I got this email the other day and after looking at all the links realized it was a spoof, but it got me to wondering. Here's the emails content:
This court-ordered notice may affect your legal rights. Please read it carefully. If you purchased online advertising from Google between January 1, 2002 and the present, you are a class member in a class-action lawsuit in the Circuit Court of Miller County, Arkansas. This notice is to inform you of the Courts certification of a class; the nature of the claims alleged; your right to participate in, or exclude yourself from, the class; a proposed settlement; and how you can claim an award of advertising credits under the settlement. Please read the attached notice.
You can get more information at: www.clicksettlement.com.
Don't bother following that link. In my email it was hooked up to a spam site … so, it's definately a spoof. However, given the current climate of hate towards Google by many webmasters, I got to wondering if a change is in the air? Maybe some change? Any change at all???
A lot of webmasters are pretty pissed off with Google for shutting down their AdWords/AdSense accounts without so much as an explaination as to why. Google also lays claim to all income earned when they close those accounts, so webmasters who have Google ads on all of their web properties are none too happy about how this mega-search giant is doing business.
What seems to be happening is that webmasters create web pages with the Google ads on them, and if anyone at the same IP address clicks the ads … Google see that as cheating. It's happening more than you think too. For example, if a webmaster puts Google ads on all the websites of a company and other employees of the company, at the same IP, click on those ads … Google sees that as cheating. It matters not to Google whether those clicks were real clicks with buying interest or not.
This creates a dilema of sorts for webmasters. For those who haven't gotten booted yet, you should seriously consider only serving up ads for targeted keywords … as opposed to allowing Google to determine the keywords served up. You let Google do it and your co-workers will click not knowing that they've just cost you all your Google income and a blacklisting by Google forever.
Back to the spoof … Google has really stirred up a hornets nest within the webmaster community. You see, Google became who they are because the webmasters promoted them. The same webmasters can just as easily swing the tides of the Search Industry by switching to the new Yahoo. I know a lot of webmasters who are applying to Yahoo and others who are waiting for it to come out of beta.
Google's also experiencing a lot of law suits with regards to click fraud. So, getting this spoof wasn't too surprising. Clever really on the part of the spammers to realize that the tides are turning and Google's not as loved as it once was.
