Selasa, 31 Januari 2012

Book Review: The Science of Social By Dr. Michael Wu from Lithium

Last Friday, the good folks over at Lithium hosted a dinner to honor Dr. Michael Wu and the release of his book, The Science of Social: Beyond Hype, Likes & Followers. I was like the ugly guy in high school that went to the prom without a date — I

Source: http://www.britopian.com/2012/01/16/book-review-the-science-of-social-by-dr-michael-wu-from-lithium/

advertising work from home seo media

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Spam? Affiliate is a 4 Letter Word

Google Hates Affiliates

Years before Google broadly torched affiliates operating inside the AdWords channel I highlighted how much Google hated affiliates in their ecosystem.

How was I aware of that?

2 ways:

  • If you read any of Google's older guidelines that leaked over the years you would see a consistent disdain toward affiliate sites. This was also reflected in official advice at search engine conferences & whatnot.
  • A friend of mine went to Google's campus & Google offered to "optimize" their AdWords account. As soon as the word affiliate came up it was like spoiled meat. Replacing the word "affiliate" with some other idiotic made up phrase (I think it was "regional online distributor") suddenly made everything O.K. again. Other friends had similar stories.

Note that the difference between "affiliate" and "regional online distributor" is for all intents and purposes linguistic crap, however it can be the difference between life and death for an online business.

To be fair, the ready availability of feeds to quickly generate sites means that most affiliate sites will be garbage. At some point Google gets sick of fighting the same battles over and over again. Then again, most websites are garbage & only the top x% of anything is going to be great.

At Affiliate Summit last year Google's Frederick Vallaeys basically stated that they appreciated the work of affiliates, but as the brands have moved in the independent affiliates have largely become unneeded duplication in the AdWords ad system. To quote him verbatim, "just an unnecessary step in the sales funnel."

It is worth noting that Google doesn't consider itself "just an unnecessary step in the sales funnel" when they insert themselves as an affiliate.

Should information empires be allowed to discriminate based on nothing more than the business model of competitors?

Spam vs Not Spam

The most recently leaked Google rater document stated

Spammers create spam pages to make money. Sometimes, they make money directly, by placing moneymaking links on the spam page. Here are two types of moneymaking links:

  • Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads: Spammers get paid each time ads are clicked on their webpages. Another term for PPC ads is ?sponsored links?.
  • Thin Affiliates: Spammers make money when a transaction is completed after the user has clicked through to the merchant?s site from their webpages

PPC ads appear on many, many webpages. Some pages with PPC ads are spam, but many pages with PPC ads are not. Pages should not be assigned a Spam flag if they are created to provide information or help to users. Pages are spam if they exist only to make money and not to help users.
Sometimes, spam pages do not have moneymaking links. These spam pages are created to change search engine rankings or even to do harm to users? computers with sneaky downloads.

So in essence, the difference between spam & not spam is if the page is helpful to users.

The rating document takes 130 pages to clearly articulate the difference between what is spam and what is not spam.

But the core ethos in categorization is if it is original & helpful it is not spam unless it is doing something deceptive.

A Minor Exception*

Google's rater guides also arbitrarily sneaked in the "what the hell, if it is affiliate, it is spam" card:

Note: Major cosmopolitan cities are preferred targets for spammers, especially hotel affiliates. Such results should be flagged as Spam, even if they are related to the query and helpful to users. For example, a hotel affiliate page with a list of Chicago hotels may be assigned a rating Relevant, but also receive a Spam flag.

Google is directly going out of its way to attack competing business models.

Even if the site is quality - any way you slice it - they still tell raters to label it as spam if it is a hotel affiliate.

Once again it is worth pointing out that the label "affiliate" is just an arbitrary label. It could just as well be a "commissioned salesperson."

An Example Market: Books

In our forums one of our members quoted a brilliant book by Karl Polanyi from 1944 which was full of gems like "A so-called self-regulating market economy may evolve into Mafia capitalism ? and a Mafia political system"

I searched for that quote & guess what ranked #1?

Google Books of course.

Google's owned & operated affiliate offering in the niche.

The stolen version hosted on Google.com ranks #1...everything else is either spam, unneeded duplication in the marketplace, and/or conjecture that can float up and down as they tweak the algorithms.

To say that the book publishing industry is undergoing pains would be an understatement. But maybe in some weird way Google promoting Google helps the book industry by giving it more avenues to be seen? Maybe they are trying to help out book authors?

The structure of the book industry prevents the book author from getting anything but a small slice of the book's revenues (unless the author is well known and/or they self publish). Markets being what they are, most authors live in obscurity on the long tail. To help supplement their low cut of the revenue pie, some book authors use affiliate links to link to Amazon.com as a purchasing option on their official book websites.

Recently in our forums a member created a thread about a client site being blocked from AdWords because there was an affiliate link on the page for their own book!

Google is The Biggest Online Affiliate

So the author is not allowed to advertise his own work to give you multiple buying options & highlight options which offer her additional compensation, however...

  • Google is free to steal the copyright work & promote their looted version first
  • Google can run an affiliate network
  • Google can double dip in the AdWords auction
  • Google can give itself affiliate ad units in the SERPs (all their lead generation offers & the CPA-based product ads)
  • Google can invest in start up affiliate networks (like VigLink) that automatically inserts affiliate links without any editorial discretion from the publisher
  • Google can invest in networks of similar sites (like Whaleshark Media) that are primarily driven by affiliate links
  • Google can create paid placement affiliate-driven sites like Boutiques.com & then fold them into Google Product Search without disclosing what is happening to those affiliate placements
  • Google can become the ultimate online affiliate

And yet the word "affiliate" is a bad word.

