Google AdSense has Golf Balls

Google AdSense has a testimonials page, these are usually very lame - often fictional quotes dreamed up by PR people, PR people posing as customers whacked on MDMA:

I'd like to thank Shady Company for a fantastic product, it's increased our revenue by 12,000% since an hour ago, and its such a pretty color. Whee! Look at the colors! The after-sales people are fantastic, I love you guys, I love you so much, I just want to touch your shirt... wow, thats so... amazing... your shirt... it feels so furry... wow.
Dr Martin Horseworthy, Nebraska

Sometimes they have a picture of a potato-looking goober to go next to it, so you'll know that someone this white and this bald may endorse the product. But this is Google and I'm interested to see some examples of ad placement they think work well without interfering too much with the site. Enter testimonials:

Check out golf-equipment-tips.com down the bottom. Things to notice:

The site does not exist, the domain is registered anonymously with Tucows, but that could mean anything. Hanzi dead link.

Google has a cache of a single page from December of last year, so the site did at one time exist, and it looked something like this:

The text ads on the left are AdSense, the text ads on the right are LinkSynergy ads. This is a clear breach of 'Wesley Atkins' AdSense agreement:

'General: You further agree not to display on any Serviced Page any non-Google content-targeted advertisement(s)'

LinkSynegry is a spyware related company and the number one result on Google for that name is a page on how to remove their hideous malware, so Mr. Atkins may not hold his site visitors in great regard. The content of the page is MaxFli's own marketing text, copied verbatim. There are links at the bottom to the rest of the pages which existed on the site, which together with the repetitive text make a good example of keyword stuffing, which Google frowns upon. AdSense policy prohibits 'Excessive, repetitive, or irrelevant keywords in the content or code of web pages.' This is the excessive repetitive kind.

I would wager that none of the other pages contain any real original or valuable content, or even a useful arrangement of content, the site was put up solely to host ads. This is verging on a blackhat site. Again, Adsense policy is that: 'No Google ad may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant.'

So... a spam site violating Google's policies and recommendations that did not even stay in business is Google's idea of a 'success story'. Hmmm... little oversight there.

I should note that I am a big fan of AdSense, I use it on several of my sites and it pays the hosting costs. I could use more intrusive placement to increase my CPM, but I don't need to, and y'all wouldn't like it. They're the only game in town as far as I'm concerned, which is why I stuck with them for the past two months while the ads were turned off (Google was sending me a postcard with a PIN number. They do that, be warned.) For comparison, I spent a year trying different ad layouts and formats from Amazon on a another site, referred them a bunch of people and... nothing, they acknowledged the traffic and that's it. Not one brass farthing. Lot of good that was. I do wonder about the quality of Google's services since they went public, they don't seem to be showing the innovation or commitment to 'Dont be Evil' that they used to. Oh well, still better than Yahoo :-) Thank you Adsense guys... I love you... can I touch your shirt...

UPDATE: April '07, Google have made a new testimonials page.

Created 2007-03-03 20:53:59 by 102 and filed under internet