I've still got a problem with how this was done - no email notification that it was fixed, and I didn't see anything in the Apps management console either; you find out by following some Google blog or other, or keep trying it. Google ought to improve communications with paying customers.

And as a result of Google's approach of non-communication and the forced creation of transition accounts, I now have a pointless Google Account which I must merge back into operations - more work for me and my staff, and no apparent help or guidance from Google for my having to fix a problem they created. It's just not good customer service. I suppose I'd like a way to merge Google Accounts - so I can get back the access that I had seven months ago.]

This has to be the strangest thing that I’ve come across on Google Plus and Google Plus 1. Google has created a paying service to manage user identity, and then excludes those long period paying customers from taking part in Google Plus One and Google Plus. Yup, if you have Google Apps, you can’t use social networking, and you can’t mark the resources you find useful. Everyone else who *doesn’t* pay Google for services, can use Google Plus and Plus One. And Google’s response to Google Apps users? Silence. Total silence. Thanks, Google guys. Thanks a bunch.

[Update: 2011-08-12 - Google Apps Help Forum has a Google Staffer response, but unfortunately he promises to keep users updated on a thread that already has 8 pages of comments. Find the updates if you have time... What's wrong with a pinned posting, maintained by the Apps Help Forum Advisors and locked against user content - a reasonable way to publish the Google position in a forum, with such a strong set of questions?]

[Update: 2011-07-21 - How Can I Get My Staff Connected? - You'll have to send an invite to a non-Google Apps Google Account, from a non-Google Apps Google Plus enabled account, and run everything involving Google Plus in a separate account. If you send an invite to a Google Apps accunt, it is completely useless, because Google appears to check that the Google Account that you are using, matches the Google Account of the invitee. Invites to a Google Apps user are completely useless. Not that Google tells you that, either as sender or receiver, until you actually click on the link and get the error message about Profiles, below.

Note that Google is apparently both intending to allow brands to have space in Google Plus, and is also supposedly adding access Google Apps users, at some unannounced point - so you may face another problem of merging identities or re-establishing an identity when Google does get around to allowing you access. Nothing like making it easy, eh?]

What the farquahr was passing through the mind of the Google Product Managers that chose to do this? Perhaps:

“I know, we’ve had paying users on this service since about 2005, we’re sure of their identity, because they are paying us to make sure we know who they are, so, I dunno, let’s just forget them because, well, they’re obviously idiots. They’ll take any amount of abuse. They’ve been used to working out how our poorly documented systems can be used, so being unable to reach another service we offer can’t possibly bother them. And if they complain? Meh. Paying customers on AdWords go for years without answers to basic problems, except ‘ask another user’. Fuggedaboudid.”

[Update: 2011-07-20 - Dave Girouard, a VP at Google says (but not in the Google Apps Help forums run by Google), that adding Profiles is a priority; even using the guys' name in searches, I can't find this post in the last month of articles on Google's various Blogspot.com blogs - probably because Google are such lame users of SEO. Running a separate blog article with a probably non-useful title and perhaps missing important cue words to allow search to operate properly, rather then replying in the Help Forum to questions from Google Apps Administrators and users, on a forum set up by the service organisation, is pretty peculiar. It's like me getting a question from a client, writing a blog article and neglecting to let them know it is relevant - irritating for everyone, and less than helpful. Blogs are for public announcements, not client communications. Learn. The. Medium. And learn how to write so that useful stuff can be found on search, or fix your search engine to work with the opaque way that you blog. One of them is ineffective - either search doesn't connect relevant material, or the writing needs fixing.]

Do Google Customer Service Staff Keep A Chart Of “Clients Crapped On This Month” and Compete To See Who Wins?

Doesn’t excluding Google Apps users from two services means that a whole bunch of federal and state government employees, several significantly sized corporations and a whole bunch of iddy-biddy liddle companies have just been excluded? Oh, and didn’t I see some national governments in Google Apps “list of informationally endangered organisations” client list?

I used to think that the hundred thousand or so small businesses denied any access to AdWords Customer Service was an abomination. But whoever thought up the idea of silently and without warning denying access to the great new experiment in social communication, to all Google Apps customers, has to win this years’ award for “Most Google Paying Customers Excluded From Reasonably Expected Service Levels For No Stated Reason”. We’re talking ten thousand users *at a time* for some Google Apps clients. By my estimate, it totally dwarfs the scale of ignoring small business AdWords advertisers by about an order of magnitude. And to omit the same user group on *two* services, in one month – absolute genius. Not sure if they get double points for that, or an exponential powerup.

Why This Might Not Be a Good Idea For Google

For most businesses on the planet, paying customers come first, not last. If they did so at Google, then when Google have a new and exciting service, Google should make sure that the people who pay the Google payroll and keep the lights on in the Google datacenters, get an early crack. Rather than the current policy, which is apparently to keep paying customers both excluded and totally in the dark. AFAICS, that’s really not very clever customer service – is it? Am I really that out of step with how organisations should be treating clients?

You know that number one thing in the Google corporate mission statement? You know, the one about “Focus On The User“? It comes ahead of the one that people usually talk about, that you can do business without being evil? Point of fact for the Google staffers… the people who pay Google to do things for them, are Users, too. Just because they pay Google, doesn’t mean that they should deserve less respect.

I’m really annoyed by Google. For now, we use Google Apps. Or at least, we will probably do so for about 30 more days *WHILE I WORK OUT HOW TO LEAVE GOOGLE APPS*. I’d prefer to not-have access to a service that I’m not-paying for, than be denied a free service because I am paying an organisation for their services.

Cloudy Implications

Why would being disallowed to use Google Plus and Google Plus One make me reconsider our usage of Google Apps? There’s some really cute things you can do with apps, from scraping sites to sharing stats. But… Google is supposed to be unifying the Identities of Google Accounts and Google Apps. This is the first crucial test of whether new services will be available. And the answer is “FAIL”.

({sarcasm on} Good product naming system, BTW – makes it totally clear in the users’ minds what they are doing and how separate those services are. I can’t see anybody ever being confused about them. {/sarcasm})

Which would I rather have? And what would my users in the business rather have? The ability to mark useful resources and engage in controlled social networking, or the opportunity to use the not-as-good-as-Word-or-Pages word processor, or the not-as-good-as-Powerpoint-or-Keynote presentation tool, or… Well, they already hate using Google Docs, unless I force the use on genuinely shared data. So most would vote to kill it – they use the mail system, and otherwise overwhelmingly prefer to use a local app with a richer UI and features. Unless it is genuinely data for interactive sharing.

Sharing Data and Encryption

There are other ways to share data, after all. The failure of DropBox a few weeks ago (they accidentally allowed anyone to access any content in any DropBox for a four hour period) has made me wonder about the wisdom of having unencrypted data in the Cloud. I’m beginning to develop the idea that, just as I do with DropBox, I only put already encrypted data on it, or I use for insensitive data, stuff that I wouldn’t be unhappy to have leaked. But Google keeps everything in the clear… And that’s increasingly uncomfortable for me. We have client data. If we continue to march towards sharing data, I want an secure communication to an encrypted resource, not something merely protected by a single level of authentication and a secure communication protocol. I want the service to be unaware of the keys to unlock the data, so even if someone at the service provider forgets to lock the resource, I’ve still got a good level of protection on the data.

