(2005-08-24) Oreilly Search Engine Spam

Phil Ringnalda finds that OReilly (and Shelley Powers) is showing Search EngineSpam.

TimOReilly acknowledges that it's a tricky issue. So Advertising on a site with a high Page Rank instead of via Google AdWords is a way of arbitraging the relative cost of advertising on the two sites. However, it has a downside in terms of the Search Engine user experience... is it appropriate for a site to monetize its page rank as well as its page impressions?

So what we have here is a Zero-Sum Game, between Google and the various parties involved in gaming Page Rank.

• Google doesn't count its own AdWords links in Page Rank calculations. But does it catch and ignore other TextAd-s, such as those fed by other Self Service Web Ads networks?

• might Google demote OReilly pages? That's what they did to Word Press (though that was a more obnoxious case).