The word affiliate is arbitrarily tarnished in the same way that SEO is.

Use another label & if you do the exact same thing it is clean. Craigslist or eBay are not affiliates as they are marketplaces. Wal-Mart & Amazon.com might do drop shipping & have some affiliate promotions on their sites, but they are retailers.

These arbitrary label differences make a big difference to the stability of an online business.

Machine Learning vs a Small Business Killing Machine

Google can claim that they use artificial intelligence and machine learning and are unbiased, but their ranking systems need training sets. And if upon this alleged independent rating affiliates come up as "spam" then how can an affiliate build a sustainable business model?

I know what you are thinking: "Well, Aaron, they can stop being affiliates and move up the value chain."

The problem with that is that as an affiliate I can compare a lot of products in a condensed space, but if I accept payments for products then I likely need to have a page for each product. The issue there is that if you do not have a strong brand and you have lots of pages on your site there is a great chance that the Panda algorithm will torch your website.

At the same time, if you try to go big & thick you have to worry about competing against Google as they buy out vital pieces of the supply chain, create their own affiliate partnerships, steal your content & outrank you with their copy of it, and launch their own affiliate channels & affiliate stores on their websites.

Brand Sites Become Affiliates

One of the things Google mentioned to identify thin affiliates from other merchants is this:

Check to see if the address of the image is the same as the address of the page or if it is the address of a ?real? merchant?

Small businesses are getting squeezed out of the search results by Panda. Affiliates are getting torched for not being a "real" merchant.

What is "real"?

At the same time, some of the biggest branded websites that Google promotes are now BECOMING AFFILIATES:

The new items on the website will mostly get to consumers through third-party sellers, which means B&N won?t have to carry the expense of inventory. The bookseller will just take a sales commission of 8% to 15% on each item.

What's worse, when brands come under review for spamming, Google says that they already ranked #1 so there is no reason to penalize them. Which is precisely why you can now buy rugs on Barnes & Noble. And it is precisely why you can find dating offers, education offers, jobs, and automotive sections on Excite.com. There is no SEO risk in brand extension for large brands that can do no wrong.

Google puts weight on domain names then suggests that domains can be a spam tool. So in a sense, if you invest in whatever Google trusts and are small you are a spammer. Whereas if you invest in whatever Google trusts and are large you deserve the benefit of the doubt & further promotion.

Sometimes the only difference between the brand and spammer labels is that the brands spam harder.

Brand + Money = Not Spam

For those with money, brand is another SEO tool to buy, and Google will proudly run the affiliate program for your duplicated site if you buy a bankrupt brand & slap a product feed on it.

Google literally ties their relevancy signals to their ad units. Recall that:

So if you have brand & money you can just flat out buy the "relevancy" signals. Yet if you try to create similar signals without paying Google & without owning a billion Dollar brand you are shunned & labeled as a spammer.

This subjective circular nonsense is getting a bit out of hand.

In summary, we are not SEOs and we are not affiliates.

We are a brand & we will buy retargeting AdWords ads + up our AdWords budget appropriately.

If we rebrand to remove "SEO" from the domain name can we please be added to Google's whitelist? ;)

Categories: 
google

Source: http://www.seobook.com/brand-vs-affiliate-vs-spam

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Transparency vs Asymmetrical Information

"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Everyone Except Me Should be Open

Being labeled as open or transparent is a great public relations strategy. Executed effectively it gets ditto heads to feel like they are part of a movement and spread your propaganda.

However actually being transparent is often a poor business strategy.

When WordAds opened up someone in the comments suggested that they should win by being open like Google. I read that and laughed. Where Google is losing you can count on them pushing the open label in order to build momentum & destroy the asymmetrical information advantages of existing market leaders. But where Google leads non-transparency is the norm.

A few examples & comparisons:

  • Claiming to run an open auction, while running obfuscated quality metrics that price gouge advertisers.
  • At the same time Google is trying to push social sites to offer transparent data, they decided to block some Google search referral data (unless you are paying for the clicks, then you get that data).
  • When planning some of the features behind Google+ one of their employees wrote a book about the social circles concept with Google's blessings. Then, after he wrote the book, Google revoked permission to publish it!
  • Nuking affiliate links of some websites & then investing in Viglink, a network that automatically turns links into affiliate links.
  • Burning some networks of websites for being doorway pages & then investing in the Whaleshark Media roll up & launching Google Places.
  • Nuking some UK financial comparison sites for link buying & then buying BeatThatQuote.
  • Suggesting 60 or 90 days of penalty is a reasonable penalty for sketchy links & allowing BeatThatQuote to rank 2 weeks after penalizing it without cleaning up any of the paid links.
  • Android is open but internal Google emails revealed that carriers were getting wise to Google using compatibility as a club.
  • Not sharing revenue share stats with AdSense partners for a half-decade.
  • When websites are nuked they are frequently given no explanation. Worse yet, their content often re-appears in the search results on some other domain that stole it, in many cases while being wrapped in AdSense ads.
  • Arbitrarily making it hard to export AdWords campaigns to other services (& making it against the TOS to do same via the API).
  • The Panda update was needed to rid the web of garbage content. And yet Google is pre-paying Demand Media to post videos on YouTube. Since the Panda update downstream Google traffic to YouTube has more than doubled & YouTube is serving over a trillion streams per year!
  • In spite of not having permission to do so, Google has been scanning books for nearly a decade now. Yet whenever Google goes to court they try to get the court documents sealed so that their statements couldn't be used against them.

