Mark Cuban Doesn’t Get How the Web Works
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As a little background for this rant you need to know that Mark is an [the?] owner of IceRocket.com. IceRocket is a damn fine blog search engine and I’m guessing that the biggest problem they, and other search engines, face is how to separate the so called spam sites from the real content. If you own a search engine…this is what keeps you awake at night…ask Matt Cutts.
To get on with my rant, I was reading Mark Cuban’s blog, as I do regularly and well, here’s a quote from his story called What is click fraud?
“Im going to offer my definition and let everyone else chime in as well in comments.
…
If an ad shows up on a splog and the advertisers doesnt want their ads on splogs. Thats click fraud.…
Some may feel that Im over reaching in the definition, I dont.“
The bold is me, cuz that’s where Mark proves he doesn’t get it. And what he doesn’t get is that splogs [I prefer the term blams...spam blogs] work. They not only work for the sploggers, they also work for Google [in about a billion way$] and they also work for the ADVERTISERS.
It’s all Google’s fault really, and don’t kid yourself, Google is well aware that those blams go out and infest all the other competition search engines and make Google a wack of cash. Like I was saying it’s all Google’s fault. Since they invented Adsense, they incentivized the game of infinite niching. So now there’s money to be made by carving a niche [eg: used cars] up into finer and finer slices.
As a nicher I can use a variety of tools to generate a list of 10,000 possible terms that someone could be searching for. The blam miester can then go and build a 10,000 page site that catches every possible search related to “used cars.” The problem is that someone with a real site for used cars can’t possibly compete. Even if they did want to, their site would look ridiculous if it was optimized for all those terms like the blam site.
The problem is that there is a disconnect between how people search and the way the search engines work. When you search Google for “used cars” the first result is Kelly’s Blue Book, but I don’t want that, what I really want is “used cars around the corner cheap new york” and then I get a list of blam results [or I would if I chose an example that had some money in it]. So the innocent searcher clicks on Used-Cars-New-York-Blam.info were he finds a page that is showing ads from the used car dealer from his home town [because they are localized] and targeted to the exact phrase he was searching for. Blam! The searcher found exactly what he was looking for. The adverstiser got a pre-screened [important! more likely to be ready to purchase] potential client looking for exactly what he his selling for the cost of about a dollar and he didn’t have to spend the time or $$$ to massage his website into a ridiculous mess trying to seduce Google into believing he was the best choice for some crazy searcher’s terms.
That’s why blams, splogs or what ever you want to call them are the farthest thing from fraud. They are simply necessary due to the lack of intelligence in a search engine. And they’ll continue to be necessary until either the search engines learn to return results based on what searchers actually mean rather than what they type into the search box or searchers learn to find what they need without resorting to a mathematical formula [search engine] for help.
Until then Mark, don’t think of them as fraud, they’re just Google’s little helpers, out making sure that Google can control traffic on every other search engine too. It’s all really math. If you want to get rid of blams, just like any other virus, take away their food: PPC ads and mathematically based search engines. Not going to be easy though, too many people [and not just the 'bad guys'] making money.