O’Reilly joins the search engine spam parade
You growled at the thought of The Stanford Daily advertising “diet pills” next to articles about their dangers.
You roared in outrage when WordPress let a search engine spammer onto wordpress.org.
So, how do you feel about this?
O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com site, home of tons of interesting articles on Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl/Python/PHP over the years, now also features (at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar, under the “oh, but it’s related, really” headline “Travelling to a tech show?”) eight links to the sort of garbage hotel sites that make it utterly impossible to find any useful information about hotels on Google.
O’Reilly’s OSDir.com, where amusingly enough I was looking to see what had happened to Danny O’Brien’s To Evil! column, is brought to you by things like Cuban cigars, mortgage refinancing, Jack Daniels (no, I didn’t click to see what sort of scam involves wanting to be highly ranked for “Jack Daniels”), online degrees, and cheap hotels: basically, the same folks who are spamming your comments, minus the rape porn.
O’Reilly’s XML.com, a site I used to take very seriously, because of all the scary-smart people who write there? Brought to you by hotel spam, mortgage refinancing spam, and one of those “directories” that only exists to feed off confused searchers by sending them right back around through Google’s AdSense division when they arrive from a Google search.
How horribly low have we sunk, that I’m not willing to link to O’Reilly sites without a rel="nofollow", because they are a bunch of low-life search engine spammers? X-bloody-ML.com, something that I won’t touch without a nofollow condom? This just sucks.
It sounds no different to ad-sponsored free-to-air TV or mags. Still…
I can’t understand why we don’t have web-pages with optional ads.
Have an ad section on the page which is collapsed by default. If you want to see ads they are just a click away. Win-win (or at least no-one loses).
Oh, sorry, there’s some shared context with the people I was writing for that you apparently don’t have.
If people want to put advertisements on their web sites, that’s fine with me: either they’ll do it in a way that I can tolerate, or they won’t and I’ll stop visiting. But these are not advertisements: follow the links to the O’Reilly sites, and scroll down in the left-hand sidebar, and you find nothing but links with the keywords that the search engine spammers want to have associated with their site. The only purpose of those links is to have Google say ”oh, a site that we are impressed by says that this is a good site for Niagara Falls Hotels, so when someone searches for those words, we should put them higher up in the results.” That’s search engine spam, and it’s the reason that you can’t find any useful information (unless you find pages of affiliate links useful) when you search for hotels in any major city.
Because the O’Reilly sites have had a lot of good content over the years, a lot of people have linked to them, and now O’Reilly is turning that into money which he is taking from people who earn a living by confusing people who are not very good at using search engines, and in the process is making search engines less useful to all of us.
Phil: I’m glad you elaborated, because I didn’t instantly spot the stuff you were talking about.
Yuck.
Wups, good to know when I’m being less comprehensible and more obscure than usual. I added a clue to the first description - I’m so used to the typical places and appearance of those spam links that it didn’t even occur to me that they wouldn’t jump out at everyone.
I retract my ”yuck”. The post behind Greg Yardley’s trackback has got me looking at this situation a different way.
If I force my upright Christian neighbor to watch porn, I’m a bad guy. But if he comes to my house unbidden and starts zipping through Return of Pink Five, that’s his problem.
…
Yeah, right. Like you don’t think Pink Five is hot, denial-boy. As if.
Are you drinking your dinner through a freakin straw dude?
Selling ads to spammers would make Google the biggest freakin spammer around you idiot. Blog about that :)
Google knows how to detect paid ads and filter them out. Ask any link broker and they’ll confirm that a site can lose it’s ability to pass pagerank from a block of links.
With that being said you should do your freakin home work instead of spewing the retarded ihelpyou, higherankings retoric.
Google’s spent more money on their spam filter research than you’ll make in a life time. I think they should be the judge of what is and isn’t spam. They have little fear in bring down the big boy sites they don’t like.
Make ads optional?
Hide ads and make the user click to see them?
That’s hopelessly naive.
Web publishers provide information to users so they can realize revenue either via selling product or advertising. It’s a business, not philantropy and hiding revenue generating ads is not to the benefit of the publisher. If you want quality content, viewing a few ads is a small price to pay.
