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Google Cleans House

Written on
May 24th 2007
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wrestlemania.jpgMajor developements took place at Google last week which will arguably bring about changes at the search engine monolith that are comparable to the choice they made to introduce paid advertising in 2002.

Its greatest weakness is the ghost of click fraud. News based on a leaked story from Fair Isaac Corporation spread like wild fire late last week. The press release stated that Fair Isaac had been conducting a study on billable click fraud rates at Google and had found 10 — 15 % of all billed clicks to a small sampling of accounts had stemmed from invalid activity.

It appears Google is taking serious action to improve its services on many fronts. Google had begun to close “Made For AdSense” (MFA) sites on Monday, before the Fair Isacc report was publizied. Examples of MFA sites include parked domains, misspellings and faux-search engines, all of which tend to have AdSense advertising on them.

Google is sending closure notices to owners of low conversion MFA sites. Late in the week Google issued emails informing several owners of MFA type sites that their AdSense accounts are going to be terminated on June 1, according to WebmasterWorld reports. The activity at Google reveals an awareness of the chink in their proverbial public relations armor. Google is what it is now because it is perceived to be a trustworthy company.

All these developments have taken place during the launch of perhaps the most interesting thing Google did last week: the introduction of the Google Universal results. In a nutshell, Google Universal is about tying many of the multiple search indexes Google maintains into one coherent set of results.

Exciting times lay in store for Google and their users while the balancing act between their greatest fears and best intentions plays on.



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Reader Comments.

Interesting article, but the Fair Isaac click fraud “story” from last week has been revealed to be inaccurate - http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/070519-082108

Posted by searchvisor | 6:30 pm on May 24, 2007.

my question is this -from all i’ve read - Google seems to have known before hand of all these sites [ rule breaking ] actions, yet never did anything. yet the while reports of them shutting down “one site” a day [ small sites ]for click fruad. Seems like a double standard for the “do no evil” company.
Also, it seems that beating up on the low “rate of convert” sites seems a bit unfair and does nothing for the advertisers and click fruad.

Posted by medina | 7:19 pm on May 25, 2007.

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