Google Apps doesn’t have that level of security now. I haven’t seen it discussed as a future option. And if Google has such disdain for Google Apps users that it won’t communicate about its’ most important new communications and search mechanisms… Well, I don’t think they care about my concerns for improved data security. So I think my business needs to move as soon as practicable, from a provider that isn’t even talking about services that I think are increasingly needed. That’s how connected Google Plus and Google Apps are. The behaviour of one is a likely predictor of behaviour for the other – and I just lost all confidence that Google understands what a customer is, and what their needs are.

“Google customer service” is apparently an oxymoron – or at least, looks that way from the lack of any statements that I can find, using Google’s own search engine to search their own web site site and blogs using the keywords “google plus google apps”, as of July 11th, 2011. As George Bush memorably said “Fool me once, shame on you. A fooled man can’t get fooled again. Erm.” I’m just fed up with Google. Really feel betrayed. Again. And Again. And Again. And that makes me feel like an idiot for trusting Google, again. I don’t enjoy feeling like an idiot – so I’ll be extending less and less trust to Google. But I will use them for their free services – those are absolutely fantastic value.

Summary

Understanding how Google treats paying customers yields some illumination on free services. My interpretation of silence is negative – I can’t construe Google’s silence in their own forums in any positive way. I fear for the security of my company’s data in Google’s Cloud – because it is held in clear and offers no opportunity to hold encrypted shared data.

Google should be reconsidering what it does with paying clients. They shouldn’t be the last to use a service, but amongst the first; and they should be communicated with. That’d create an incentive to pay to use the services. Not a disincentive.

I now detest Google about half the amount that I detest Microsoft. I’d still prefer to use an Android phone over yet another Windows implementation, Google Search Results barely over Bing, AdWords over adCenter. And I’ll probably be looking to see if I can find an autoencrypted file sharing service that uses AWS/S3 or something similar as a service, so I can remotely mount an “encrypted disk” and use it whether connected or not (rather like Apple’s iDisk but better shared, and encrypted).

Notes

Fuggedaboudid = “Forget About It”, said quickly and with nasality.

That plant has about 300,000 employees. What’s the UK’s suicide rate? That UK government statistics site has the rate at about 12.5 per 100,000 – that’s not “suicide attempts”, that’s “suicides”. It doesn’t actually say “12.5″ in that nugget – it gives a headline rate for males and females – and women are less likely to die by suicide, by a lot. I’ve averaged the male rate and the female rate and waved my hands a bit, to get to 12.5 per hundred thousand.

Male suicide rates are about 3 to 4 times higher in the UK

So that Chinese factory, at 9 suicides for 300,000 staff, is actually running at around 1/4th the suicide rate in the UK… Or is it?

The government charts are normalised for the age; the chart represents how many die, over a lifetime, from suicide. We’re taking a small segment of people’s whole life, working for this business. So is it fair to equate a lifetime rate, with a few years history of that business?

Well, the UK stats show that here, the suicide rates are pretty much independent of age, and more related to the sex of the people; men are much more likely to die of suicide (it’s not clear from these stats whether equal numbers of men and women attempt suicide, and men are just better at it, or if fewer women attempt suicide – there are other sources for that question).

So, the rate of 12 per hundred thousand is roughly the same, for each age group when averaging the male/female rates, over the two and a bit decades of this report. That means we’d expect to see a total of about 30 to 40 suicides amongst 300,000 Chinese workers in the last year, if they had UK rates of suicide. If that inference is correct, this factory is doing something that we in the West should learn – they’ve crushed the suicide rate hugely, to about 25% of what should be expected, if it was in the West and the factory was entirely average, with a 50/50 male/female mix.

But of course, the Chinese are demons. We don’t like their human rights abuses, sweatshops and competitive rates, their intolerant politics and their manipulative economy, or the way they cut free access to western websites – and undercut Western company’s prices. So a story about how horrible they are, plays to the image we have. It’s easier to place a story that plays to preconceptions than a story that says “Shock probe into UK working practices suggests we should learn from the Chinese” – and I think you’d find few people in the West advocating 30p/hour and 12-15 hour days as a way to decrease suicide rates (hmm – make employees so busy and tired they don’t have the time or energy to commit suicide?)

Some western media are getting rational about this, and playing down the numbers – like The Times Online, which has gone one better than this article, and looked at Chinese suicide rates – and even points out the difference between urban and rural rates.

But the *low* rate of suicides at the factory rarely makes a play… maybe they have a lot more female workers than male? That’d probably account for the rate.

The other interesting factor in the stories is the emphasis on the perceived increasing rate of suicides. Is that a real increase in rate, though, or a statistical fluke? I don’t have enough of the data to begin to make a start, but infrequent events can cluster – epidemiologists have a hard time with data that points to clusters of diseases, when there is no real relationship. This partially stems from the astonishing and pioneering work in the UK in 1854, where John Snow linked Cholera to the use of particular water sources and cluster analysis showed that infection was related to the water source. Cluster analysis is an important tool – but later work has found misleading clusters, needing careful statistics work to find out what actually goes on, rather than discovering flukes.

Is there a real increase in suicide rate at the factory? Hard to say on the evidence given. It could just be a fluke – after all, you can toss a coin and get 8 heads – it’s exactly as likely as any other specific sequence (8 tails, or four heads then four tails, etc). The trick is to demonstrate that there is a difference from the rates you’d expect. And on the face of it, the only evidence is that this factory has a lower rate than expected.

Conclusions

Either some journalists are irrational and just looking to fill column inches with poorly understood and badly misrepresentative stories, or I’ve misunderstood the stats. I’ll be thinking about the stats a bit more. Maybe I’ve interpreted them badly – statistics are easy to misunderstand.

Well done The Times. Better balance and insight. That’s what we’re after. Naughty Independent – muck raking and subjecting readers to poorly evaluated reporting from organisations with an agenda? I don’t really know what’s really happening, but I’m not convinced by a lot of the coverage, and less convinced by The Independent than The Times.

Why hasn’t Apple played the card that says how their work requirements mean that the companies they work with have lower suicide rates? Why isn’t Dell on the firing line to the same extent for their use of this factory, or is this a way to knock Apple and try to dent sales and taint the iPad on the eve of the UK launch? Interesting, isn’t it, to think about the agenda that the media may be playing, whether consciously or driven by other players in the game.

National Insurance is paid in two parts – by the employee and by the business. The employee has a cap on their contribution. The business does not. So National Insurance increases naturally tend to hit higher paid employees overheads more. Want to save on your National Insurance costs? Don’t increase payments to your higher paid employees so much (see this “FactCheck” on the Chancellor candidates debate and the “wealth gap”)

The changes proposed by the Labour Party are to increase the NI rate for higher paid employees. The Conservative claim is that this increase in National Insurance will increase the reluctance of employers to hire more staff, in a recession. I’m sure that for very large businesses, there may be some impact – but if the impact is to reduce hiring of lower paid staff, that’s pretty perverse. It’s not unheard of for laws to have unintended consequences, and I’ll gladly concede that it is possible that a tax change clearly intended to target higher paid employees, might unexpectedly affect lower paid staff recruitment. I’ve never run or been a senior executive staff member in an organisation that employed more than 20 staff, so I don’t have any real experience of making decisions on staff hiring where 1% NI changes would be worth a whole employee – I’ll have to go with these large business leaders saying that it will affect the number of staff they hire.

