Aaron Wall, author and founder of the SEOBook website, called out Google today for accepting PPC ads promoting bogus Google money making schemes.
“Google gives webmasters this guideline “Your site’s reputation can be affected by who you link to.” Why shouldn’t it apply to Google as well?
As long as Google has 30%+ profit margins they are making a BUSINESS DECISION to run these fraudulent ads. They could spend 1% of revenue on cleaning up this issue (if they wanted to), but they are making a choice not to. Hal Varian (a Google consultant and UC Berkeley microeconomics professor) has probably done the math, and the offers stay after repeated media exposure of the issue,” Wall blogged.
Perhaps it is time for people to start adding Google to RipOffReports instead of just the companies that create the scam websites that run Google Adwords. It would be fun to see if Google dropped those listings while allowing competitors run malice stories that get well ranked.
I am sure there are tons of these sites that are getting bad press from RipOffReports and are well ranked as a warning to people – the reason Google refuses to drop any of the RoR listings – yet Google is allowing them to run ads to entice people to be swindled out of their money.
If it is a matter of money, perhaps Google could enlist the help of volunteers from their newly launched volunteer site. Afterall that site is called GoodForAll – something Google may not be doing in this case.