Though I must admit the ads should be relevant. Shoveling spam ads eventually will annoy and alientate users and dilutes the publishers brand…
Don’t worry about the ads on their sites!
Somehow, I ended up on their email list months ago. They keep sending me emails daily although I tried to unsubscribe, emailed to ask them to stop, and even called.
They are the worst spammers on the net.
Uhm, Phil, look at the bottom of my sidebar.
Argh. I can’t believe that you expect me to think instead of knee-jerk. Among its other drawbacks, thinking takes time.
It’s a good thing you’re one of my bestest buddies, or I’d get all hurt ;-)
Seriously, I know what you’re saying. I hestitated myself, except that I might make enough to make a car payment…and right now, I’m not too proud to do what I can to make those car payments.
Besides, I’d rather a discrete couple of links in the sidebar than 1500 entries in comments.
Just curious. You’ve labeled them ”ads.”
rel=nofollowattribute to the links (via PHP, say), would they still be ads?I’m not condemning the practice. I just think calling them ”ads” is a little strange. Maybe ”Sponsored Links” might be a better appelation.
How do we feel about ”Sponsored Links”?
I used ’ads’ as I didn’t want people to think I was linking to them as an endorsement. But if I am going to do this, I’m not going to hide the act. I will not plaster them across the page, but I won’t hide them with CSS, nor will I cheat the company by using nofollow. Couldn’t anyway, I’m using their software to generate the links.
Your ”Sponsored Links” does sound more informative.
As for the morality of doing this, well, that’s a good topic for discussion, and I respect Phil’s disappointment in these sponsored links. I did emotionally sucker punch him by coming in and pointing out the links in my sidebar. However, it adds another dimension to the discussion: if it’s ’wrong’ of O’Reilly, as an organization, is it right when a friend does it?
Shelley: I don’t think friend/not-friend comes into it. To me, there’s simply a world of difference between someone literally trying to pay a bill, and someone with a publishing empire trying to bring in a few more bucks.
Or put another way… I’m not paying you much to write my docs, because I have very little to offer. But if I were rolling in VC money and supermodels, I’d be a dick for paying so little.
Hypocrisy or context? You decide.
You were generous with me writing the docs, especially considering how long it’s taken. But your point is good.
Still if we strip away both need and friendship, and focus just on the act, O’Reilly and I have done the same thing with our sites.
I will say one thing — I bet they got a whole lot more money than I did.
Just to clarify, you don’t want people to think you were linking to them as an endorsement, but you’re fine with search engines’ algorithms considering your linking as an endorsement?
I’m not trying to catch you in a morality trap or anything–the two aren’t perfectly equivalent–but your tacit endorsement of those links on your page is added to the collective endorsement of those links in PageRank (and similar algorithms). It seems to me that PageRank reports endorsement of URLs by the order it returns search results, albeit anonymously.
I think it would be presumptuous of me to conclude that your problem isn’t with endorsement of those links but with being associated with link endorsement. Ultimately the responsibility is on search engines to provide relevant search results. Instead I’d be curious to hear what service you are providing to this company and whether you would change your position depending on whether it was targeted at people or search engine results.
George, to me a link is a link. It’s neither an endorsement, nor a condemnation. It’s a piece of technology that connects one page to another. I am delimiting the links as paid ads (though will probably change to ”Sponsored links”), because someone paid me to put the links on the page.
Just as an FYI, Google does not consider PageRank to be an authoritative measure, nor one that implies endorsement. It is a measurement used to emulate a surfer randomly clicking links, and the likelihood one page or another will show based on this random clicking.
Having said that, yes including links in pages like mine does impact at Google’s algorithm. Well, collectively.
”Instead I’d be curious to hear what service you are providing to this company and whether you would change your position depending on whether it was targeted at people or search engine results.”
I allow them to place two links on my pages, and they guarantee that the links are not to porn sites. But I also run Google Ads, and these are targeted at people, not the search engine, so I have ads targeted to both. The Google ads are also designated as paid content.
I disagree. You’re right that it’s not an endorsement of quality…but it *is* an endorsement of relevance. PageRank is based on the idea that when someone links to another site, they are voting for it as being relevant to the anchor text. In Google’s eyes, you are endorsing papoosecreek.com to be relevant to ”Montana vacation”. If someone searches for that phrase and clicks on their site in the results, it’s partly because you endorsed the site as being relevant to ”Montana Vacation”.
