode while at the same time the web was spammed to high-heaven with links and adverts marketing the crap.
If you can figure a way to stop the inevitable repetition of that (once someone’s zonked up a new killer keyword), all the little people will be protected much better.
Rees
Google provide a great advert service, and like so many good free services it gets abused, that isn’t Googles fault. Pro seos know a good money making strategy when they see one, and Google Adsense is definitely one of them.