Judge, Jury, Executioner

Calls for "transparency" in SEO may sound great on their face, but once you peal back the covers the absurdity is laughable. If Google didn't discriminate against certain types of players & if Google didn't compete in the very markets that it judges then perhaps transparency would be a good idea.

However Google is perhaps the single biggest direct competitor in many markets, so to be fully transparent with them when they are the opposite with you is a naive business strategy:

I also disagree that outing each other would make the industry less like a mafia, because SEOs aren't the mafia. SEO is a symbiotic marketing channel reliant on Google, until the next big search engine/method comes along. In a mafioso analogy, Google would be the mafia - as they control the market. Removing all webspam wouldn't necessarily create better search results or a fairer market, as Google still decides who wins and who loses. The biggest winner being Google itself, the next level being their friends.

Secrecy is also the cornerstone of all marketing channels. Social Media for instance works in a similar way to SEO, except they have secret voting methods rather than secret linking methods. You don't see major social media companies outing a rival's voting methods, as it would shine a torch on their own methods. Even outside of marketing, McDonalds probably worked out KFC's magic blend of herbs and spices decades ago, but it's not in their best interest to tell everybody.

Outing webspam helps an SEO blog to keep their UVs up and their VCs happy. It helps a failing newspaper to appear modern and edgy, whilst allowing the contributor to launch a protection racket off the back of another company's misery.

Do You Want SEOs to Seem More Professional?

How often do you see tier-1 public relations firms marketing themselves by smearing other PR firms?

You don't.

You might see a company like Google hire a PR firm to push a bogus study to smear the security of a competitor, but you rarely (if ever) will see one PR firm smear another in the media.

While some of the more intellectually challenged members of the SEO industry associate search spam with molesting children (talk to Google about that after their recent Chrome fiasco), those with a bit of intelligence and/or experience realize that many of the issues are gray and murky. What one person considers as spam one day they later sell as "advanced" months or years down the road. The ecosystem isn't some static black & white code:

The question is less whether black hat and webspam are a good thing or not, but if Google is the unbiased and benevolent instance who shall make the rules. Google is a business and persuits its very own interestes, since it is aware of its market power with a lot of arrogance, aggresivity and obviously double standards. That was also Aaron's point, but seomoz has been missing the point completly in the last time.

I expect an SEO portal/community to focus on how stuff actually works/can work, not to propagate how the monopolist does it want to work. It is their risk of doing business if they decide for an algorithm, not ours. It is our risk however, to decide whether to stick to the rules or not. And it's not only about ethics but has several practical implications...

Full Disclosure Required, Except From Us

On paid links Google claims to require machine AND human readable disclosure. Then on their own site they use an ad color background that literally fades to white on many monitors. Maybe it is legitimate that they are only able to fool some of the users some of the time. But some of their ad initiatives have 0 disclosure at all. None.

That is now part of the "organic" search results, but is that a paid ad?

You wouldn't know by looking at it, but according to the WSJ it is: "Google lists booking links to the airlines as advertisements, but the company declined to comment on how much money it makes from the arrangement."

There is no disclosure that you are in a paid ad funnel until the very last click. And those who fail to pay are either unlisted, listed last, or have a broken booking process where their brand is arbitraged in an attempt to flip the click to somewhere else. According to Leocha, ?Google and the airlines have a sweetheart deal with each other, and the consumers are getting screwed.?

In the hotel market Google is also testing comparison ads & price ads.

Notice how little they care about relevancy so long as they keep the click on Google or are paid for the referral. They rank the car rental company Avis as a top Las Vegas hotel! And even the ad links that are sold off of that do not line up. Priceline pushes the Plazzo Luxury Suites & Booking.com pushes the Venitian.

Retarding Investment in the Search Ecosystem

What do you suppose the above behavior does to cash flow & multiples of websites in that vertical? Of course it contracts them & retards investment. Who wants to start a new hotel website at this point? What other verticals have investment held back by the fear of Google's eventual entry?

If you only had to manage competing against other market competitors & staying inside Google's editorial guidelines then investment isn't that difficult, but if you have to stay within Google's guidelines in the short term yet try to build a business that is sustainable even after Google enters & destroys the market it is far more difficult.

Skimming the Cream

At any time Google can enter any market and skim off the cream: "An independent study from Leads360 showed consumers using Google?s comparison ads converted better than any other lead provider."

Other affiliate networks which do not own the search channel have to fight through quality issues if they try to build similar scale.

A Self-serving Bias You Can Count On

When Google enters a market it might buy out a competitor, buy out a supplier, bundle, use predatory pricing, grant themselves superior search placement, adjust the relevancy algorithms and/or editorial guidelines, violate IP, scrape 3rd party content, work with sketchy advertisers & publishers to undermine competing business models, or any combination of the above.

They are rarely transparent with their interests when they enter a market. Almost everything is labeled as "a beta" and "just a test." They promise to "act appropriately" & you may not be aware of the steamroller until you are under it.

Web Scrape Plus+ (Now With More Scraping)

When the +1 button & Google+ launched, Google highlighted how they would use the + button usage as a "relevancy" signal. Google recently started inserting + pages directly into the search results for brands & right from the very start they were using it as a scraper website that would outrank the original content source.