The real deception though, appears to be how equivalent savings in Government spending are to be made. The analogy that seems to be being made is that, like many businesses, the easiest way to save is to reduce employment. Cut your staff and you cut costs, and it can be done pretty quickly. I understand, from what I’ve heard in the debates and previously, that the main plank for Conservative spending reduction, is to delay filling jobs in Government, mostly by slowing hiring of contractors from the private sector. If you defer hiring a staff member by a year, you save a year of spending in wages. Seems plausible, on the surface.

In a recession, few businesses will be carrying underemployed staff who would turn into Government contract staff. People who aren’t placed on contract, and have no immediate prospect of being placed, will be let go. They will become unemployed. Or, putting it the other way round, when the Government wants a private sector employee, the contracting company hires someone off the lists of the unemployed.

This means that Governments are not like businesses in several ways. One of the ways in which the UK government is different from a business, is that the UK government pays unemployment benefit to the unemployed. So, when a Government job is not filled immediately, the consequence is that instead of the tax funds going to an private sector employee, some of the taxes go to a different part of Government spending – unemployment.

If that’s the right chain of reasoning, when David Cameron says that he will save Government spending by deferring recruitment instead of raising a tax, he’s also sustaining Government spending on unemployment benefit. In other words, the “savings” won’t be at the level that has been predicted, and the impact will be to increase unemployment in the private sector from the organisations that provide Government contract staff, relative to the staffing that would have been in place without the savings. Increased “savings” from deferring contract placements, result in increased unemployment figures with an approximate one for one correspondence of Government posts unfilled versus unemployed people.

Let’s put some numbers to this. I’ll look at £1B savings in Government spending. Before the saving on hiring the Government spends £1B on those staff including National Insurance (employers part) and takes back from those employed staff, the employees NI and taxes. So about 10% (assuming that these staff are at the lower end of the pay scale) of the payments return to the government. £1B saving means that we lose £100M of government revenue. So we’ve actually only saved £900M net from our £1B staff saving.

Worse, all those staff are now candidates to remain on unemployment benefit, instead of taking those people off the unemployment register. How much do we fail to reduce the unemployment benefit? Making perhaps egregious assumptions, an employee might expect to pick up more as an employee than as someone unemployed – let’s say that the benefit of being employed, for a low paid worker, is to be about 20% to 25% better off from having a job, than being unemployed. So £1B in spending on employees, translates to about £750M in unemployment benefit we don’t have to pay. Or put it another way – saving £1B in spending by deferring Government spending, results in keeping unemployment payments of £750M, plus foregoing £100M of taxes.

I don’t see a huge saving from deferring payments on staff like this. I do see a significant impact on unemployment spend – it won’t decrease as quickly as if the “savings” hadn’t been implemented. I think the Conservative approach to cutting government spending isn’t going to be more than about 20% effective. The result is that in order to save £6B (the target mentioned in interviews) would actually mean cutting Government hiring by £30B. And that has a very large impact on the count of people in unemployment and the private sector businesses that hire staff to the Government.

In the last few years, the Labour Government claims to have reduced public sector spend by £15B, and our public sector spend monitor, the National Audit Office says that some of that saving is, hmm, insufficiently clear that it is a saving. But the Conservatives are going to cut £6B in actual spend – which means a £30B cut in Government employment, without significantly reducing services? I just don’t believe it.

Technically, I suppose that this criticism also applied to the Labour Party and the Lib Dems – I’ve quickly skimmed their manifestoes and can’t see specific savings techniques for large sums. Lots of little bits, and claims of being completely costed. I couldn’t see where the complete costings (with first order repercussions) were in either Labour manifesto or the Conservative manifesto or the Liberal. I haven’t read the Green Party or other Manifestos, yet. I’m biased – I won’t be reading the BNP or UKIP manifestos; I regard both of these parties as substantially irrational and unpleasant and I’ve got better ways to spend my time. The Monster Raving Loony Party is a whole other game.

I’m not averse to reducing Government spending. I run a small business, and any serious way to cut my tax bill (personal or business) is welcome. But I just don’t see how trying to save £6B in real money, is possible by deferring hiring, without deferring £30B of hiring. Tell me that saving £30B of hiring savings can be done purely by efficiency, in a few years of UK Government budgets and I think I’m going to have to call you damnably suspicious…

I’d rather have my small business pay 1% more on National Insurance for higher paid staff, than to see £30B increase in the unemployed – the impact on unemployment in large businesses through that 1% tax, can’t possibly have the same level of misery for the rise in the count of unemployed, can it?

So, where’s the failure in logic and my understanding of the economy? We can’t have prime ministerial candidates misleading the public like this, can we? I must have misunderstood how the savings work. I just can’t see how. Help!

• I used to be a Top Contributor in the AdWords Help Forum (that’s a designation given by Google to high frequency posters, who are more often correct and useful, than not) – I resigned, basically because Google doesn’t understand social media
• I used to be a software R&D manager, in a large US Company, in the USA – I do know a little about how large US businesses work and think
• I’ve worked in small businesses, including a company that I co-founded, in the US – I’m entrepreneurial and competitive, perhaps not what a US commentator would expect of a Brit posting about Google and Europe
• My current business is one that I’ve set up in the UK. Self funded through sales to non-governmental clients. I’m not relying on the state to support me, buy from me, or do anything other than the common defence for a citizen – I’m not on a “European Socialist” agenda.
• I’ve developed intellectual property that has been awarded patents – I understand a bit about IP, trade secrets and technical advantages

Google is transparent – within certain limitations. I think you guys have done a great job about communicating the factors that lead to high ranking in your search engine. You’ll see references in the Merjis blog side navigation to Google resources for SEO – because those, and the Bing Webmaster advice, are amongst the best resources that I’ve found, along with Matt Cutt’s superb series on his blog and on YouTube. Applause is due for the clear way that you guys have communicated and the passion you all clearly feel.

However.

You knew that “however” was going to come, didn’t you?

There is a difference between technical excellence, passion, transparency and, on the other side, public relations.

You can have the world’s best product, and if the public perception is that a different product is better, the other product will outsell you. It’s painful for engineers to understand – I’ve personally made that journey, so I know. But having a world’s best product doesn’t automatically confer the advantage of user sympathy that you might expect.

Why not? It is best expressed as a marketing dictum – “Perception is reality”. It doesn’t actually matter, in the public playing field, whether Google is pure when it comes to privacy – it is the perception of privacy that counts. It doesn’t matter whether Google actually is working on a level playing field in Europe – it is a question of whether it is credible. The actuality does make a difference, of course, but perception is not the same as reality – look at the whole climate change issue, for example. There is some real science, with some real data, but perception and reality do not have to converge.

That’s a whole area that Google finds very difficult. Public relations.

Google has a trusted brand. No doubt about that. If the brand wasn’t trusted, it wouldn’t be so badly abused by scammers, who use Google’s name to induce people to buy into their cunning frauds. If the Google brand was untrusted, then Google Money Tree and other scams would be unable to operate.

