A friend recently sent me a link to this Google Video about the history of copyright law, where Karl Fogel, of Question Copyright.org, debunks some myths surrounding copyright. MYTH #1: Being an Artist was unprofitable before copyright law existed.
FACT: Completely false, see below:

MYTH #2: Copyright was created for artists.
FACT: It was the exact opposite. When copyright was created in the Middle Ages of England, it was about censorship. The printing press had just been invented, and people were publishing of all kinds of writings and reprinting text from throughout history. Parliament feared it, so it set up a corporation with powers to enforce an exclusive printing monopoly.

MYTH #3: Copyright protects artists.
FACT: It protects the publishers, and few artists earn the majority of their income from it. In fact, many artists see no money from it at all--it all goes to their publishers.

MYTH #4: Copyright prevents plagiarism.
FACT: Thanks to technology like the Internet, attribution of original authorship is easily detectable, especially when works are published. In many cases, plagiarism (e.g. taking the successful work of one artist and re-selling it under your name) is even EASIER to detect by performing a Google search than via the United States Copyright Office.

---

Copyright laws made more sense in the age of printing presses, but in the age of the Internet it is irrelevant. Distribution does not require significant investment by publishers. In the video Karl also said the following quote about what he thought fair copyright law should resemble:

Your name can not be stripped and no one else can claim credit for it. That is credit, reputation is a non renewable resource. It can not be replicated. It can not be copied. To the degree that someone takes credit for your stuff, that's the degree to which you lose credit. It is always proportional.

I agree that current copyright law is messed up, but so is the way that Google handles what they deem to be search spam.

A work can be a collection of keywords and a navigational structure as much as it is a set piece of content. Trusted sites keep building more trust due to their visibility while untrusted sites have to send email spam or do other types of buzz related marketing to gain awareness.

If Google pays someone to steal your work and sets your (non-transferable) reputation at zero search is not a honest business model, especially if they have any hope of changing the world's perspective of copyright law, which they may need to do if they want to keep their current profit margins.

A large part of the search marketing game that gets little discussion is perception. Are the search results relevant? Are the search results fresh? Is there adequate result diversity? Is that particular result worthy of that ranking? What techniques did they use to rank there?

User vs Engineer Perspective

Gord Hotchkiss does a great job covering the searcher's perspective, but rarely do you get to see how a search engineer thinks of the results. This NYT article offered a snapshot, but that has been filtered through the public relations team. The results show not what the engineers want, but the best they can do given their current mindset and computing resources.

Reading Changes in the Search Results

If you can learn to read changes in the results you can see what they are trying to fix right now, what issues will become a big problem, and what issues they do not care about. For example, right now, Google does not care for result diversity. They are so afraid of small spam sites that they:

• allow garbage search results from authoritative domains to rank for a wide array of keywords

• allow category leaders to own the first page of search results

Why You Should NOT Trust a Search Engineer's Blog

You can't really trust the perspective of a blog posted by a search engineer because they typically discuss the view of search from an ideal world. In addition, the role of the search engineer blog is to control and manipulate public perception more than it is to share useful information. In some cases they tell you how going off topic is wrong, while they are proud to cite your off topic marketing and praise it if you are syndicating their spin.

If You Were a Search Engineer, Would You Lie?

When you look at how they try to manipulate people you can see the holes in their algorithms. They are nothing but an algorithm, an ad network, marketing, and how they manipulate people to cede power and authority to their fickle relevancy algorithms. If they are hypocritical in their view of the web then manipulation is a large and important piece required for them to keep what authority they have.

How to Spam Google Right Now

A few tips they don't want you to know the truth about:

• Buying old sites works amazingly well.

• Buying and redirecting sites works amazingly well.
• Paid links work amazingly well, and you have a strong brand or can tolerate a bit of risk you would be an idiot not to exploit that hole.
• Exact match domain names play a good role in helping a site rank for the associated keyword phrase.
• The supplemental results suck, but they don't want the portion of the web they throw into it to realize just how bad it sucks.
• The search results have a lot of hand editing in them. Hand editing is gratuitous for smaller websites, but they are afraid to edit out large corporations.

Why might Google refer to some of the above techniques as spam? Simply because they are effective. We don't write the algorithms. We give the search engines what they want.

Have You Ever Been Hand Edited?