Google used the buy in from their promised relevancy signal to create a badge-based incentivized system which acts as a glorified PageRank funnel to further juice the rankings of these new pages on a domain name that already had a PageRank 10.

I recently read a blog post about how anyone could do the above & the opportunity is open to everyone. But the truth is, I can't state that something will become a relevancy signal that manipulates the search results in order to get buy in. Or, if I did something which actually had the same net effect, Google would likely chop my legs off for promoting a link scheme.

Recently the topic of Google+ as a scraper site came up yet again via Read Write Web & on Hacker News a Googler stated that it was "childish" to place any of the blame on Google!!!!!!

Google determines how much information is shown near each listing & can create "relevancy" signals in ways that things tied to Google get over-represented (look at the +1 count here). When they do that & it destroys other business models *of course* Google deserves 100% of the blame.

It may be more profitable for Google to squeeze out some of the players, but if Google's quest for free content manages to destroy business models & the ecosystem as a whole, then they are not "doing what is best for the user."

Things We Do Not Approve...

Google can bundle themselves into markets, but when others do the same it is a big no no:

A Google spokesman said "applications that are installed without clear disclosure, that are hard to remove and that modify users' experiences in unexpected ways are bad for users and the Web as a whole."

Google's founding research highlighted how bad ad-driven search engines were & then Google's core revenue engine of paid search was built on their violation of Overture's patent. They keep buying swaths of patents to protect against their other violations.

The business model of "violate & then buy protection" has helped lead to a protection-racket styled marketplace in patents that makes the risk of innovation for smaller players so expensive that it drives them under.

Where Google has gained a dominant position in a marketplace they can begin misdirecting for profit. Let's say you link to your own location on Google Maps to drive traffic to Google & help your users locate your office. Well in some cases they then reciprocate by confusing users by putting an ad in your location bubble.

Once again, you are forced to buy your own brand unless you teach your customers (and prospective customers) to avoid Google products.

Sure I May Have Failed, But at Least That Failure Was Transparent...

If you are fully transparent against an arbitrary set of guidelines when the company that judges you also competes against you & brushes up against the limits of the DOJ & FTC then you might lose for no reason other than being transparent. And not only are you competing directly against Google, but the algorithms are biased toward certain players.

Creating a Two-tier Web

In 2006 Google's Eric Schmidt admonished others for attempting to create a 2-tier web:

Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody ? no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional ? has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can?t pay.

But when Google launched their Panda algorithm they did the same thing.

Their "quality content" thesis could have come across as being honest if they weren't still pre-paying Demand Media to upload "content" to YouTube.

You might get smoked by a Panda update or have your accounts arbitrarily frozen while operating at a 7 out of 10 level, and then you see Ask is Google's biggest advertiser, their arbitrage gets a pass, & that feed even monetizes misspelled searches for Google's brand. ;)

Risks

Risk is needed for adaptation, so some amount of risk is good, but...

If the old established corporate competition needs to be as good as you to compete then there is little risk to being transparent if the competition is doing nothing beyond following you around. But if the playing field is tilted and the competition only needs to be 5% as good as you are to beat you (and can easily come from behind to copy any success you have) then full on transparency brings much more risk than potential profits.

You Are the Ad

We are moving into a media world where the content becomes ads & even how people interact with the ads and content becomes a part of the ad.

Further Google uses their data advantage to create other asymmetrical advantages. While credit card companies sell personalized ads in network, Google is creating a marketplace to buy and sell user data.

Every time you view a page and click an ad (or even don't click an ad) you are feeding highly personal data back to Google. And they will use it as they wish. Here they are saying thousands of people like eBay, which is of course plenty reasonable, except for the fact they claim the people voted for that specific page rather than the site as a whole.

What's worse is that sometimes they will put your picture next to a listing and claim that YOU PERSONALLY voted for a specific page & use that to market that item to your friends and contacts. The problem with this is that:

  • even after you remove the vote for a site they still keep showing it
  • you may vote for site A & they will show your image as voting for site B
  • when they show your picture they claim you voted specifically for the page being advertised (even if that page is promoting a scam or something else you wouldn't endorse)

Once again, I will highlight that they use the votes against the wrong sites & pages and that they keep showing the votes even weeks after you remove them.

Where is the transparency in that deceptive crap?

Others Are Just as Bad, But Are Not Monopolies

But Aaron, you are just being hard on Google, why don't you ever mention Ask or Yahoo! or Bing?

I did mention Ask above. ;)

Bing has done numerous self-serving things, including some that are flat out sketchy.

Yahoo! offers a useless "buying guide" for fish tanks that is nothing more than a paid pointer to Overstock.com.

If you click on their coupons tab on that fish tanks search Yahoo! shows you coupons for tank tops, which is pretty idiotic.

Why is this Yahoo! Shopping & Yahoo! Deals product so ugly? They outsourced it years ago. So it is a non-product & thus the integration can't be anything but crappy.

Why do Yahoo! & Bing typically get a pass? They own a fairly low search marketshare. Missing traffic from either or both of those is certainly significant enough to be felt, however even when they are combined it is still less than half of what Google controls in most markets. Market leaders are expected to operate in less conflicted & less self-serving ways than also ran players in their market do. If Microsoft would have had 10% or 15% marketshare for their operating system then it is unlikely their browser bundling would have come under such scrutiny.

Transparency in The Real World

In the past I highlighted how every form of media is manipulated in Why Outing is Bad, but I thought it would be fun to run through some other markets and highlight how transparency often exists only as an illusion (to lure in punters so they can be rooked).