Michael,it is relevant. It is a vacation place in Montana. The question remains: would a random surfer had hit the site as easily without my link? Hard to say.
Shelley, I do like your site and your writing so I’m disappointed to see you engaging in the same activity. Please hear me out though, I don’t mean to be harsh, but this is a tragedy of the commons problem.
A link isn’t just a link, it’s a vote of confidence, especially when it comes from a trusted site like yours. You’ve been blogging high quality stuff for years, and just as if you actually took a vacation to Montana and loved it, you might have a link to the place you spent time on your Montana vacation. I’d want to know where you stayed in case I was going there too, so it would be important. I buy stuff all the time from mentions on blogs I trust, so this is really high quality information and links.
Google can’t tell the difference between an entry in your blog praising a place in Montana you visited, and someone that paid you to link to them using the exact search phrase they aspire to, ”montana vacation.”
They’re paying you to help them keyword stuff Google, and they’re paying you because you have an otherwise well written, high quality site. People that operate spam blogs like mycityrealestate.blogspot.com are trying to do the same thing, though they don’t have any good content and no pagerank, but they’re keyword stuffing the old ballot box anyway.
In the end, all of us lose out, because these companies are going to great lengths to muck up Google’s results (just as every other search engine has been gamed to death). I know it’s just a tiny thing in Google’s immense database and they’d have to pay 100 other bloggers before they’d probably start rising to the top of the listings for ”Montana vacation” but if they did make it to the #1 spot, do you see how that’s a bad thing? That they didn’t necessarily have the best or most useful information about vacationing in Montana, but instead they got there just because they paid enough trusted people?
Matt, I’m sorry you feel that way, and that you’re disappointed I went this route, but I’m not going to be removing the ads.
I am at a point now where I don’t know what of my site is mine and what belongs to the ’community’. I do know that the ’community’ doesn’t pay me a wage. Rightfully so–isn’t obligated to. But until it does, I am going to control what appears at my site and how, and why.
Money is a real problem for me now, and if leasing a small bit of real estate can help, I’m going to lease it. So if the community doesn’t have to support me, I hope it respects when I take steps to support myself. If not, then I imagine I’ll lose readers, and will be sorry to see them go.
As for Google, well, it is the architect of its own vulnerability.
Note that the Google ads are not very well paying, ever since I went to full syndication feeds. I may end up taking them out again.
Be patient, Bird that Burns…Repeat after me, ”People who come to my site via search engines click on ads, not those subscribed to my feeds.”
Meh. Meh, meh, meh! Violent ambivalence is not my favorite feeling.
You are my people. I never do enough about that fact, but you are. And so is Zoe, who had no way of guessing whether or not it was a good plan to throw in her lot with someone not-young and not-male who would wind up a LAMP-head in a land of VB. Whatever it takes to keep you fed and sheltered and electrified and wired so I don’t lose you, and especially to keep Zoe curled up in a warm spot with a full belly, you do it, and tell me you have to, and I’m behind you all the way. Even if it’s ”only” a choice between losing your Golden Girl, and your freedom to move, and the chance to get out and keep your sanity, or being a tiny nagging thorn in the side of people with literally billions of dollars, and adding a tiny bit to the frustration of people who don’t know how to use their tools, do it. Whatever you do, don’t listen to me: I’ve felt bad for months about getting you to take out AdSense because it didn’t smell right to me.
The fact that a lot of my philosophy comes from Robert Heinlein probably isn’t one of my greatest intellectual strengths, but I’ve always like his (roughly, because I can’t remember just where to find the quote) ”a society has those ethics it can afford.” If you can afford to protect a search engine owned by billionaires from having to evolve, and you can afford to protect people who don’t know how to frame a search from their own incompetance, that’s great: it’s good to feel morally right, and philanthropic toward people, whether you are looking up or down at them. But if you can’t? Screw ’em, and forge ahead. You do what you can afford to do.