Perception is a matter of whether the public, especially the public in non-domestic countries (i.e. outside the USA) can trust a business that is owned by Americans, run in the US, under US laws, paying US taxes, and that appears to put US citizens first in their thinking to operate on a level playing field outside the national boundaries of the USA.

It is perception that is the overwhelming part of the game. And transparency is not the same as developing trust and improving perception. I do trust to Google to deliver fair and transparent results – so long as the social context is the USA. That’s the crucial issue.

I trust Google to badly misunderstand social media, and public relations – even in the USA. That’s because you guys are mostly engineering. You think that delivering the worlds best search engine is proof that you are delivering a level playing field to Europe. But what you *are perceived to do* is what counts. And inside and outside the USA you act differently.

Some examples. At the risk of making these too brief to make the point:

Customer Service is not the same as a Public Forum

If I have a unique problem (e.g. my credit card works elsewhere, but doesn’t work on a Google transaction), it is not appropriate to post that problem in a public forum; no-one but Google and the customer should be involved in that discussion of a failed payment – perhaps the bank or credit card company might be involved, but other customers? The decision by Google to throw small AdWords clients into the hands of other users, shows a complete lack of understanding of, and is an abuse of, social media.

Google AdWords apparently conducts the auction in US Dollars.

That means that UK businesses appears to suffer from a competitive disadvantage in auctions – the granularity of our bids is 1.5 times larger than the US, so a USD based competitor can bid slightly less in the auction, giving them a competitive advantage. Where is that documented? Why are British companies selectively chosen to pay more in auctions? It doesn’t *look* like a level playing field. It isn’t discussed in AdWords Help.

Google hides critical elements of fairness from public view. Is that transparent? Or manipulative? Or just so parochial that it beggars belief?

Google AdWords apparently converts British Pounds and Euros to USD for the AdWords auction.

What’s the exchange rate? Where is it published? Which of the exchange rates do you use? What’s the time interval on updates – or is the time interval manipulated so you update faster when it suits you and slower when it doesn’t?

US business may be selectively advantaged, and Google itself can benefit from currency fluctuations, using an entirely undocumented transaction system. Where’s Hal Varian’s posting and paper about currency quantisation and exchange rate fluctuations, and what Google does to level the playing field for non-US businesses? Or did you guys assume that with the auction in USD, that all is fair? Or do you actually run the auction in the .co.uk servers in GBP? You don’t say. Even as an AdWords Help Form Top Contributor, I never got a straight answer about the auction, exchange rates, and the quantisation problem.

Google doesn’t expose stuff that is critical to showing that you play fair. Microsoft doesn’t expose this either. Guess how much I trust them to play fair in Europe?

Yes, I know that some one will say that if I don’t like AdWords I don’t have to use it. But Google penetration in the UK is higher than in the US. I am effectively forced to use Google – it’s not my decision, but my target audiences’ decision. They don’t, directly, bear the costs of that, or need to understand the issues of a business forced to apparently compete on an unequal playing ground with US businesses.

Google makes primary decisions about search in the US HQ.

That means, because you live in an insular nation, that you will unconsciously tend to focus on the US environment in decision making. This shows up. When you (correctly – well done) decided to help with the Chilean Earthquake disaster relief, you chose only to concentrate on US citizens and donations in US Dollars. Even when you translated the pages on national servers to non-US languages, you still told the French in French, and the Germans in German, how US citizens could call US resources.

What? You guys don’t know how to use a search engine to find the appropriate resource in that country for its’ citizens? Or is a US citizen so much more important than a German or French citizen that non-US citizens should be ignored? It is deeply insulting (outside the Googleplex – within, its apparently OK to value a US Citizen more highly?).

Geolocation is confused outside the USA.

Take AdWords again. Google used to claim “94% accuracy with a 20 mile radius” But that’s not true in Europe. See if you can find a statement about the accuracy in Europe. It is important. At certain values of accuracy, you waste money by geotargeting – but Americans have decided that Europeans should use US figures for accuracy. I have discussed this with Google staff, but I’m under NDA, so I can’t say what I know.

What I’ve measured, *BEFORE* talking with Google staffers, in limited trials that my small business can afford to do, is about a 70% inclusion rate. That’s close to the critical value that means it is more effective to disable geotargeting. But you guys think about Americans. Not the Brits, the French, the Germans and the Italians, and how our telephone and ISP services developed. So you make decisions that affect us, without understanding us. Pretty arrogant and insensitive, isn’t it? Or are we just supposed to be grateful that the mighty GOOG noticed anything outside California?

Geolocation is increasingly complex, and as users become more mobile, the location in Europe is likely to become more precise. But the large volume of desktop based (typically, still, 90% or so of the volume on mainstream sites) is subject to the old router/ISP based locations. Which in Europe will be less accurate. Where’s that explained? Clearly? So that someone can make an informed decision? Google has decided that all we need to know in Europe, is carried by the US based experience.

AdWords is completely confused about time zones.

Coded in California, with a default California time zone, the user interface betrays a conflict between events run in PST (California Time), events in the user selected account TimeZone, and the users’ current machine timezone. When you sit down and write this stuff, Google staff think about someone in Mountain View, not in Tokyo or London using a machine set to the time in Frankfurt or Durban.

There’s about ten times as many people *not* sharing US Time Zones, as are in your time zones. Want to convince us, the rest of the world, not accidentally sharing your time zones, that we’re valued? You know what to do – understand time from *our* perspective and reflect that in the UI, properly.

I haven’t checked this (and the related issues of Ad Scheduling that fails when it is near midnight, California time) for a few months. It’s been a problem for ages. But hey, we’re in Europe, so if we complain, it’s probably because we’re funded by Microsoft, eh?

Perception Is Reality

I could offer more examples. If pushed, I will. There is a key point. There’s what Google says, and there’s what Google does. What you *say* is great.

Google is going to organise the worlds information.

What you *do* tells us that this has a qualifying statement.

Google is going to organise the world’s information, in the way that works best for Americans.

In terms of AdWords, I’ve moved to thinking that the Ten Things don’t apply. You don’t put the user first. You put the American user first.

The way you behave to us, causes perceptual problems outside the USA. Until Google learns to play the game of understanding the messages that it emits, as if it didn’t live in the US, we Europeans and Asians and Africans, etc, will feel like second class citizens.

If you want to be the worlds first truly global business, you’ve got to stop thinking first and foremost like a US business. And that will cause you huge difficulties. Your HQ is in the US, surrounded by US media, US investors, US citizens and US lawmakers. You will think of your countrymen first. It’s natural.

You’ll have to work to overcome that institutional bias – or forget about making us feel like partners. Because right now, I don’t trust that Google *could* make a fair and equitable decision about European rankings. You have failed to communicate that a European life is worth as much to your thinking as a US citizen, and that the success or failure of a non-US business is as important to you as a US business competitive advantage.

All because Google hasn’t understood how to encode and decode messages – the key component of social messaging is that you value the people at the other end of the message. Master that, and you’ll help us to love you, instead of fear you. Stop being offended by the criticism, and start thinking about *why* you are criticised. You’ve a long hard haul ahead to master social media. It isn’t an engineering problem – it’s a psychological and marketing communications problem.

