05
May
2005
|
03:14 AM
America/Los_Angeles

GooglySpam - unwanted, untrusted uninfo

In a piece for Media Post's OnlineSpin newsletter, Shelley Palmer of Palmer Advanced Media, is waving a red flag about "GooglySpam" - sites created (and ironically often hosted on Google's own Blogspot service) to monetize on AdWords/AdSense click payments. She writes:



Because the best way to drive traffic is through a relevant search result; and, because keyword advertising pays anywhere from pretty well to very well on click-throughs, a cottage industry has emerged: GooglySpam. GooglySpam is not a real word, it's not even a good word, it just describes a new kind of extremely annoying spam -- fake microsites pretending to be relevant search results.


Microsites are not new, neither are landing pages. But this is a new generation of handcrafted useless Web pages created simply to monetize keyword searches. They are creating a new level of unwanted, mostly for profit, untrustworthy, infomercial-like, eyesoresque, brain-melting pseudo-information... GooglySpam!

In his book, "The Selfish Gene," Richard Dawkins describes tipping points that destroy evolutionary stable systems. Is there a point where GooglySpam will kill this most popular, flavor-of-the-month, advertising methodology? Could GooglySpam make search so emotionally unsatisfying that the very foundation of search optimization will be damaged or even destroyed? I don't think there are any psychotropic medications available for Google, but if this trend continues, we're certainly going to need some.


- Richard Koman