But, unfortunately, I can’t extend that absolution to you, and deny it to Tim O’Reilly. From everything I’ve heard, he’s not a tacky bastard, and he’s not the least bit unfamiliar with how the web works. And if his business was solid gold and going great guns, you wouldn’t be in St. Louis interviewing for entry-level VB jobs, or whatever horrors they’re listing these days; you would be in San Francisco, cashing royalty checks for WordPress 1.5 In A Nutshell and working on Atom 1.0 Pocket Reference. And for every n books he doesn’t sell, or for every m people who install an ad-blocker for their browser and never see or click another ad on his web sites, that’s another person with babies, or worse yet, with kitties, that he can’t employ any more. If he doesn’t make that ad money, or that book money, someone else will, but will that person hire Mark Pilgrim and Joe Gregorio and Uche Ogbuji to write articles about XML that I can understand, but just barely, when I stretch? Will that person support all the open source people I know who get at least some of their pizza from O’Reilly?
Fuck. I don’t like this answer either. Isn’t there one where I can get back up on my high horse, and take a nice absolute moral position?
Phil: Sure there is. ”I don’t like that kind of advertising. It contributes to Google pollution, and I’d prefer to see Google as clean as possible. If you’re thinking about supporting ads like that, dear audience, please think it through.”
No murky judgements cast upon those who must do what they must, but still a fully righteous and upright stance, stated clearly.
If you want to live on the edge, you could then modify it with: ”And if I catch your advertising partners showing up in my referrer logs and/or comments, I reserve the right to bounce pebbles off your forehead when next we meet.”
I am not responsible for making Google better
Like the Stanford Daily and Wordpress before, O’Reilly’s been called out for allowing a search-engine-spam network to place links on their network of sites. I’ve written about this before, and have thought about it since, and have decided that this so…
I don’t think the form this advertising takes is the issue. It’s the fact that some if not all of O’Reilly’s sponsored links are to junk sites. If you’re going to sell sponsored links, you should take the time to make sure they are advertisers you’d want to be associated with.
Now that I have a few page rank seven sites, I hear from these kinds of people all the time. I don’t have a problem with taking their money, but I haven’t done so yet because the sites are junk, and I don’t want to sully my reputation by becoming linked to them.
hmm… I’ve got 2 sites with a pagerank of 8, and have yet to get any cash offers. Or maybe they just ended up in my spam-folder along with the useless link-exchange spam I do get…
Ads, Spam, Commercial use of RSS feeds
A bit of admin - just so you know, I’m testing out a new type of RSS advertising with Feedburner. I’m testing it because it’s pretty close to the type of RSS advertising I described in this post back in…
Perhaps you are forgetting O’reilly was the first company to actually run advertising on the web with Global Network Navigator in the Fall of 1993.
It’s just more of the same.
O’Reilly joins the search engine spam parade
Is it ethical to sell your Google Rank for money? Are you more entitled to it because you are O’Reilly?
My single-word-answer for both is: *No!*
Friends don’t let friends spam
After WordPress and Syndic8, now it’s O’Reilly’s turn. While I can understand the small guys falling for this, it’s hard to think that a large publisher like O’Reilly would be so desperate for money to accept these kind o…
Most ethical questions must be answered within some context. If there is something that is irksome about xml.com and OnLamp.com engaging in these practices but not, say, Shelley, then you should trust your gut and explore the differences to seek out exactly what it is that makes one bad and the other less so.
Ain’t that a shame
Looks like O’Reilly has added its name to the list of companies whoring out their PageRank to search engine spammers. I expect better from them. By the way, don’t miss the comments on Phil’s post, inspired by the fact that…
I just wanted to thank y’all for trying to intelligently and care-fully discuss a tough subject. Seeing/reading difficult conversations done with as much grace as we can muster is a good thing. Difficult, but good.
I’m realizing, more than a year later, that my greatest regret in not communicating properly when we changed the licenses on Movable Type is that we didn’t describe, in exacting detail, all the business models we *didn’t* choose.
I am also appreciating, more than ever, that Phil’s friends get to make mistakes. A kinder community is a nice thing.
”…we didn’t describe, in exacting detail, all the business models we *didn’t* choose.”
Anil: What if you had, and circumstances had forced you to switch to one of them?
