What do you mean? We sold links on websites filled with unique content we paid for...
We were masking those domains from google because google penalizes selling backlinks to justify paying for their ads. My conscience is quite clear. When google delisted our network, we refunded our customers and moved on to a smaller invite only network that ran well for years. I left that company 6 or 7 years ago, but I'm sure they are still making some money off hosting and managing private blog networks.
Said search website was probably google. If that's the case they don't have to sell it, they just use it to target ads from their own network. If you search something on Google it will follow you like the plague.
Even Google is supporting these shady practices by powering some of the search toolbars and probably paying the toolbar owners for ad clicks. See MyWebSearch (http://home.mywebsearch.com/) mentioned in the article.
By replacing ads on websites with their own, and url hijacking for referral profits. They are not a good service, they're content thieves with a mask on.
Google, Duck Duck Go, Bing, Blekko, etc etc: you really need to start delisting the fuckers who pollute search results with made up shit. How is this possibly useful to your users? Companies who want to cram their URL in front of me at every opportunity should pay to place it in ads.
(I don't use an ad blocker. I even click relevant ads, although I've never bought anything from one yet.)
What I find interesting is that there's a handful of small pixel chunks on their that amount to something like "Paid" or "Reserved", so they don't have valid URLs at all. Feel like those folks missed out on tons of eyeballs a decade back.
Also wonder if there's any study on ongoing advertising impact on these links. For example, a number of links on their don't resolve anymore - are those domains worth anything more than a usual registar price?
There are multiple reasons - negative SEO, positive SEO, malware distribution, paid clicks, advertising and probably others I've forgotten at the moment.
It was a classic I bought about 20 links. But as soon as the webspam action happened I removed them (through text-link-ads.com). I was on top of it and cleaned it up but I have 3 times resubmitted it for re-approval over 1.5 years now with no luck.
I broke the rules but Viagra sites get better treatment.
The problem was that 80% of the customers came from lists given out by courthouses. Customers would type in the web address into Google search instead of the address bar.
Once the website disappeared from the Internet the only way customers could find the site was by Google adwords which went from spending $150 a day to $500 a day. A total win for Google I guess!
It was impossible to spend $500 a day forever, I put the website (the same website, no changes) onto a new domain and now it spends about $200 a day in Google adwords. Much better. I seemed to have received the worst possible webspam action for really very little. Consider other site buy thousands of links.. my 20 links were small potatoes that I thought would fly under the radar.
The whole incident cost about $100,000+ in sales mostly from customers who if they just knew how to use the address bar would have made it to the website.
When I see other websites have issues with Google, I know it doesn't take a whole lot to bring a great deal of Google issues upon them. Google if they wants to can just remove them or send them to page 200 and since Google gets 80% or so of searches and people don't know how to use the address bar the website is going to have to buy Adwords in order to stay online or change domains (assuming it is not an on-page issue).
They tend to get similar advertisers to sites like the pirate bay. At one point, they had duckduckgo advertisements but I was so cynical that I assumed it was just crap like the rest of the ads... never clicked on it.
For profit companies whose users don't pay a dime for the service.
I was just pointing that out because this change against linkbaits look like something good for us, against the tyranny of stupidity that even once-glorious publications are imposing on the social networks users.
It is not.
I contacted G once when I noticed that someone had clicked on about 8 pages in a couple of seconds. I had a simple question: "did I pay for this click?" They were unable or unwilling to answer. I've been suspicious since.
And I second your observation on content networks. It seems to be largely without useful controls.
I’m really curious what the original owner of the domain thought the value of spending $200 on that little ad was. Like nobody is going to see it in the sea of other ads, and backlinks weren’t a thing then. Why else would you buy it?
As others have mentioned, they run ads — based on the search query of the page they appear on. They also (not unlike Brave) participate in affiliate programs. They get referral commissions when they funnel people to Amazon or eBay, whether through their shopping carousels or through !bangs.
> use them anyway because they at least claim to be private
Me too, at least there's probably some chance they get sued if they’re as terrible as Google. But
> haven’t yet given me specific reason to doubt it
I do doubt they’re as private as they could be, because they act a lot like I imagine a honeypot does, hide their source code, and have had serious past privacy problems in other products (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708166 ‘We’re not collecting your info, our servers are receiving it but just trust us we just throw it away’).
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