I think the reason is that site owners who “invest” in spammy paid link purchasing rarely deeply understand what they are buying. And link spammers don’t really care whether what they do is effective, so long as there are people prepared to buy, and so long as Google and Bing mistake the links as being valid in the early days. Businesses usually evaluate the impact of an activity fairly early – so if they are told that the search engine impact will be most visible a few weeks or months after starting, then that’s when they’ll measure. A spammy link buyer will keep buying for years, because the impact is positive at the time of the measurement – the value declines with time as Google and Bing detect the patterns of spamming.

The very worst link spammers will submit your site to places that are already known to the search engines as places for low quality links, and already offering no value. So the most value that you get from the service, is a list of places that won’t have any impact… Useful if you need to go back and clean up the spammy links, later.

Take, for example, this piece of spam, submitted to this blog:

It looks appropriate. It’s about H1N1 and it has been submitted as a comment to an article about H1N1. But the URL given is for a product, even though the name offered is not a keyword. Is there any way to tell that it is spam? We could search for a key piece of text that seems unlikely to be in other comments. And here’s the traces that this is a piece of spam:

We can see the same author ID, with the same comment in many blogs – 314 blogs identified as carrying that precise piece of text, presumably with the same link to the “Fish Oil FAQ”. It is definitely spam.

In what way are Google and Bing so stupid that they can’t detect the same piece of writing in comments, when they can tell that a site has two or three paths that lead to the same product, wrapped in a templated page? It doesn’t add up that Google and Bing would penalise a site owner for multiple paths to a product that customers buy, but don’t penalise spammy links. So, do the search engine penalise spam?

Why are pages containing spam reported in search results, if the content is treated as spam?

Search engines are looking at the overall quality of the site and its’ pages. Some spammy comments to a blog or a discussion forum won’t kill the pages’ value. If users are finding the whole page is useful, then the whole page isn’t deranked – unless the web spam teams decide that the only reason for the page is to host, or be target of, spammy links. So you can find spammy postings on pages that have weight. A few spammy links on an otherwise useful page, won’t kill the page. That’s why we can still find spammy comments – they are a part of a page that is valuable.

That doesn’t mean that the reverse is true – spammy comments can be found, but it doesn’t mean that the links in the spam carry any weight. If they did carry weight, then we should find at least 314 sites are offering weight to the Fish Oil FAQ. So… where’s the site in the listings?

Interestingly, you can’t find the site named in the spammy posting. Yup. All that spamming and link dropping has had no useful effect at all – just try the search for links for fishoilfaq.com. Which just goes to show that the technique is pointless – it doesn’t work.

Back To Duplicate Content

Google and Bing are tolerant of genuine duplication within a web site. The large search engines even have a mechanism to help webmasters to signal that they are aware of duplication in their sites, and have a preferred path to that resource – the canonical link ref. A signal agreed to and used by the major search engines. It’s been so successful that search engines are now respecting the canonical link reference tag across domains (with some limitations).

But, identical postings, across a range of blogs and discussion forums, with keyword laden author names? Somehow that pretty obvious technique is supposed to defeat the search engines with wicked cleverness? It does, for a while. Then the web spam teams notice, zero weight the spam, and decreases their trust in your business. And that’s why duplicated postings in user generated content don’t work – blog spamming is an ultimately sterile exercise. If you’re going to comment, comment because you are a part of the discussion. Be interesting enough, and people will write about you and what you’ve written, in their articles – just as I’ve written about Danny Sullivan, below.

This decay in the value of blog spam (and other types of undeclared paid links) is why we hear the repeated refrain from businesses that:

“we hired an SEO agency for link building, it made an impact at first, but since we terminated the contract there’s been no impact on our business”.

Spammy link building has a positive effect on visitor volumes in the first few months or even years. But after a while, the search engines downgrade it, and decrease trust in the sites that gave you links (because those sites host undeclared paid links) and in your site (as a business that buys undeclared paid links). The activities have less and less impact with increasing time, and it is harder for your business to make headway once the search engines suspect that you are focusing on spamming as a link building strategy. You can even find that an entire chunk of your website is not being given any credibility for inbound links.

Blog spam has an unpleasant impact on the blogs it is dumped on, too. Read Danny Sullivan’s article about the way that blog spam affected a nascent site that may been useful to a specific online segment. The site did have some spam defences in place, but doesn’t it seem just a tad nightmareish that a site offering some long lasting value is taken out of action through activities that ultimately have no or little value. The economic equation is imbalanced. When that happens, as Danny implies, there is time and space for ethics and morality to play a part. Law? I don’t hold out a lot of hope for that – all that a US based law would do is to drive the targets offshore, or to use anonymising proxies, etc. (See our ancient article about tracking the steps in a spamming effort, apparently by some Ukranians).

Summary

Spend less time worrying about duplication on your own site – use the canonical link reference to help yourself and the search engines. Read Google’s official description about the canonical link reference, and how they have coordinated with Bing and Yahoo to understand the tag.

Spend more time worrying about what your linking strategy is telling Google and Bing – are you telling the search engines that your business will lie and deceive? Here’s Bings statement about spam and what they do in response to detecting spammy links. You really want those outcomes? You really want to pay people to cause work for other site owners, that has no long term benefit and may have disastrous repercussions on your own site? And when you find that the search engines no longer trust you, then you’re going to face a higher bill to remove links – there’s automated link placement, but the technologies for link removal are largely manual, and hence more expensive.

It’s pretty easy to establish the practices that lead to long lasting, higher ranking web sites. Start engaging with your prospects and clients, or find another way to engage with an online audience – at this point in the search engine optimisation game, they don’t have to be the audience that you sell to!

Follow this on Buzz.

Let’s have a look at what Google Product Search is, and does, first… so we’ve got some context.

Google Product Search

It’s free. Anyone can sign up, and feed products. Well, almost anyone. Google has a restriction that there must be one supplier for a given product URL. So you can’t have lots of people all listing the same DVD on Amazon – Google doesn’t like spam, and multiple appearances of the same product from the same vendor at the same price, count as spam.

Within limits, then, Google Product Search is free and a wide range of businesses can use it. You just need to sign up for a Google Merchant Center account, and publish a feed. A feed can be as simple as a properly formatted CSV file (exportable from a spreadsheet, once per month) or as complex as a machine-readable and real-time updated XML file synchronised with your product inventory and pricing.

Product Search results – well, they don’t appear in every search, and they don’t alway appear as number one in the search listings. That last item is especially important and tells us, the rest of the world, something about how Google is treating Google Product Search.

Why is it important that Google Product Search is not always number one for product related searches? Anyone involved with search engines knows that number of clicks to a listing is *very strongly* correlated with the position on the page. A listing in position 1 can easily get ten times, or more, as many clicks as exactly the same listing at the bottom of the page. So for Google to list Google Product Search at positions *other than* position 1, tells us that Google is giving up a lot of influence. And remember, Google isn’t making money (none directly, and only indirectly some revenue) from Product Search listings.

The implication of the varying position of Product Search results is that Google is not giving undue weight to their own product. The reverse implication – that Google is artificially reducing the ranking of competing product listing services – is not addressed by that observation. Just seeing that Google doesn’t inflate it’s own rank in all cases, is not enough to say that a different service has not been penalised.

Are there any other vertical search engines in Google results?