TrueCar aimed to make that market more transparent by giving consumers pricing data online to remove some of the asymmetrical advantage dealers have & makes the sales process smoother for consumers. How does the automotive market respond? Honda issued threats to their dealers & now TrueCar has a hate video ranking for their brand.

This nontransparency is not something new, but rather the way it has always been.

It exists at every level of society. Countries spy on one another & companies may chose to show different views of the world to different markets.

And what they do internally doesn't match the story they share publicly. Look no further than the News of the World's hacking scandal:

News International?s leading profit centre, the News of the World, was dependent on a very ugly culture of lawbreaking, hacking and impunity. This freewheeling, ask-no-questions attitude spread to other parts of the organisation, such as the Times and the Sunday Times, both of which used have used illegal or unethical techniques. Even more troubling, when senior News International management were confronted with evidence of wrongdoing, the company made false statements and took actions which prevented key evidence from reaching the public domain.

The same company has not only been accused of hacking at some of its other news outlets (by its own employees no less) but was also accused of similar in other lines of business:

Both cases involve News America Marketing, an obscure but lucrative division of the News Corporation that is a big player in the business of retail marketing, including newspaper coupon inserts and in-store promotions. The company has come under scrutiny for a pattern of conduct that includes below-cost pricing, paying customers not to do business with competitors and accusations of computer hacking.

Were The Robber Barons Transparent?

Going back into history it is sort of hard to pick a starting point (one can go to the spice trade & orders that are unsealed at sea, or likely earlier than that) but to pick a somewhat recent starting point, we could look at the railroads:

So how did unnecessary, inefficient railroads get built? Because of government subsidies. In short, the federal government paid to build the railroads through massive financing subsidies and also gave them ample land grants. The trick to building a railroad was not knowing anything about railroads or even about business; it was having friends in Washington who could give you the right financing and land subsidies.

Even then, the railroads lost money. Not only was there insufficient demand for their services, but they were run by people who were generally incompetent. (For one thing, they didn?t even know their own costs of doing business.) Yet the people who owned the railroads made fabulous amounts of money (of which Stanford University is one symbol). The main way to do this was simple. The people who controlled a railroad (generally by putting up very little of their own money, thanks to the government subsidies) would also wholly own a construction company. They would cause the railroad to overpay the construction company to build the railroad?in effect transferring wealth from railroad stockholders and creditors into their own pockets

What did the Robber Barons invest in? In large part government, media & educational institutions so that they could help "educate" society on how to behave much more civilly than they have.

Corporate Advocacy

There are tons of marketing campaigns designed to "educate" society about the impacts of various companies. BP now markets the gulf coast economy they plundered.

AT&T's astroturfing campaign to acquire T-Mobile was so over the top that it actually backfired.

"Get the facts" styled campaigns are rarely about promoting a complete worldview.

Remember the $500 million fine for Google from them pushing ads selling overseas Viagra in the US? Now they promote scaremongering ads against fakes from filthy labs.

Coca-cola runs The Beverage Institute & has "doctors" highlight how healthy soda is.

At the same time, when Pepsi was sued over an alleged rat being in a can of Mountain Dew. Pepsi's defense claimed: "the mouse would have dissolved in the soda had it been in the can from the time of its bottling until the day the plaintiff drank it" turning the mouse into a 'jelly-like' substance. But don't worry folks, it's healthy. :D

At least we still have water.

When they are not busy making it illegal to collect rainwater, Bechtel wants you to follow them on Twitter.

It is hard to know what is in our food & those who label things as organic have to fill out more paperwork than those who manufacture frankenfood. Then there are the baseline chemicals sold as biodegradable which are not. ;)

Oh well, at least we have insurance.

State Farm is the #1 ranked bad faith insurance company, but at least they upload & advertise irrelevant funny videos to YouTube to create brand signal for Google.

Transparency in Everyday Life

Of course some of the worst affiliate offers, the most aggressive sales calls & other scams are designed to prey on ignorance of small print & rebilling, but even generally good businesses practice in asymmetrical skimming.

A few recent examples:

Is Our Financial System Transparent?

When one looks at the field of finance it is story after story of deception, nontransparency & lawlessness. It is a constant reminder that there is no such thing as business ethics.