I don’t know, I think we’d be in a tough position. That’s I guess what I’m trying to say… the problem with doing things that I’m ambivalent about, or that I feel might be a compromise, is that you can’t ever *undo* it. Not saying I don’t understand that people are in that position sometimes, but that it’s easier to end up there if you don’t think through all the long-term implications.
I don’t judge anybody harshly for any choices they make in regards to this stuff; I just know that I admire my friends when they do the right thing instead of the easy thing. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, the right thing and the easy thing are the same thing.
I’d just like to interrupt the moral high horsing going around and clarify that St. Louis is a fine city. :-)
If you need a VB job in St. Louis, let me know.
We have great toasted raviolli and a thing called the Arch. Not to mention, we have the best baseball team in the MLB.
Ringnalda clearly can’t tell his arse from his elbow.
Write about stuff you *do* know about eh?
GNC-2005-08-23 #93
Join me on the Computer Outlook Radio Talk Show this coming Wednesday at 5pm PST and also if you are…
…I have to disagree. I wonder if you’d pay for ad-free access to the O’Reilly sites? If you were in charge of the company would you still poo-poo the ads? And lastly, ”punch the monkey and win a free X-Box!!!”
Would I pay for ad-free access? No, like all of O’Reilly’s readers I’m quite capable of blocking any ads that are lame enough to bother me, and the content is almost never valuable enough to me that I would pay for it. To me, their websites advertise the O’Reilly brand, and encourage me to buy their books and pay to go to their conferences.
But, what I’m wondering is whether you are just paying so little attention that you think this calls for the knee-jerk response to anyone who complains about any website showing any advertising, or are you advancing the rather cunning argument that search engines are the primary readers of most sites, and purchased links to utterly unrelated sites are just advertising aimed at them? That’s actually interesting.
Who are you calling a knee-jerk?! There I go reacting too quickly again.
While Threadwatch and The Blog Herald are mostly interesting from the ”how can you be so unpleasantly nasty without corroding yourself into nothing but a puddle of acid?” angle, someone at one or the other saying that O’Reilly’s been doing it forever did prompt me to look at the Wayback Machine, and indeed they have been selling links on xml.com to piss in the hotel search pool since late April 2003. I guess that says something about how useless for human eyeballs the bottom of a left-hand sidebar really is.
Phil, you’re an idiot.
You got it wrong, be an man about it and stop whining like a little girl that lost her dolly.
Nick, you’re exactly one comment away from being completely removed from my world. Either say something with actual content, or go away.
i just did - you got it wrong. Admit it, and retain a little dignity.
Text link ads are a legitimate form of advertising, they don’t need to be ”on topic” but are best if they are - the difference between standford and this is exactly that.
You thought you could jump on a major story, but it isn’t a story. Get over it and move on…
See how much better it works when you actually say something, instead of just being insulting?
But the exact opposite seems to be the case: you could reasonably assert that Stanford actually was advertising, that college students really do buy diet pills online and play online poker. But I know O’Reilly’s audience, they are my friends, and let me tell you: O’Reilly’s audience does not refinance their mortgage through random websites, O’Reilly’s audience does not book a hotel through a random affiliate of a random affiliate of a random booking wholesaler. The only way that you can say that those links are advertising is if you say that Googlebot is the consumer who is being advertised to, and the intended result of the advertising is to persuade Googlebot to put the advertised link higher in the search results, and because I don’t think the best search result is the site that has paid the most money to other sites to link to it, I think that’s search engine spamming. I’m beginning to think (see above) that I don’t care whether or not search engines are spammed, at least in that way, but it’s still spam.
But, ”get over it and move on”? I’m not doing a thing here: talking to people who leave comments and thinking about things, same as always. It’s not like I’m running around emailing people and begging them to link to me, or buying links to this post trying to promote it. If you want to delete the Threadwatch link to it, and persuade Duncan to delete his Blog Herald link to it, that’s fine with me, but I don’t have any interest in deleting my post, or closing comments, or whatever sort of moving on you have in mind.
i’m sorry, but how is selling advertising space search engine spam?
if you are worried about context, join adsense. but the buying and selling of links, for whatever purpose, is not a penalty offense, altho the links may wind up in the sandbox…
Phil - It’s always a case of ”follow the money”. Advertising creates revenue… the fact that links
are built into the DNA of most effective search engines just links one business imperitive (be profitable) to a public benefit in an unfortunate way. Bloggers and even O’Reilly need revenue to exist… most of the ”offenses” you document we’re all driven by someone needing additional funding (like the WordPress situation).