If Foundem has a case, it is that they are being excluded, artificially from results. You don’t just get listed highly in search results because you exist. Well, not unless the search is pretty rare. If you’re talking about the highly competitive spaces in which searches relate to things that people might buy, the competition is intense. To show there, you need a lot of “link love”. You need a lot of people to link to your site, with the right words, and you need the site to be well designed, and you need to have *credible* links. If you don’t have all of that, you don’t stand much chance.

So, let’s assume that Foundem, being fairly new, and not having made much of a media impact before today, doesn’t have a lot of link love. Can we support their argument by showing that Google doesn’t highly rank vertical search engines?

Annoyingly for Foundem, there are vertical search products that show. Businesses like Trovit, with their used car facet-based searches, letting you slip a slider along the price range that interests you, does show up. And they show up for place reviews. And other stuff… It is arguably a better user experience than Google Product Search for used cars. Trovit have page one appearances for some products. I can see their impact on clients’ sites.

Google *does* allow vertical search specialists to appear in search results. That, for me, puts a dent in the argument that Google excludes vertical search specialists. If some do appear, and they collect clicks, in multiple categories of product, then Google is not completely removing them from listings. A dent, but not conclusive evidence.

Do Ciao and Foundem have a case?

I don’t think an appeal based on “we must be shown because we’re a competitor” has any real merit. I’m not a lawyer – so that’s not a commentary on whether the courts would find it to be true. But in terms of search engine results, if you aren’t sufficiently loved by users, to displace the other ten businesses that are shown, that’s not, IMO, a reason for a court to decide that you should be shown. Win the users’ love… and you should be listed.

But, since the algorithms are trade secrets, and the data collected is known only to Google, for an outsider to claim that they have been penalised by Google, is pretty difficult to discern, or prove.

Unless, of course, you have the backing of another search engine that produces broadly similar results, in which your site appears more highly ranked and in which you have no evidence to believe that the results are influenced. In other words, if you were financed by Bing (the only other serious volume search engine left in the game), then you might have strong evidence that you don’t have spammy links, spammy comments and other factors that would cause de-weighting.

Ciao is owned by Bing. Might there be some evidence? Or is this just Bing (Microsoft) playing games with Google. FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) have always been strong components of Microsoft marketing techniques. I certainly don’t have any confidence that Microsoft is doing this because they love Egalité, Fraternité, Liberté and the European Way Of Life.

Foundem – it’s a small, relatively new player, in a crowded market. I suspect their only problem is the classic one – not enough users love them to help their site to rank highly. But I haven’t investigated their site or backlinks. That’s just a first pass impression with no evidence. I’ll gleefully admit I could be wrong – though I’d be very surprised to be badly wrong.

But the possibility of Google reducing the rank of a disfavoured competitor, or slightly inflating the rank of a preferred information supplier, is something that gets me twitching. There’s no oversight for Google. We have only their word that they are using what they publicly claim to be fair. If, in the depth of a recession, California based Google were to be weighting US businesses slightly higher in the UK than they should be, it would direct between tens of millions and billions of spend to US companies and away from British companies. Same for France, and Germany. Is Google making sure that the US economy brings in a little more business than it *should* do? I have no idea. I can’t measure it. I can’t tell. It does worry me. I worked in the USA for about a decade, and I know how insular US businesses can be. The rest of the world has fewer investors, fewer buyers and works in funny languages and currencies; it is easy to fall into the model of thinking about what works best in the US economy and rolling that out, worldwide.

So there *may* be some basis for European businesses to wonder if Google is deweighting their business. It may be deweighted because it doesn’t fit a market model that Americans understand. It may be deweighted because an American business is, even unconsciously, working for the end of a recession in their domestic market. It may even be a conscious effort. That really, really worries me – because I don’t think even a national government outside the USA, could get the data to investigate whether Google is deliberately, or unintentionally, diverting economically significant activity, artificially, to the USA.

Do Ciao and Foundem have a case? I don’t know. I’m looking forward to finding out, if it is released, just what evidence might make them think they do. I hope it’s a lot more compelling than “we want our share of the Google billions”, “Microsoft is using me as a sock puppet to attack Google” or “Google’s Buzz is creating a weakness in perception we can exploit”. I fear there may be some interesting biases in Google’s system that do favour US businesses – simply because I can’t see any way to prevent there from being such a bias, or to detect one if it were present. And *that* has implications for national security – the protection of the realm. Interesting times.

Updates

2010-02-27 – SearchEngineLand article about Microsoft’s involvement.

History and the Current Era

A long, long time ago, I submitted sites to search engines. I’m talking about 1994-1996. By 1997, the web was becoming decently interlinked. That linking of sites into a formed web, is what allows Google and the modern generation of search engines to work. The old stuff, like AltaVista, HotBot and Lycos, which in their early days relied a lot on submitted sites, has both evolved and disappeared in the face of the modern, link following search engine.

How do the modern search engines decide to rank your site? Strictly, no-one outside the search engines knows all the details. But observation, testing and reading what the search engines themselves claim, shows that search engines like sites with links to them – not just any links, but links that are formed for a good reason, that a user might feel was a good reason for visiting the link. I’m not going to discuss that much more in this article, just this whole idea of search engine submission.

The key points are that modern search engines, like Google and Bing, follow the links around the net, and use those links to find and rank sites. If your site is so poorly linked to, that it hasn’t been found, how high in the ranking will you appear, after submitting your site? The answer is “on competitive keywords, not very far – and on uncompetitive keywords, you may do quite well, but are those valuable enough to try to get?”

By and large, you are better off making sure you’ve joined relevant trade associations with member directories, joined LinkedIn and mentioned your site and formed relationships with business colleagues, or even joined appropriate discussion forums and linked to relevant and useful comment on your web site – these are all more valuable uses of your time and money than submitting your site to Google or Bing.

You do have to watch out for who’s linking to you. Some “neighbourhoods” can reduce the trust that Google extends to you. I can’t tell you what precise directories and link farms might be involved in automated submission, but I’d tend to be very suspicious about the value of those links. By and large, anything formed from automation, will also tend to have a lot of spammy content – and you don’t want that, pointing to your site. Spammy stuff won’t add link weight and trust.

As a small business looking to promote yourself on the web, be very cautious about following up on the offers you get in your email, and instead of spending time on those, go find someone in a discussion forum with a problem of the type that your business solves, and help them – especially if they have a problem that you can answer in a longer article, or a YouTube video, on your blog, explaining the options and how to use what you recommend. Takes about the same amount of time, costs about the same or less, and is likely to result in the search engines both visiting, and better ranking, your site than just “submitting”. And you may have helped someone who becomes a client, or at least thinks more favourably of you.

There’s a guy at Google, called “Matt Cutts”, who’s really helpful, especially to learners. Read a nice interview with Matt Cutts, with a side salad on search engine submission. And another, older message about the official looking requests for money in order to have your site submitted.

Harsh criticism, you might think, but I’ve been part of Google’s attempt to de-staff and automate customer service, by relying on the willing help of volunteers. I used to be a Top Contributor in the AdWords Help Forum. I contributed a lot of posts, over the years. In the early days, it was a good place to learn AdWords problems, and to spot problems and policy changes before they were announced. Over the last few years, Google has taken to sending users with problems to the Forum first, rather than to customer service.

