• ClickZ, Tuesday, May 9, 2006 11 AM

As Shari Thurow points out, AdSense creates A LOT of so-called search engine spam, which refers to the myriad link farms and other bogus sites appearing in natural listings that make their money off a combination of AdSense and high natural search placement. Link farming is the process of exchanging links with other Web sites in order to boost your natural ranking. Google considers this a form of spam, and bans sites that have deployed the tactic. However, Google doesn't exactly allocate vast resources to squelching the problem either, perhaps because it makes money from link farms that display Google AdWords. As Thurow asks, "What Google sales rep allowed these ads to be displayed on such a substandard Web site? Do Google ad reps monitor the sites that display these ads?" Call it "AdSense spam," call them "AdSense magnets" if you want to be nicer, but the fact is--like click fraud, or even the proliferation of copyrighted material on YouTube--Google makes money from the existence of AdSense spam, so it'll be happy not to allocate resources to stamping out the problem.

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