It makes more sense to keep on Google to refine their ability to help users find the data they need. When you make it harder for the poster to add reveneue generating links to their pages you make it harder for a ”burningbird” to be independent (as an example).
For me it’s like singling out the small villager that cuts off branches from the forrest for a lack of conservation behavior when there’s a multi-billion dollar logging operation working the other end of the valley. Of course, getting the multi-billion dollar operation to respond is much harder.
and honestly… most of the readers for your rant only see the accusation. The details of the charge are lost on most reader’s and O’Reilly is one of the most technologically/ecologically friendly multi-million dollar loggers on the planet. They
actually pay smart people to write for the rest of us. Is that such a bad business… and XML.org still rocks despite the link spam non-sense that you consider harmful. It’s like refusing to read
a major newpapaer that has resorted to running ads for ”Sex Shows”. I only mention ”Sex” to end with a big finish.
”Link Spam” is a crap concept… Money IS the root of evil but everyone needs some. Link Spam just aligns with Maslow’s Heirarchy of the Internet.
Get over it and push for better Serach criteria.
>>See how much better it works when you actually say something, instead of just being insulting?
Well, if we want to get ”playground” about it
You will indeed find a great many search spammers at TW - you’ll also, if you can reach that far, find that these people, the same people that Google and Yahoo engineers have on their IM’s and on their official blog blogrolls, know more about search than any other group.
You insult my entire membership, and expect me to be light and fluffy when you cock up?
Listen to your readers - i see more comments here saying you’re wrong than saying you’re right.
My interest wanes.
You’re right, I’m wrong. Anything that you simply assert is absolutely correct. Anything which is paid for is an advertisement. Anything which affects search engine results is good. The best result is whoever has paid the most. Your readers are both smarter than me, and better looking, and you are the smartest and the best looking of them all. Every comment here is from one of my regular readers, and they all disagree with me. My post, and all of my comments so far, were both saying absolutely that O’Reilly was wrong, and were themselves wrong.
Goodbye.
oh stop throwing a tantrum phil, just live with the fact that you can’t always call it right.
Sheesh, i post maybe 10 times a day, and get it wrong quite often - my readers tell me, i live with it.
so should you.
Text ads have been around for awhile, it’s true. Many are simply links designed to get a human visitor to click through. Those have been around for awhile and we all know what they look like.
Some other ads are for the main purpose of having search engines see that a well-regarded site is linking to the advertised site, with the aim of boosting the latter site’s rank in search engines. I don’t think anyone disagrees that this happens.
What’s controversial are: a) is this technique right or wrong, and b) in a particular case, is the text ad for the ”ordinary” purpose of user-faced advertising, or the ”dubious” purpose of PageRank spamming?
To a), it seems that this technique is designed to unnaturally increase a site’s apparent relevance, without increasing its actual relevance. I.E. if natural links are people who willingly link to you with no ulterior motive, this is an unnatural link. So it seems deceptive to me, in that sense. Another test is, ”What if a lot of people did this?” It would result in search engines ranking the sites most willing to buy links, rather than the most relevant. Ultimately, search engines like Google would be forced to rethink or abandon algorithms like PageRank. Seems like it would make the Web worse, rather than better.
To b), which is O’Reilly doing? I’d say apply the Duck Test. Does it look like a duck, walk like a duck, quack like a duck?
Tim O’Reilly just posted a long and thoughtful response to this. Obviously, I’ve been crusading against this kind of search engine manipulation for a while now, so I know as well as anyone why this is a big issue.
That said, I have to ask… Did you try to contact anyone at O’Reilly before posting this? It would’ve taken very little effort to get a response from them before you released the rest of the world on them. Like Anil said, ”the blog world likes nothing more than a good old-fashioned pile-on.”
Nope, despite having teed off on xml.com before, leaving Edd hurt and angry once before, when he said that time too that an email first would have been nice, I never for a second considered it. Dunno, maybe I should change that, but I think I’m much more likely to just shutter this weblog, and start a new anonymous one that I only tell friends about.