Now, I don’t mind answering, in public, questions about AdWords, if I have the time to do so. What I don’t like is answering the same question, repeatedly, when it it caused by a failure to understand information architecture and search engine optimisation and I especially detest it when the question is entirely within the province of Google. An example of that? A user saying that their credit card has not been accepted by Google. There is no reason for anyone outside Google to know the causes for that. There is nothing that anyone outside Google can do about that. It’s a problem caused by Google deciding to decline payment – so what can you, or I, or any one else outside Google, say to the n’000th person to claim their card payment has not been accepted? There’s an entire subsection of the AdWords Help Forum that consists of would-be AdWords users complaining that their cards have not been accepted.

It’s not a nice place for a volunteer to hang out. And the rewards are minimal… because the interesting problems are now very few and far between. Anyone wanting to ask a serious question about *how* to use AdWords effectively, is lost in the noise of people whose adverts aren’t running yet (another Google internal problem, where Google has decided to defer approval of the adverts, or keywords, and no-one outside Google knows the precise reason) and other repetitive self inflicted customer service wounds. I wince when I look at the forum – so my response to this miserable treatment of Google’s customers is that I’ve resigned as a Top Contributor.

Agency and GAP Treatment

Agencies can have a Google Account Representative assigned to them. Sufficiently large accounts may have a “vertical” strategic team associated with them. So at any one time I’ve had between one and three account reps to handle problems. I’m actually pretty pleased with the way that works. I can have a new MCC set up inside a day. I can get billing questions resolved, and sort out linking, and raise account limits and have adverts pushed through expedited reviews.

But if you are a mass market, self-signed up customer, with a low budget? Tough. You’re on the self-help program. And that can be a maze of twisty links, all leading inexorably to the AdWords Help Forum, for volunteers to solve problems that Google has created for you, partially because they create a maze of ever shifting links to more or less incomprehensible answers and forms, and the forum.

Google Staffers

Google has a team of staffers who respond to Google-oriented questions. These are the AdWords Pros (AWPs). Empathetic. Pleasant. Courteous. Access to a lot of areas inside Google.

They answer thousands of posts. By eyeball estimate, the most prolific answerer, AWP.Bindu, from India, answers somewhere in the range of 5,000 to 10,000 individual threads a year, having checked the account to find out what the status is. She’s unfailingly nice, and really does try to help.

The AWPs are also sometimes ready and willing to help the Top Contributors tackle problems. Top Contributors, or TCs, have to answer frequently, and correctly, and courteously. Otherwise they won’t be TCs. It takes time. Months of answering several questions, correctly, every day. TCs have their own private area in the forum, invisible to normal users.

Why Am I Spitting Rivets This Time?

Google isn’t merely annoying an army of small businesses who’ve had their AdWords accounts terminated for unstated and apparently irreparable reasons, but it isn’t even able to obey it’s own guidelines for making websites. And if it did, the help services it offers, supported by volunteers, would be a lot easier to find, slightly more useful, and less painful for the volunteers that help Google deliver customer service.

Look at this ageing article by Google’s own Matt Cutts, on the use of the Nofollow link attribute. Old news for SEO. The summary of that article is that “page rank sculpting with nofollow is dead, and we may penalise organisations that overuse nofollow”. And what does *that* mean? It means that the nofollow attribute, originally intended to help reduce spam in discussion forums and blogs, has been so widely adopted that the use of the attribute is destroying the way that the web passes link weight.

What does Google do, in its volunteer supported web forums? It nofollows each and every link in every article, even when posted by a Google staffer, much less the “trusted” Top Contributors. The consequence of that is postings with links that refer users to better postings with good information, are not ranked any higher as a consequence of the additional links. That means that users are not served with the best content. That means that TCs and Google Staffers waste time repeatedly answering the same question, because the search engine has been rendered useless.

What does Matt actually say?

I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

In other words, when Google staffers have nofollow links to pages inside Google, or to pages outside Google, they are not doing the right thing. By nofollowing links within the help forum, useful pages inside Google aren’t ranked more highly, and external authoritative resources are also not helped. Ultimately that should lead to Google penalising itself for attempted pagerank sculpting. Amusing, eh?

Why Are Customer Problems Exposed To The World?

Google has taken a philosophy of user contributed content and applied it to ludicrous lengths. As I said earlier, there is no way that someone outside Google can usefully comment on why a specific advertisers adverts are not running. There’s lots of reasons. They usually boil down to “you’re in an account review or an advert review”. But that’s not the specific help that advertisers are looking for – like why their card has been refused.

It is reasonable for users to ask other users about the impact of geotargeting, or what kind of advert copy works best, and the reasonable fees for an agency. But asking other users about decisions that Google has made, for reasons kept private inside Google? It makes no sense to me, or to anyone else that I’ve spoken to, outside Google.

The philosophy that users are frequently enough nice and helpful is fine. I am, even with a snitty posting like this, attempting to help other users on the internet. It is even, in a painful way, helpful to Google, by pointing out that the policies they have developed are one thing and reality is another.

I like the idea of the forums. I use the other Google forums myself. But to withdraw customer service for wounds that Google has inflicted, and only Google can comment upon, and to direct those damaged customers to volunteers for support, is just not sane. Or if it is sane, it is sane in ways that mean that Google can reduce staffing – it isn’t sane in terms of developing a reputation for good customer service.

And lo and bhold, what do we see when the Nexus One ships? The same philosophy that users will help. How can I, sitting outside Google, respond to a question about when someone’s phone will ship? Or issue an RMA for defective hardware? Or deal with provisioning questions? These all need levels of of authority that are really part of the social contract between user and service provider. A relationship in which random third parties should not be welcomed by either side.

Yes, I do run an AdWords Help Forum blog (with Kim doing most of the postings, these days, as I’m just so annoyed with Google). But I regard it as a supplement to Customer Service, not a replacement for it. That’s why I resigned as a Top Contributor. Preventing users from advertising for Google internal reasons, then telling them to consult ignorant third parties, is demeaning for all involved parties.

And then nofollowing every useful link, makes the value of posting much lower than it should be, forcing the volunteers to keep answering the same questions, again and again. Some proper information architecture and linking would help a lot.

Updates

2010-06-21 – typos corrected.

The article is a week or so late, as this is really the complement to the recent action taken to stop these scams from appearing in AdWords adverts. The AdWords Help Forum, and the AdWords Help Forum Experts are seeing quite a lot of advertisers, some of whom have unwittingly joined these scams, asking why their adverts have been stopped.

Undoubtedly there will be some users accidentally caught, or coincidentally trapped for other reasons, where the account has been denied or the Quality Score has been dropped to 1/10. If you’re sure that you aren’t sending search users to these scams, you should probably approach a pay-per-incident AdWords Professional to assess the account and site, and to negotiate with Google to restore the QS or resume the account.

The article describes both the affiliate recruitment scams, and some of the common organic search scams, some of which revolve around user confusion between paid search and organic search results – some schemes offering “guaranteed page one search results” are in fact offering AdWords results, very often at an outrageous markup, from organisations who claim to be Google.

AdWords and Organic Search Results Are Not The Only Problem

Google and the other search engines, driving the traffic volumes of trusting users that they do, are targets and implicit, albeit unwilling co-operators in promoting spam and scams. Blogger, for example, is sometimes used as part of a route to direct users to AdWords arbitrage, or, as in the case of the article you are reading, to republish articles to promote suspicious offerings:

Summary

Late, but welcome, Google starts to defend search users from scams that abuse the Google brand.

