• Search Engine Land, Monday, March 23, 2009 11:45 AM

In a lengthy post, Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan tears apart a guest article called "Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet" that appeared in TechCrunch over the weekend. The article was written by Eric Clemons, "professor of operations and information management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania," whose title is accompanied by a fancy description at the university's Web site. Says Sullivan: "Unfortunately, I won't get a refund for the time I wasted reading through his article," which he says is full of numerous errors, particularly about search advertising.

In it, Clemons argues that Google's business model is all about "misdirection, or sending customers to Web locations other than the ones for which they are searching...Monetization of misdirection frequently takes the form of charging companies for keywords and threatening to divert their customers to a competitor if they fail to pay adequately for keywords that the customer is likely to use in searches for the companies' products." Makes Google sound like the traffic mafia, doesn't it? "Unbelievable," says Sullivan. "Search advertising -- the biggest form of online advertising -- is all about misdirection? Really?" So, according to Clemons, Google has been misdirecting searchers with search ads for over 10 years, while at the same time forcing companies to buy advertising in order to guarantee organic traffic to their sites.

Absolutely ridiculous: "I have never, ever heard of a serious, evidenced-back case where Google has threatened to drop some company ranking for a generic term if they don't buy ads," says Sullivan. "Never." There have been algorithm changes, he notes, but "I doubt Clemons is even aware of these algorithm shifts...And if he is aware, then he's also aware that Google still sends huge, colossal amounts of traffic to commercial web sites for free -- even those that do not buy search ads."

Read the whole story at Search Engine Land »