I would be very much amazed if Tim got so little email that he would even notice one from someone he’s never heard of, complaining about ads on his websites. I don’t have any relationship whatsoever with any O’Reilly employees. I know a few O’Reilly authors, but I would never for a second consider putting any of them in the position of asking the boss whether he really thinks he should be spamming search engines.
So, it all boils down to: I had a few minutes to look at my subscriptions that hadn’t updated for too long, checking for problems, went to OSDir.com to see what had happened to To Evil!, and in digging around the sidebars looking for some site navigation noticed those links. In the time it takes me to compile Firefox, which is what gave me the spare time, I could maybe have dug out an email from the corporate site, and sent off what I would have considered a totally hopeless email, or I could write a post for my friends, saying ”crap, have you seen this, the O’Reilly sites spam search engines!” That seemed more likely to blow off my steam and amuse me, and I certainly wasn’t expecting this to be such a slow news week that it would get any more attention than my posts usually do.
So, I’m quite happy to have wound up starting an interesting conversation with my friends about whether or not we still feel protective of Google, quite displeased that I did anything to bring Nick around, delighted that I brought something that Tim hadn’t seen and doesn’t entirely approve of to his attention (and delighted to have prompted him to write such a long and thoughtful post, because I don’t get to see nearly enough of his writing, probably because I’m looking in the wrong places), and utterly horrified that I did so in a post which was mostly intended for my amusement, and that of my friends, and not at all for him.
In hindsight, would I have written it like this if I knew that it would come to the attention of Tim, and Edd, and that I would be tarring my dear friend Shelley with the same brush I was tarring them with? Of course not. Do I get to erase it? Certainly not: I don’t understand my revision code well enough to fake it, even if it wasn’t quoted and cached around and about. Will I be nicer next time, and act like a journalist who checks everything with his sources, or like a linked-in person who expects to be able to get personal and private attention to his concerns? I doubt it. As I say, I’d rather have a new weblog that’s mine than have to write on this one in a way that meets other people’s expectations and desires, rather than my own.
Don’t change a damn thing, Phil. Or send me the link of the other place you start writing at — it is already hard enough chasing your comments around the web.
This is supposedly weblogging where we can write what we want on our weblogs, and even from time to time be critical. Your writing this post was not a bad thing, Phil.
Give it a week, though, and you will have paid sufficiently for your audacious criticism. I fully expect O’Reilly to come out of this looking like saints.
And, interesting but unanswerable question: if I had written some mildly worded ”Should we still feed protective of Google’s ranking algo?” post, would it have actually had the result that this inflammatory one did? I don’t know what path it took to Tim, or whether it took a critical path or if there were several possible ones, but I do know some of the people who linked to this post well enough to know that there are lots of ways I could have written it that they wouldn’t bother linking to.
Another interesting bit of hindsight: if either you or I had done sufficient research before going off on it, and seen that they had been doing it for years, would either of us have thought that Tim didn’t know about it, and didn’t approve of it, and that just bringing it to his attention without any fanfare would have taken care of the problem?
Phil, I work as senior web producer for O’Reilly’s online publishing group, which is responsible for the O’Reilly Network array of sites.
I saw your post Friday night and decided to forward it to our head editor and department lead (because frankly those links make me uncomfortable), and I suppose eventually it got to Tim (which is saying something because FOO Camp was this weekend).
Setting aside the ethical discussion about how to complain about something in public (which I’ve been meaning to blog about), let me offer myself as a contact within O’Reilly if you ever have a concern you want to air to a person before you blog. We’ve interacted briefly before, and I quite enjoy (if not depend on) your and Sam Ruby’s work on Atom and feedvalidator.org.
I’m currently responsible for improving our syndication strategy, including the problems that you brought to light, oh, more than a year ago. I’ve been at O’Reilly for just over three months, and in that time, you’ll be delighted to discover that the new XML.com Atom feed validates as Atom 1.0! I’m still working out the kinks (aren’t legacy CMSs fun?) so please feel free to bang on it and tell me if something goes wrong.
Finally if you or any of your readers just want to send general feedback, I would add we read and respond to all of the mail that gets sent to webmaster at oreilly dot com. In fact a support ticket gets created for every email you send, so don’t be shy. Thanks.