  • Wachovia laundered $3.84 billion in drug money for violent drug cartels. As if that wasn't bad enough, we also sold them weapons that wound up at murder scenes with our own border patrol dead & the Koch brothers sold weapons to states that we brand as "rogue."
  • Bank of New York Mellon ripped off their clients with unsavory Forex rates: "As investigators sought to determine whether the bank overcharged clients to execute their currency trades, a senior BNY Mellon executive nicknamed "Rambo" urged traders not to tell clients how much money they made on trading, according to the informant."
  • A former Federal Reserve member writes about the Fed: "No matter the legalistic interpretation, the Fed is, working through the ECB, bailing out European banks and, indirectly, spendthrift European governments. It is difficult to count the number of things wrong with this arrangement."
  • Bank of America recently had to pay $335 million to settle a discrimination lawsuit against minorities, due to Countrywide (who is NOT on your side) charging juiced interest rates. Bank of America had to pay an $8.5 billion settlement to investors who bought some of the junk mortgages out the other end.
  • "What?s happened is that, almost overnight, we?ve switched from democracy in real-property recording to oligarchy in real-property recording. There was no court case behind this, no statute from Congress or the state legislatures. It was accomplished in a private corporate decision. The banks just did it." - Christopher Peterson
  • The financial markets are becoming glorified crack houses: "Frankly, I am concerned that Wall Street is becoming little more than a glorified crack house. Day after day, the sole focus of Wall Street is on more sugar, stronger sugar, Big Bazookas of sugar, unlimited sugar, and anything that will get somebody to deliver the sugar faster. This is like offering a lollipop to quiet down a 2-year old throwing a tantrum, and expecting that the result will be fewer tantrums. What we have increasingly observed over the past decade is nothing but the gradual destruction of the ability of the financial markets to allocate capital for the benefit of future growth. By preventing the natural discipline of the markets to impose losses on poor stewards of capital, and to impose interest rates high enough to force debtors to allocate the capital usefully, the world's policy makers are increasingly wrecking the prospects for long-term economic growth."
  • Companies are often brought private, leveraged up on debt & have their pension programs destroyed to make "profits" for private equity investors: "Nowadays private-equity firms often spend hundreds of millions of their own money on an acquisition (BW -- Feb. 27). Just as often, though, they load up the companies with debt and use the money to pay themselves special dividends and other fees that allow them to profit even if the company itself struggles. Then the backers take the company public, often pocketing the lion's share of the offering."
  • Individuals who put in extra hours of work because they are sold on the promise of their options may also find those disappear: "Taking away the value of options that are vested means that the concept of vesting becomes bogus. It doesn't matter whether the employee understood if this was the deal or not, it's a scummy practice, and it's ultimately self-defeating (both for the company and the industry as a whole). Who would go to work for Skype (or any PE-backed company) in the future? "
  • Limitless fraud before the courts & dancing on the graves of the newly homeless: "Court records show that the firm angered state court judges for alleged false statements and filing suspect documents. Arthur Schack, a state court judge in Brooklyn, in a 2010 ruling said that pleadings by the Baum firm on behalf of HSBC Bank, a unit of London-based HSBC Holdings, in a foreclosure case were "so incredible, outrageous, ludicrous and disingenuous that they should have been authorized by the late Rod Serling, creator of the famous science-fiction television series, The Twilight Zone."
    ...
    The law firm said it would shut down after New York Times columnist Joe Nocera in November published photographs of a 2010 Baum firm Halloween party in which employees dressed up as homeless people. Another showed part of Baum's office decorated to look like a row of foreclosed houses."
  • That theft of physical property is ongoing: "Also announced over the weekend was the jaw-dropping, yet illuminating fact that the MF Global bankruptcy was fraudulently, nefariously and illegally drawn up as a Chapter 7 BK for a SECURITIES DEALER and NOT a commodity brokerage as it should have been. Look, MF Global was the second-largest non-bank FCM in the United States next to NewEdge which is the old FIMAT. If MF Global wasn?t an FCM, then there are no FCMs. Of course it was an FCM. It had $7.2 billion in customer seg funds as of August 31, 2011. And yet MF Global was immediately, from the get-go, put into Chapter 7 BK as a SECURITIES FIRM. This is fraud. MF Global?s BK should have OBVIOUSLY been established under Subchapter IV of the Chapter 7 code as a COMMODITY BROKERAGE."
  • And as banking criminals literally steal money, destroy lives & undermine the rule of law to grow their "profits" sleazeballs like Jamie Dimon think that the reason people hate them is envy.

The above makes no mention of helping Greece hide governmental debt, bid-rigging bribes in Jefferson County, robosigning bogus foreclosure documents, and a host of other crimes. But one thing in common with all the above crimes is this: no jailtime for the banksters.

Since there is nothing stopping those criminals they keep up their crimes:

Big banks represent the ultimate in concentrated economic power in today?s economies. They are able to resist all meaningful reform that could really change their compensation schemes. Their executives want to get all the upside while facing none of the true downside.

But capitalism without the prospect of failure is not any kind of market economy. We are running a large-scale, nontransparent, and dangerous government subsidy scheme for the benefit primarily of a very few, extremely wealthy people.

The actions of the financial cartel are both obvious & predictable. And the damage they do is felt worldwide:

Credit-financed economic booms, by turns in private then public credit as one ratchets up the other over a series of booms and busts, are as irresistible to politicians as hookers and maids.
...
The failures of American FIRE Economy policies are behind the movements in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, as reflation measures, from quantitative easing to currency depreciation, steal purchasing power from low income families world wide, acting as the most regressive tax imaginable. Simmering hatreds are exacerbated by the developing global crisis over oil supplies and costs.
...
The so-called debate about debt ceilings, spending cuts, and entitlements reductions is a red herring. The public debt crisis arose from the 2007 - 2008 private credit market crisis, not the government liabilities that have been building for decades. The mistake of both the left and the right is thinking that we can escape an output gap without facing up to the politically unpopular task of demanding that creditors take a loss on loans taken out during the credit bubble era.

A creditor that makes bad loans deserves to go out of business. Their outsized compensation can't be justified unless they are also made to eat their losses. But rather than holding them accountable for their own actions, societies the world over absorb that pain.

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power"- Benito Mussolini

Slavery, Debt & Freedom

There are currently more slaves alive than at any point in history. And many people who are not slaves are still being enslaved by crushing debt:

Money is a human construct. The fact that our money is now backed by nothing more than our collective future ability to "produce" relegates us to that of slaves.

Money=paper=blood hours.

Blood hours are a finite measure. Heartbeats.

What's in your wallet? Is it the new debt slavery card: "A personal bankruptcy is supposed to cut borrowers loose from lenders and debt collectors, but Capital One Financial Corp.?one of the nation's largest credit-card issuers?sometimes doesn't want to let go."