Search relevancy algorithms change depending on what types of spamming are popular and effective at the time. After experiencing your first hand edit on something you worked hard to build it changes the way you perceive search engines, and how much you are able to respect them. If you are a professional you are not supposed to take it personally, but it is hard not to if you have to fire all of your employees.

Why is it that one person can review your site and kill your business model, but they wrap their ads around people stealing your content and it is a long drawn out process to get them to fix that problem? It is just an extension of how Google thinks of consumers. If you don't have lawyers they don't give a crap about you.

What is Spam?

Spam used to be irrelevant, but now that the web is a direct marketing channel spam is typically more seen as being focused on who was paid to achieve the results. Search relevancy algorithms are based on ad sales. Something that is spam is perfectly acceptable if Google gets a buck a click out of it. Ad networks dictated by automation and economic efficiency also push a lot of fraud. Consider the following:

• McAfee conducted a study showing that paid search results are at least twice as likely to scam consumers as organic search results

• many of the most profitable ads are profitable because they are misleading or exploit common psychological weaknesses. Google's CPA ads are virtually unmarked, and Google opted publishers into the program without even asking for their permission.
• Google sold AdWords ads promoting preteen sex
• Google sold AdWords ads promoting Ponzi scheme investment fraud
• Google syndicated ads on the largest Warez site
• Google removed disclosure from many of their syndicated ads
• Google has placed unmarked ads in their search results
• Google funds an overwhelming majority of copyright and trademark violations
• Google sells AdSense ads on sites they removed from their index for spamming
• Google recommended HMOs carpet bomb consumers with deceitful educational messaging

Much of their profit margins come from supporting fraud, but most people do not realize the extent of it.
Why is Google's ad centric view of the web viewed as more honest than any other business model?

How to React to a Hand Edit

The way to look at search is that they want their techniques to be robust and scalable. Anytime a search engineer does something to you that is unjust and draconian it is because they have a huge hole in their algorithm. After you get hand edited the four strategies worth exploring are

• how to obfuscate your identity

• how to scale exploiting the holes which required a search engineer to try to destroy your business
• how to make your "spam" fit their view of relevancy so they don't go out of their way to keep hand editing your businesses
• let others know if you think something is dishonest so you can help them avoid trusting it too much

Should one company own 10 first page results for a commercial non-brand keyword?

If you or I ever ranked this well and were that over the top with white-label domains we would expect a swift hand edit from the Google engineering department. Should Bankrate? Or is it ok for them to monopolize the search results if they already are a near monopoly? What is questionable here is not just the number of results or similarity of offering between different brands, but that a couple of the domains are the exact same names with the exception of one of them sporting a hyphen and the other going without. It is not like the competition is weak, with them outranking Fannie Mae, Yahoo! Finance, and Bloomberg.

In a few months all those Bankrate sites will still rank because they have the AdWords budget and brand to support it.

In some markets $5 a click is cheap. Conversion rates are going up. Well run internet businesses have low overhead and are getting bigger cuts from merchants as their businesses scale. Domain Name Wire posted that throughout the first half of this year CreditCards.com earned $4.64 per visitor:

Internet Real Estate Group sold the domain to Click Success in 2004 for 'only' $2.75M. Daniel H. Smith pocketed $97.7M from the sale to an Austin Ventures-backed group in 2006. The purchase by the group in 2006 from Click Success was financed partially with debt from American Capital Strategies (NASDAQ: ACAS).

CreditCards.com's S-1 filing is a treasure trove of information about the company's traffic (they actually have more than one domain driving traffic) and earnings per visitor. In the first half of this year, the company received 5.899M visitors and earned $4.64 per visitor. The traffic was up only slightly from the same period last year, but revenue per visitor increased 46%:

CollegeScholarships.org recently launched a web design scholarship, offering students interested in web design a chance to win $5,000 for designing a Wordpress template for a scholarship site.

I wasn't going to mention it here (figuring I have mentioned that site too many times recently with covering the 301 redirect from the old site, eh?), but I know many designers read this site, and so far there are only 2 entrants. The scholarship was going to close on the 13th of August, but I asked Daniel to extend the submission deadline to the 18th, and he was up for that, so there is about a week left before the submission deadline. The winner will still be announced on August 20th.

If you are a student into web design please apply! If you know people who may be interested in it please pass the word on.