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Google’s Battle Against IM Products

By Marsha Gellerman

Internet marketing products rarely work and there's always something being hyped - something bigger and better - that will automate the processes in the ebook you bought, so whatever difficulty you're experiencing can be handled without your making an effort. So the $27 product, with the up sell, winds up costing you over $150. And then, there's another up sell. Or another product made by a friend or a mentor that the marketer recommends. It’s on sale for a limited time only, and you better jump on the bandwagon, because after a time this product won't be available or the price will double. Buy before midnight!

There are very few products that work as advertised, they usually have a steep learning curve to implement properly, and are all against the terms of service of every site you use them on. Charges for this kind software are made on a monthly basis with the two most popular ones running at $67 and $149 monthly.

These products are software that automates 1. the sign-up on web 2.0 properties, article directories, bookmarking sites and RSS feeds. They allow you to 2. mass post spun content, 3. bookmark your posts and then 4. send out your RSS feeds to feed aggregators and then 5. ping every single property you've created. While they can be effective, usually the content that's created is so poor that content distribution sites like HubPages and EzineArticles were severely devalued in the last Google update.

I'm happy, because two HubPages articles in a niche I compete in disappeared from the search engine results. This means more traffic for my site. Don’t get me wrong, I have articles on HubPages, and I haven’t lost traffic. It simply galls me to be outranked by spam.

I'm also happy that these content distribution sites are being devalued because of another IM weapon that's very hard to compete against.

Certain marketers have created mass blog membership sites. They leave a small footprint for Google because the people who created the software don't use their own blogs. They use blogs that belong to their members. So you are talking about thousands of sites spread across thousands of IP addresses. You create an article, spin it and distribute out to the network. Again, we’re talking about tons of sites with crappy spun articles. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Google has decided to clean this up also, and one of the things they're testing is the new "block this site from your search results."

I don't know if you've seen it yet. And you have to be signed into your Google account to use it. Search for any term in Google, go into a site, then press the back button on your internet browser. All of a sudden, there is an additional choice for the site that says, "block this site from your search results."

While Google says they won't use the data they collect on sites that are blocked in their decision on how to rank sites, I know they will and so does everyone else.

Posts on "how to bring down your competition" are already in SEO forums proposing software that will duplicate the actions of a user, going into a site and blocking it. They can use proxies to make it seem as though random users are doing the blocking. It would be a relatively simple way to bring down the sites ahead of you in the rankings.

Eventually, the only way to prevent your number one ranking site from being bull-dozed, it to make sure you have Google Analytics on the account, so they can see that the majority of visitors stay and that the sites that are blocking you are from spammer or proxy IPs.

Another win for Google and another loss for Internet Marketers.

Contributor's Note

I'm not sure who I'm cheering for in this battle. I think Google is too large as it is, but certain IM tactics ruin it for everyone.

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You can bet if it really was a sure fire way to "Make over $1,000 per day with 5 minutes work", they would be spending that extra marketing time using their own product instead of trying to sell it for "$69" or what ever.

Hi Dwayne -

The problem is - some of the automated products do work. The automated submitter I described was built by a 16 year old kid from Norway? I think. It was bought out by old time IMer, who found his sites consistently outranked by the kids.

The mega IM merchants have found that it is smarter to use the product on their own sites for a short period of time, then release it to the general public, once enough people find out about it and start copying the method. They in effect, make their money, and then make their money all over again. With the monthly fees they're pulling in - it's all gravy.

Marsha

Another very informative intel. I actually liked Google's actions. I'm hoping that when I search for a topic, what I'll get on page one has substance. That is also why I try to write articles that have substance.

Hi Nora -

Google hasn't gotten this right yet. For example, I had a site scraped by several sources and my content was posted all over the net. Instead of penalizing the scrappers - my site went into the supplemental results. How difficult is it to rank duplicate content according to posting date?

Google owns Double Click. So they can follow you across the web via cookies, even if you are not logged into your Google account.

Google own YouTube. If you sign up for a channel on YouTube, as I did for research on an article, the ads for that YouTube channel follow you around the web. Even if you, as an AdSense advertiser opt out of showing third-party ads which are not relevant to your site, the last Privacy Policy update made is necessary for your visitors to also opt out.

GMail, Blogger, reCapatcha, Feedburner, and more are all Google properties. They own search. There are some sites that I don't have in my Analytics account, because third parties use your analytics codes to track ownership and scrape keyword information. And, quite frankly I have tracking software that gives me more useful info. But I'll be forced to put Analytics on my sites to retain rankings.

I'm not a big fan of Twitter or Facebook. Google rankings lean towards sites that have social media links.

I find the big G to be a little too invasive, but they are the only game in town. That's why you find people that are already planning on gaming the "block this site" option.

Marsha

Any information that leads to the clarification of the Internet and Internet marketing is a bonus for all of us who use the Internet. Thank You Marsha

Hi Marion -

Thank you for your comment.

It's a rare occasion when I won't tell you what exactly what a product does and what the Google ramification are. I hate "mystery meat."

Marsha

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