Citigroup has an "effective" strategy they employ in some 3rd world countries to deal with those who can't pay:

After dropping his younger daughter at school, Octa walked into Citibank?s credit card collection department on the fifth floor of the Jamsostek tower just after 10 a.m. Four hours later, he left the 25-story building slumped motionless in a wheelchair -- a victim of what police allege was a violent assault by debt collectors. Driven to a nearby hospital in a Citibank car, Octa was pronounced dead on arrival.

Unfortunately, even if you stay out of debt, you are forced to support banking scams:

before being bailed out by governments, banks had never made any return in their history, assuming that their assets are properly marked to market. Nor should they produce any return in the long run, as their business model remains identical to what it was before, with only cosmetic modifications concerning trading risks.

So the facts are clear. But, as individual taxpayers, we are helpless, because we do not control outcomes, owing to the concerted efforts of lobbyists, or, worse, economic policymakers. Our subsidizing of bank managers and executives is completely involuntary.

In the US the reason the government debt outlook is so bad is in part due to overpaying for "assets" owned by the likes of Citibank:

The way the banks make money now is by hiding their losers off balance-sheet, or by forcing them on the taxpayers, and after having themselves declared "systemically important," adjusting their on balance-sheet exposures accordingly, crashing the system and cashing out on their leveraged derivative bets, also at the taxpayers' expense.

In real life, if there is such a thing anymore, all of the major banks are arguably insolvent. So, in reality, they're not making any money at all, they are merely having it transferred to them by their political operatives in Congress and the Federal Reserve Bank. This, after all, is the modern purpose of the Congress, and has always been the purpose of the Federal Reserve System.

Even as they destroy savings, kill jobs & undermine the competitiveness of the economy, why does the government continue to support such scams? Without the scams & cost-shifting those in government wouldn't have as much wealth, power & influence. It is debt & cost-shifting that fuels them:

government and banks are stuck together like a couple of dogs screwing and we don't know which is on top. Here, Republicans need government to finance war and Democrats need it to finance social programs. Both need it to finance both, as that is how government attempts to maintain power and influence over the people this day and time.

The congress literally sells insider tips to hedge funds:

When Senate Democrats finally brokered a compromise over the proposed health-care law, a group of hedge funds were let in on the deal, learning details hours before a public announcement on Dec. 8, 2009.

The news was potentially worth millions of dollars to the investors, though none would publicly divulge how they used the information. They belong to a select group who pay for early, firsthand reports on Capitol Hill.

Since most money comes into circulation as debt (and due to the compounding nature of debt interest), if those at the top are not allowed to fail then those at the bottom will fall hard:

In the past, periods dominated by virtual credit money have also been periods where there have been social protections for debtors. Once you recognize that money is just a social construct, a credit, an IOU, then first of all what is to stop people from generating it endlessly? And how do you prevent the poor from falling into debt traps and becoming effectively enslaved to the rich? That?s why you had Mesopotamian clean slates, Biblical Jubilees, Medieval laws against usury in both Christianity and Islam and so on and so forth.

Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.

Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.

And, I might add, if Aristotle were around today, I very much doubt he would think that the distinction between renting yourself or members of your family out to work and selling yourself or members of your family to work was more than a legal nicety. He?d probably conclude that most Americans were, for all intents and purposes, slaves.
...
Clearly any pretence that markets maintain themselves, that debts always have to be honored, went by the boards in 2008. That?s one of the reasons I think you see the beginnings of a reaction in a remarkably similar form to what we saw during the heyday of the ?Third World debt crisis? ? what got called, rather weirdly, the ?anti-globalization movement?. This movement called for genuine democracy and actually tried to practice forms of direct, horizontal democracy. In the face of this there was the insidious alliance between financial elites and global bureaucrats (whether the IMF, World Bank, WTO, now EU, or what-have-you).


Those who have the least often give the most. Excessive income inequality (especially when driven by fraud) leads to a moral and cultural rot. Financial cartels & governments can only enslave people in so much debt & hand out so much soma before they either revolt or simply lose faith.

(On a related note, December saw record gun sales.)

State actors have repeatedly use violence to try to encourage a similar response. Instead they created a viral meme & the movement lives on.

Of course there are "opposition research" hacks willing to dig up dirt on anyone with wide reach who opposes the state-sponsored fraud: "It will be vital,? the memo says, ?to understand who is funding it and what their backgrounds and motives are. If we can show that they have the same cynical motivation as a political opponent it will undermine their credibility in a profound way.?

The state has long manipulated mainstream media and has tools for spying on social networks, hacking accounts & astroturfing online, but sock puppets can only go so far against reality.

Who Does 100% Marketing Transparency Help & Who Does it Hurt?

We have an SEC that shreds over a decade of evidence (and engages in other illegal behaviors), a government that bails out the criminal enterprises & a court system that broadly makes it nearly impossible to win a financial fraud lawsuit.

The biggest companies & the biggest people in business at this point are simply above the rule of law & are not held accountable for their actions. Worse yet, the corrupt system has global influence.

  • In 2004 the FBI warned that there was an "epidemic" of mortgage fraud and that it would create a crisis.
  • "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks," the president told them.
  • And, in spite of the FBI highlighting the massive mortgage fraud, and the above quote, the president (who is a horrible human being) aims to keep the population misinformed & ignorant, publicly stating that what Wall St did wasn't illegal!