There will be other scams – the loss of one set of scams will simply results in the scammers switching targets. Just like this:

PT Barnum – or deception? What’s the line between marketing ethically and flat fraud? Google’s beginning to make sure AdWords advertisers stay on the right side of that line at last.

Imagine my delight when I found a persistent set of comments, apparently from an identified organisation, with a consistent IP address. A chance to nail the sleazy scum that spam. Or not!. Because, of course, it always *could* be an attempt to blacken a company’s name by a competitor, paying someone else to spam on their behalf.

That’s not as crazy as it sounds. Email spam has, for more than 15 years that I know of, relied on stealing contacts from address books and purporting to come from someone that you may already know and trust. Tainting an otherwise reputable agency might be a similar task.

Then I found the signature *again*, on another blog. I decided to have a deeper look. Remember, it may be that the organisation is perfectly above board. There may be someone else trying to make them look bad… By looking both like a spammer, and an incompetent spammer.

First piece of evidence is a screen shot from an Akismet automatically detected list of spam, supposed to be added to an article about expanded broad match:

Note the IP address? Where’s that from then? According to RIPE (a network information service for Europe):


inetnum: 93.107.80.0 - 93.107.95.255
netname: VODAFONE-IRELAND-MOBILE-ISP
descr: Vodafone ISP - Pool 4


The company named in the email address and as the recipient of a link, is in Ireland (that’s the “.ie” suffix) and the person that added this spam is also in Ireland, but using a mobile network data card (a dongle) in all likelihood. That’s not an entirely foolish thing to use, for a spammer. Mobile data networks tend to have dynamic IP addresses, so it does provide some anonymity. If this activity were widespread and illegal, then mobile phone operators can track down which SIM was used to access the network and from where. That, of course, is still circumstantial – the SIM could have been cloned, and the location simply means that a specific antenna was in use – not that a specific person was using it.

There are other traces that less competent spammers will leave behind, though.

What’s next? More spam!

The first and fourth comments are both for the same article. Note that the newest comments, to different articles, are identical and from “the same user”. And that the shared IP address for these four comments, is all on the same Vodafone network. Could it be a proxy for a business? Possibly. In which case these users may have different cookies; if the web server has Apache mod_usertrack or the equivalent, then these users may be identified as the same or as different in web server log files.

So what else… Oh dear. A spam attached to the “About Us” page. Static pages on blogs are great places to trap spammers. Why would anyone spam a comment policy page on a blog? Because they search for “blog” and “comment” as well as the subject area. So a comment policy saying that spam is not acceptable, is an often sought target for spammers. Amusing, I think.

And what do the web server logs show at this point?

access_log.1.gz:93.107.95.106 - - [15/Jun/2009:10:17:24 -0700] "GET /about-us/ HTTP/1.1" 200 33250 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Thunderbird/1.5.0.7"

access_log.1.gz:93.107.95.106 - - [15/Jun/2009:10:17:24 -0700] "GET /2009/03/expanded-broad-match-come-on-google/ HTTP/1.1" 200 51154 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; BuzzRankingBot/1.0; +http://www.buzzrankingbot.com/)"

access_log.1.gz:93.107.95.106 - - [15/Jun/2009:10:17:27 -0700] "POST /wordpress/wp-comments-post.php HTTP/1.1" 302 - "{URL}/about-us/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Thunderbird/1.5.0.7"

access_log.1.gz:93.107.95.106 - - [15/Jun/2009:10:17:28 -0700] "POST /wordpress/wp-comments-post.php HTTP/1.1" 200 - "{URL}" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; BuzzRankingBot/1.0; +http://www.buzzrankingbot.com/)"

Read that carefully. The same IP address gets two URLs. Then, a few seconds later, the same IP address *POSTS* to the identified URL that was previously GOT. And the POST is by something claiming to be a Bot. It clearly isn’t a bot. The spammer is claiming to be a Bot, probably because they are using a selection of User Agent Strings intended to disguise the real source. But they neglected to remove strings that really shouldn’t be identified as POSTing. Bots that POST comments? Hmm. Wouldn’t that be a spambot?

And, one more datum. In poking around to find out about the company, I stumbled into the following listing:

That’s still not conclusive. If the spammer is in fact not at the company, then it would have been possible to have found at least one name there, with trivial searching. “Ollie”. There is no reason to believe that the two are one and the same… Someone could post using my name and even link back to here or other referral source. Since the search engines aren’t usually able to see web server logfiles and check the user tracking, it is hard for them to identify whether a claimed identity really is the identity.

Guilty or Not Guilty?

Well, no way of positively telling whether the company is spamming. They claim to do SEO and to be be Google AdWords Accredited Professionals. Whoever has conducted these activities has done their online reputation no favours. Not even the basic protections described in our previous article about web spam (“Anatomy of a web spam attack“). If this was an attempt to discredit them, it is itself a pretty incompetent showing – but maybe that was the point of the effort, to show what a talentless loser would behave like when attempting to spam blogs? If they did it to themselves, it’s a pretty dodgy way to do business and they need to upgrade to at least the technological level of the suspected Ukranian spammers we previously looked at.

There are some contraindications for the company. Until this week, the company site claimed to be Google Accredited Professionals. That’s still in the cache on Google. But the graphic was just a graphic – it didn’t link, as it should, to the business listing at Google. Maybe that was just a technological oversight:

Our GAP logo attaches to a page that describes our business – in general, most valid accreditations *have* to be active links that go back to a server under the administrative control of the accrediting organisation – so if you click on the logo below, you should get to a Google administered secure HTTP server – a proof of identity will look like either:

GAP images are an 80×80 JPEG, and are supposed to link to the Google page for accreditation. Otherwise, they aren’t part of the GAP, they are just random images… But images with a claimed meaning. Using a GAP accreditation incorrectly, is worrying for what it says about the business and the way it is trying to be perceived. But it could be an honest technological error or a failure to understand how the logo should be used.

Fighting Spam, Improving Reputation

Hard to see how to easily progress this further without the active participation of the victim of abuse. Their reputation has been lightly damaged by this activity, so whoever did this, did them no favours, but hasn’t detectably caused any ranking penalties. Further tracking down the source without active cooperation is moderately difficult and bluntly, I’ve got too much real work to do to take this much deeper.

Fortunately most heavy ranking blogs will have spam protection software and many of the features of these messages would trip spam detection. That’ll limit more negative perception for these guys. They might want to go round the blogs they can find and ask the administrators to remove some of the more repetitive postings, so they look less like foolish spammers and more like victims.

You’ll notice that I’ve been careful to avoid mentioning the business name or better identify the individuals at the company – the names are all embedded in graphics. So *THIS* article shouldn’t further contribute to their online reputation management issue. I intend to actively prune and edit comments that mention the name.

Identity remains a core problem for search engines. Attributing maliciously placed content to innocent sources is far too easy. The NOFOLLOW link certainly defuses some spam, as was its’ original intention. Despite the controversy over rank sculpting, NOFOLLOW for comments remains a useful feature. Otherwise, assiduous attention to vanity searches remains important, and tracking down and removing embarrassing content is still an important activity for reputation management.