How technorati's ruining my blog's reputation to make money
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Something like 12 hours ago, Max logged on technorati and made a search for www.we-make-money-not-art.com. Surprise, surprise! The page that appeared contained repeated sponsored links titled "we make money not art.com" pointing to websites that explain you all the tricks to "Turn Your Debt Into Dollars With This Money Making Opportunity" and get rich from home. I felt so ashamed and insulted. I could really make a lot of cash if i were to accept all the proposals i get to run similar ads on my blog, so seeing that an "authority" as respected as technorati is using the name of my blog to lead their users to debt websites really infuriated me. I was away when Max made that discovery but he sent them an email 7 hours ago asking them to remove the offending ads ASAP. No answer so far. I guess the guys are too busy making money. UPDATE: there's hope! Technorati wrote me (see the comments) that they pass on the URL to overture (Yahoo Publisher's Network) to get their ads, and because your URL has "Make Money" in it, the overture folks are providing, ahem, somewhat "interesting" ads. It's soemthing to be expected (google adsense does the same on my blog) but at least the ad links i get do not bear the mention "we make money not art.com." Anyway, looks like the Technorati team are trying to solve the problem.
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Cheeky B******ds. Keep us posted, hope it gets sorted out soon
Yeah we had the same problem this morning...got heavily spammed from within technorati..but it was the first time this has happened so i hope they are taking note and will fix the leak. Spam is an annoyance in email, but a crime in spoiling the integrity of conversations in blogs. it made me very angry...james
This is the sort of thing I've been expecting and why I cut feeds from my blog in April. Sadly, parasites are going to find ways to profit from the content of others. I expect it's going to get worse before it gets better. And there's not much you can do.
Sorry to hear this.
this is very sad.
ouch! i've noticed those. not cool.
Hmmm, looks like these are overture ads (note the sponsored link indicator above and below the links) and not Technorati search results.
I'm going to have a look into this and see what's up. Sorry about the problem!
Dave
Mmmm, yes I think I see what's going on here. We pass on the URL to overture (Yahoo Publisher's Network) to get their ads for display, and because your URL has "Make Money" in it, the overture folks are providing, ahem, somewhat "interesting" ads.
I've passed this on to the overture abuse team so that they can take action.
Again, I'm sorry that you had a bad experience with Technorati. I hope that we can get things resolved quickly for you. Please do bear with us as this is not coming from us, but from our ad serving partner...
Dave
Yo Regine,
I tried the same search just now for your blog, and the stupid
ads are there, of course - selected by some bot reading your URL.
The funny thing is, when I tried searching for one of my own obscure blogs,
there are no ads. This probably means that the popular your blog is,
the more Technorati is trying to piggyback on your reputation to push ads.
I tried some more searches:
BoingBoing : 1 insert, repeated
SmartMobs: No ad insert, except that ugly poster on the right margin
WorldChanging: No insert
Then I tried yours again - NO ADS. I refreshed the page - and lo!
They were back. Some algorithm is selecting when to display
and when to omit. I think its taking the "make money" in your URL a bit too literally.
This is a classic case of "We're not doing anything. It's all automatic."
High time people realised that they are responsible for
what the software (they own) is doing with their subscribers.
hi DJ Fadereu,
interesting! thanks for your experiment. yeah, that "make money" in the url is a bummer. sometimes i send emails to people and my message gets dumped by their spam blocker because of that "make money" ingredient in my address
seems right, as i can see in
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.we-make-money-not-art.com&fr=FP-tab-web-t400&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8
you I was believing that google adsense got filteing on some words, so what's about yahoo ?
I'm sorry for you...
anyway it's money & pornography that's keeping the net going, isn'it?
shit happens
It might be, as mentioned before, something one has to expect.
That automated ads are picking on the "make money" term.
But it is unconscionable that technorati allows ads that clearly fake the url
We Make Money Not Art. Com
Work From Home And Earn No Less Then $1,000 Per Transaction.
looks at first glance like an original post from you
If technorati, or whoever grabs the money is unable to control it´s own system
it will loose it´s reputation very fast.
Let´s see if they can handle their bot-pets
best,
pK
oh, yes. and just in case people didn't realise it. Mister Sifry did a great PR job here but didn't bother to remove those horrible ads from his website.
oh, yes. and just in case people didn't realise it. Mister Sifry did a great PR job here but didn't bother to remove those horrible ads from his website.
My most recent search threw up the URL clones you mentioned in your post. Red-handed, I've saved a JPEG. The cloned links are superimposed on top of Overture search-marketing links (a Yahoo company). I refuse to believe Sifry when he says that it is "abuse" - no Sir, this is your entire business model.
People create tags. You create a crawler over these tags - Technorati. Then you match tags with ads and instead of throwing up search results, you throw up ads that "resemble" what was being searched. This is a subterfuge model, this is cheating.
Technorati is merely an automated index whose subscribers (and indeed - content creators) should get the benefit of its movements, just like a stock market. Without the tags and the blog contents, Technorati is hot air. You (David Sifry) should only get paid to maintain the index honestly.
But of course, I'm dreaming of a different world.
.
DJ Fadereu I don't know if I buy your hyperbole. It's not tags or tag search. The 'misleading' ad comes from the URL. I do not have any high regard for the quality of technorati as an index believe me, but I find it beyond reasonable belief that their CEO would come here and actually lie. [I say this at the moment - if some other evidence turns up, I'll change my mind]
Technorati don't make the ads -- yahoo/overture does. Technorati just pastes in the code to their page design and the ads are sent to their site automagically. Like googleads - the user has no control (this is my guess and it seems logical; it's the usual way for the text ads to be served).
Regine, I very much sympathize with this situation and I notice that the bogus ads are still there now. So maybe you should write to Overture/Yahoo telling them of your complaint. If Sifry already told them, then Overture/Yahoo are being slow/slack and it might put more pressure on them; or if Sifry is lazy and hasn't actually told them yet, then you will be alerting Overture/Yahoo to the problem.
first of all, we did of course write overture/yahoo.
my blog runs google ads and it's not true that we don't have control over the ads: we can decide to remove ads from a page when it features ads we're not happy with.
Oh yeah, sorry Regine, I remember seeing the googlead choice page - I've just never had a reason to edit it.
I see the bogus ads are still there on technorati. This really is too much time. I find it hard now to understand what the hell might be causing a delay in fixing it. Stupid moneyhungry people I guess.