Bronte Media

There are always blurry lines between what is right and wrong.

For instance, Google began cracking down on sites with no links and just adsense ads. Yet ironically their adsense links product on their own site hypocritically creates a similar experience.

The reaction of that move by ‘webmasters’ was to ’scrape’ content from other parts of the web which they then slapped Adsense ads to the side. The content was boring but was enough to trigger the keyword they were targeting and having the intended consequence of making the ads appear more interesting in comparison. They then bought cheap traffic, drove it to the site and hoped that enough people would click on the higher value keyword-targeted ads that they would make money on the micro-transactions.

You can bet that Google and Yahoo are pretty much trying to create a pattern for such activity and ban it.

But in an interesting twist, Yahoo has launched its ‘brand universe’ program which ’scrapes’ [side note: industry-friendly terms for ’scrape’ are ’syndicate’ (old-skool media), ‘mash-up’ (new-skool media) and crawl/index (hi-tek non-media industry)] information from Yahoo properties (Flickr, Answers, Bix, Delicious etc.) around certain brands. Here is one site for the Nintendo Wii.

They aren’t running content targeted ads but rather display units. Is this kind of site right or wrong? I am not passing judgement, just like I would not pass judgment on the supposedly ‘wrong sites’. That’s for Google and Yahoo to decide who they do business with. But the line of hypocrisy is a thin one.

In another SEO trend, ironically the example Yahoo gave on the wii, is part of ‘forecasting keyword demand’.

Sometimes it’s all about the lipstick and polish.