NFFC talks about how search engines lose relevancy when they care more about how the results got there than the quality of the results.

Well a while ago Danny Sullivan made a post about comment spammers being the dirty sleezy scumbags that they are.

When comment spam was new and limited most of the people who were doing it were somewhat intelligent and did not hit too many live blogs. Since then people have got dumb about how they do it, hitting even blogs ran by search engineers.

I guess I understand working your way around the system or doing what you have to do to compete (I manually added a few spam links to some sites when I was first learning the web & SEO and did not understand some of the broader implications of what I was doing) but eventually as you learn and as techniques lose their value the solution is to move on to doing other things.

Some people are still holding on to comment spam and it is annoying. Some of them are going so far as to register domains like drive.to or shop.at to where if you block the domains it prevents people from writing some common phrases.

And then you got Google caching random .xml documents you do not remember ever creating chuck full of spam. Of course the fine people at MovableType do not care about comment spam when you buy a license, upgrade the software, or pay for an install. No, that is your problem for chosing to use MovableType in the first place.

I would love to see MovableType write an open letter of apoligize to anyone who ever paid for a license to use their swiss holed software in which using requires a ton of operator intervention.

If you are selling thousands of licenses of your software and it has holes in it then you ought to take the time to discuss the issue with people to do a legitimate job to fix the problems. And you ought to apoligize to anyone who paid for the nightmare you put them though with MT. I mean some of this stuff has still been uncovered fairly recently, and your company long ago had VC funding.

How long does it take to plug the holes & make a useful software product?

Did I ever mention how much I hate cold calls?

So I picked up the phone on the first ring, and this girl was still talking on the other end to one of her friends.

I said "hello."

She said "is Robert there" (Robert is my roommates name)

I said "who is this"

She said "is Robert there"

I said "who is this"

She said "Mary Jane. Is Robert there?"

I said "who paid you to call me"

She said "oh, you are Robert"

I said "who paid you to call me"

She said "I might be able to tell you if you weren't so rude and would stop interupting me." And then she hung up. Perhaps she reads the archives and knows better.

A telemarketer inturupting me, and not even being ready to talk when she does, and she is talking about someone being rude and interupting. What a perspective. What irony. I laughed.

It is the exact reason why search and blogging are so great. Those who want to tune in do, and you waste minimal resources hunting down disinterested prospects.

All your ads are belong to us^TM, so say Google.

Google is looking to get feeds from classified sites, according to Paid Content:

CIR's John Zappe writes: "Commercial classifieds sites such as CareerBuilder, Cars.com and others have to weigh the additional audience Google could deliver against the potential loss of revenue. Analysts, including us, predict that advertisers will move to free sites if they become convinced that they will reach an audience as large - or larger - on a search engine than on a paid advertising site."
Baker told CIR that's why the company and some of its larger clients are looking at alternatives including pay for performance rather than pay for distribution.

As Google (and others) gather data and Google makes advertising easier many hollow underperforming businesses will have their business models destroyed.

Those who are unwilling to share their data with Google will likely lose marketshare to smaller, newer, and more efficient competitors who have nothing to lose by partnering up with Google.

This makes heavy investment into vertical search much more risky, especially considering how shoddily some of the more established players are operating.

As Google gets more efficient at selling ads (with advertisers helping other advertisers free) you can bet they are going to get more and more ad dollars, directly & indirectly.

Part of the reason AdBrite was able to take off quickly was that it made buying ads an easy impulse purchase. It seems Google likes the idea, and on some quality AdSense publishing sites (like Ask The Builder) they are beta testing a new your ad here feature. When you click the advertise here link they bring up an AdWords page explaining how and why to advertise on the site.

The sign up process is smooth for new advertisers, but a bit sloppy for people who are already AdWords advertisers (who may not yet have experience running site targeted ads).

It will be interesting to see how granular the site targeting ads may become (ie: section targeting or page targeting). If they make them exceptionally granular you could buy ads on a somewhat decent ranking page on an authority site and then get them a few additional cheap spamish links to increase their ranking on that page or section and boost your ad exposure, while not being seen as associated with the spamming.

Yahoo! is beta testing their contextual ad service. MSN will also enter the contextual ad games soon, which will mean 3 companies will be fighting for publishers with their feature sets and payouts. Likely publishers as well as creative marketers / spammers should be able to do really well with that. It also means you will probably see less dog food for sale.

link from the brick man :)