Get Ur Geek On
Well, Google is set to announce their Google Talk and Google Desktop v2.0 tomorrow — but folks have already been using Talk for a few hours now (and the client has been released). Was the leak to create ’buzz,’ mayhaps? Danah Boyd doesn’t call Google…
I’m curious why certain people think that the internet is the only advertising media where all advertising must be entirely within a narrow topic range?
Also, seems to presume that search engines don’t have automated ways in which to devalue such links.
I don’t know, maybe if you find those people you could ask them?
Rationalizing that search engines are perfectly capable of recognizing and discounting this particular form of spam makes for a rather different ethical dilemma, doesn’t it? Or is it perfectly okay to sell something that should be harmful, as long as it doesn’t actually work as intended?
The beef with the O’Reilly text ads is they appear to be a scheme to exploit O’Reilly’s high reputation to unnaturally boost other sites that would not be so boosted except for the exchange of money. The subject matter of the sites isn’t really what the search engines care about.
Fact of it is, most search engine spam is relevant, i.e. mortgage spam tends to target mortgage/finance queries, not travel queries. The trouble with spam is it’s pollution, it displaces better answers.
O’reilly’s should hire an Ad Compliance Officer
[sigh] More SE pollution. Or at least that’s the allegation. There will be no “piling-on” in this post. And I think I’ve got a positive solution so please keep reading, but first some history for those new to this story.
Phil …
Are we spammers?
There’s been an interesting cross-blog conversation going on lately: Phil Ringnalda: O’Reilly joins the search engine spam parade Tim O’Reilly: Search Engine Spam? Shelley Powers: Who is gaming who? In the interest of full disclosure: we’re running the…
These are the people in my (Web) neighborhood
In reaction to some ads of questionable value being placed on some of O’Reilly’s sites (response from Tim O’Reilly), Greg Yardley has written a thoughtful piece on selling PageRank called I am not responsible for making Google better: Google, Yahoo, Mi…
Ads for Bots
Content creators shouldn’t winge about revenue from ads. If they’re legitimately concerned with adverse impacts on user experience then they have a duty to themselves to evaluate advertisers more carefully, not to whine to the blogosphere.
Enlaces de texto publicitarios como spam
Las siguientes anotaciones son muy buenas, y mejor aún los comentarios – de lo mejorcito que he leído últimamente. Tal vez sea el mejor hilo temático del año. No son del todo recientes, pero es que las vi tarde. Durante…
”and one of those ”directories” that only exists to feed off confused searchers by sending them right back around through Google’s AdSense division when they arrive from a Google search.”
WTF does that mean Phil? You make no sense.
I really think you need to explain this. It really makes no sense.
Well, do you find Tim’s description any easier to parse?
And when the AdSense ads are actually contextual for the whole set of breadcrumbs down to the category, plus some other scattered words, they aren’t even ads for the category, often as not.
Phil,
Why can’t you answer the questions and not point out what Tim wrote? I looked at that site and I see adsense ads and lots of sites listed in that directory.
Are you blaming adsense for displaying inncorrect ads? I’m not sure what you are getting at.
Dan
Just curious to know if you think there’s significant difference in the blogosphere between notion of advertising in the commercial, buy-this and advertising in the ”turn toward”, look-at-this sense.
…and which applies to comments, and didn’t this use to be slashdot…
And now onlamp.com has those nasty javascript-added pseudo ”intellitxt” links that really annoy me elsewhere. Hmm, but you can disable it at http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/general/intellitxt.html
Posted for Ian Davis, since my comment form refuses to let him comment:
I surfed to those O’Reilly sites mentioned but couldn’t find any links to spam sites. Did they remove those links?
Yes, they did: I should have kept a screenshot for comparison, but my feeling is that they’ve been replaced by more AdSense and DoubleClick ads than they ran before. That’s a good thing for me, since those are the only two ad domains that I’m currently blocking in my
hostsfile, though it’s maybe not quite as good a thing for readers who don’t block them, particularly the DoubleClick ads, which are undeniably large and flashy and distracting. That’s one of the many conflicting aspects of text link selling: it may be bad for searching in general, but it’s a whole heck of a lot better for reading the site than a big animated ad.