A discussion of earning with the Best Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers and Affiliate Marketers.

  As many of my readers probably know (and probably agree with), I’m not a fan of free blogging services. Why? Let’s face it, human nature tells us that giving away free stuff brings out the worst in people. However, the sheer amounts of spam, scam and junk blogs hosted by Google’s Blogger and Blogspot services is seriously polluting the internet with downright trash. If one of us webmasters or bloggers were to host such a site that contains so much duplicate content, copyrighted materials and just plain garbage, Google would surely penalize our sites, regardless if there were any useful content presented in between the junk. Is this yet one more clear cut sign that Google, the “Do no Evil” company has painfully mutated into a “double standards” company? Heaven knows they have the resources to clean up their act.

Does Google really care? Hell no. Why do I care? As a webmaster who owns several blogs, several forums and a human edited blog directory, I have been spending hours per day removing spammer links from my sites that point back at these abominable free blogging services. Does that mean I think all free blog services are tools for spammers? No it doesn’t. I have never had a single problem with spammers dropping links to Wordpress free hosted blogs. Why? Because Wordpress heavily moderates their free blogs and they remove blogs that don’t meet their quality criteria. Not to mention, Wordpress doesn’t allow Adsense (or any other form of monetization) on their free blogs which makes them useless to spammers.

You might be thinking to yourself, “Google allows you to flag a spammy blog”, well, maybe they do have a flag button at the top of every free hosted blog, but I’m certain that button doesn’t work because I’ve used it numerous times to no effect.

I’ve already gotten into the habit with every new blog I bring up for my network or for a client, that the first thing I do is add “blogger.com” and “blogspot.com” to the comment blacklist. I do the same thing for every forum I install. The first thing is to add those two domains to the list of censored words on the forum.

As for my blog directory, I just had some joker submit 700+ spam blogs hosted on blogger.com and he did them all by hand because the submit form for my directory is nearly impossible to automate (unless you’re a libcurl genius and can crack captchas). This person even email confirmed each individual entry. I kid you not, 700+ blogs he bothered to create on blogger.com and then starts submitting them to my directory !!! I have to give the guy some credit because it must have taken him several hours unless he had a boiler room full of Nigerian 419 spammers working for him when they were on a break from creating phishing schemes. All his work was removed from my directory with one SQL statement that took me all of 30 seconds to write and execute. Zap, bye bye…

The point I’m trying to make is that Google is so anal retentive about every other webmasters’ content (especially ones not paying for Adwords) and they continually regurgitate their quality guidelines through their sock puppet Matt Cutts. Not to mention, Google wants to tell us how to create our sites, how to link to and from our sites and basicly when we should take a dump, but in the meantime, besides their shady Adsense for Domains and Adsense for error pages, Google has created the most massive FFA, link farm, spam farm ever witnessed on the internet. Not even Angelfire, Tripod and other free website junkyards could ever hold a candle to the massive abomination that Blogger and Blogspot have become.

It’s worthy to note Google doesn’t offer a contact for support on these services but they do have a notorious spam bot that has been locking legitimate bloggers out of their accounts. Way to go !!

What do you think? Is Google allowing the creation of spam farms on Blogger and Blogspot? Do they have a double standard for content on their network versus other networks ?

Off rant…

         

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I just logged into my Adsense account and noticed a new Adsense product called “Adsense for Feeds“. My interest was peaked by this new arrival in my Adsense control panel so I did a quick search for “Adsense for Feeds” and noticed there was quite a bit of information regarding “Adsense for Feeds” having been in BETA for a few years now. I couldn’t find anything on the official Adsense blog about this new product but I did find the following explaination in the Adsense Help Center…

What is AdSense for feeds? We’re currently beta testing AdSense for feeds, a program that allows you to monetize your feeds through contextually targeted advertising. AdSense for feeds works the way the rest of the AdSense program works, delivering ads that are so relevant to the content that readers find them useful. And when people click on these ads, Google pays you. Please be aware that our beta test of AdSense for feeds is full and we are not accepting applications at this time. If you’re interested in participating in AdSense for feeds in the future, please check back here for updates.

I know I’ve seen something of the sort in my Feedburner dashboard about monetizing my feeds but I’ve never paid much attention to it because RSS feeds are (in my opinion) taboo from being tainted by advertising and monetization. It seems I’m not the only one who had that impression but nothing stays the same in the online world and survival is about adapting to new methods and applications. So, here’s what this new implementation looks like :

Anyhow, I’m checking out the features of “Adsense for feeds” and I do see that it’s linked to your Feedburner account, however I was able to add my non-Feedburner feed into the interface. From there, you can choose the frequency of the Adsense ads, such as after every feed item or after ever second feed item. You can also select an option to display posts of a certain length and you can choose where you would like the Adsense ads to be positioned, such as at the top or bottom of each feed item. Lastly, you can choose to allow AdSense to optimize feed ad color choices automatically or choose your own colors.

After all is said and done, here’s what I’ve come up with…

I guess I’ll try again later. :-)

         

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It’s no secret that Google is responsible for the most comprehensive spyware network, spying on internet users through their search engine, advertising programs, feedburner, webmasters tools, analytics and the notorious Gmail email service which stores users email forever even if the user has deleted it. The spyware issue is reason enough to avoid Google’s internet offerings however anybody who has seen Googles warnings in the search engine results stating “This page may harm your computer” might be interested in the fact that Google has been found to be responsible for serving over 2% of the internet’s malicious viruses through their Blogger free blog service. This information is according to a report by Sophos anti-virus…

Source : Don’t Be Evil–Just Serve Ads on It

Looks like Google’s Blogger is a more popular blogging platform than Wordpress and Moveable Type, after all–in some circles, anyway. Internet security outfit Sophos says it detects just over 16,000 malicious Web pages each day, and nearly 2 percent of them are hosted on Blogger. “The number one host for malware on the web is Blogger (Blogspot.com), which allows computer users to make their own Web sites easily at no charge,” Sophos said in its 2008 Security Threat Report (PDF), adding that between malicious blogs and malicious comments posted to otherwise benign blogs, Blogspot.com accounts for two percent of all of the world’s malware hosted on the Web.

Do no evil??? I don’t think so…

I’m sure any webmaster who operates a blog or a forum can attest to the fact that Blogger and Blogspot accounts for a much higher percentage of the spam that is posted in blog comments or on forums. I have made it a habit to add the domains blogger.com and blogspot.com to my comment blacklist on each new installation of wordpress because it seems 70-80% of all my trackback and comment spam links back to those spam-laden domains. Additionally, whenever I see a blogger or blogspot url in any search results, I put on blinders an avoid it like the plague.

Considering Google is so adept at policing other people’s self-hosted blogs, searching for paid links and sponsored reviews, maybe they should start at home and clean up their own mess before they start sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong. Funny thing is that even though Google accounts for the largest proportion of malicious websites, you’ll never see a “This page may harm your computer” warning when you search for Blogger or Blogspot.

         

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