Aries Penguin - Local Search Guru

I have read Andy Beal’s blog, Marketing Pilgrim for years.  Andy approached me a couple of years ago about writing guest blog posts.  My first post was a piece on PPC click fraud.  In it I suggested that creating a content network and either hiring or developing a bot network could pose a big threat to PPC.  Since then, a couple of bot networks have been discovered.  Even Google has admitted they have found one.  Most recently, Microsoft has filed a lawsuit against a Canadian for depleting PPC accounts of competitors.  No one has admitted how he did it but I suspect a bot network of some sort.

I followed up that PPC article with another related post the 12 Ways of Click Fraud  These were points I created to help people realize the depth of click fraud.  The post was inspired by Google’s claim that click fraud is only 2%.  You can find some other articles related to click fraud on Andy’s site.  Just do a search for “zombie” for a good list. 

I also published an open letter of sorts.  It calls for the major internet players to eliminate email SPAM.  Email SPAM accounts for over 95% of email traffic on the web.  The elimination or reduction of this useless traffic should be high priority.  Google has recently started a “make the web faster” program.  Again, they should start with useless bandwidth waste instead of targeting web site owners for quicker downloads. 

I continue to subscribe to the Marketing Pilgrim blog and am a semi-frequent commenter.