Henry Kissinger has a famous quote about power: "Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, ?The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.? [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I?m afraid to say things like that." Since then government officials have become much more evasive & smooth talking. Unfortunately, freedom of the press only goes so far:

this is how the much-lauded "freedom of the press" myth in the US actually works. If you perform the job of an actual journalist, telling truth to power, forget about attending press conferences at the White House, Pentagon or State Department. You won't even be admitted in the building.

When you ask for total market transparency it changes nothing with the criminality at the top, but it does create a juicy data source for criminals while harming personal civil liberties & unpeople with limited power:

The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. ?Real names? policies aren?t empowering; they?re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people.

Categories: 
business

Source: http://www.seobook.com/transparency

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Mary Tyler Moore honored for lifetime achievement (AP)

LOS ANGELES ? Mary Tyler Moore made it after all.

The 75-year-old actress, who as Mary Richards "turned the world on with her smile" in her groundbreaking 1970s sitcom "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," received the lifetime achievement award at Sunday night's 18th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards.

"MTM. There's probably not a person in the civilized world who doesn't know what that means," said Dick Van Dyke, her former co-star in the equally appealing 1960s sit-com "The Dick Van Dyke show," as he introduced her.

He noted Moore's achievements as an Oscar-nominated actress, a dancer and a Hollywood executive whose MTM Enterprises has produced several other hit TV shows.

As she accepted her award, Moore revealed how the civilized world almost never did hear of MTM, who was told in the opening theme song of her show each week, "You're gonna make it after all."

When she entered show business at age 18 in 1955, Moore said, there were already six others Mary Moores in the Screen Actors Guild.

Told to change her name, she quickly added Tyler, the middle name of both her and her father, George.

"I was Mary Tyler Moore. I spoke it out loud. Mary Tyler Moore. It sounded right so I wrote it down on the form, and it looked right," she said. "It was right. SAG was happy, my father was happy, and tonight, after having the privilege of working in this business among the most creative and talented people imaginable, I too am happy, after all."

Before the awards show Van Dyke had stopped on the red carpet to remember working with Moore on his show.

"She was 23 and had never done comedy. I never saw somebody pick it up so fast. I still have a crush on her," he said.

The show's audience, including Moore's former co-star Betty White, showered both her and Van Dyke with standing ovations, leading Van Dyke to remind them, "I'm just a presenter."

Van Dyke and Moore were so believable as husband and wife Rob and Laura Petrie on "The Dick Van Dyke Show" that many viewers thought they were married in real life.

As Laura Petrie, Moore also turned Capri pants into a fashion trend during the show's run.

Van Dyke noted they fit her so well, which created such a concern during that more conservative era, that she was limited to wearing them in only one scene per show.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/celebrity/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120130/ap_en_ce/us_sag_awards_mary_tyler_moore

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Getting Your Internet Marketing Dream Job: How to Interview & Succeed at a Top Agency

Today marks my 4 month anniversary at TopRank Online Marketing and almost 5 years in the online marketing industry. �It has been a goal of mine to learn as much as I possibly can from those who know the industry best. �In this seemingly short amount of time I have received, and continue to receive [...]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OnlineMarketingSEOBlog/~3/EEKc44F2A7I/

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Rick Santorum says 3-year-old daughter recovering, and he's back to campaigning

Rick Santorum said that his 3-year-old daughter has now 'turned a corner' after being diagnosed with pneumonia. Santorum is schedule to speak in Missouri and Minnesota Monday.?

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said Sunday his daughter Bella is recovering from pneumonia after a rough 36 hours.

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Santorum spoke with Florida supporters by telephone from 3-year-old Bella's hospital room and said doctors hope she can go home in the next few days.

The former Pennsylvania senator also said, "We're going to get out on the campaign trail later tomorrow [Monday] ... heading out to the Midwest, and start campaigning in the next states as we move this campaign forward."

RECOMMENDED: 10 things to know about Rick Santorum

Santorum scheduled a speech Monday in Missouri and another event in southwest Minnesota ? two states with early February contests. He then planned to head to Colorado and Nevada for events Tuesday.

Santorum is scheduled for an afternoon appearance at St. Charles Community College in Cottleville, Mo., followed by an evening event in southwestern Minnesota. His event at a Pizza Ranch in Luverne, Minn., would make him the first 2012 presidential candidate to campaign in the state this year.

Minnesota holds its precinct caucuses next week, but the results of a preference poll are nonbinding. Texas Rep. Ron Paul is airing TV ads in the state. Santorum and Paul have all but conceded Florida, where Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are competing hard for a win Tuesday.

"I feel very, very good about where we are and where the campaign is going," the candidate said.

But during the call with Florida voters, Santorum? opened with remarks about his daughter. "She without a doubt has turned the corner," he said. But he cautioned she "isn't out of the woods yet."

Santorum called his daughter's improvement a "miraculous turnaround" after an unexpected detour from the campaign just days before Tuesday's Florida primary.

Santorum got to his home in Virginia around midnight Friday for a quick break to do his taxes, but found his daughter "was not doing well."

"I was up with her a lot of the night," he said. "By the end of the day, it was really, really clear she was struggling."

Saturday evening, Santorum aides announced Bella had been admitted to the hospital and they canceled his morning interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" and church services in Miami. His aides later canceled his trip to Florida and instead sent his 20-year-old daughter to campaign for him.

Santorum described the situation as a "very, very tough night last night" but said by late Sunday Bella was "alert and back to her own beautiful, happy girl."

"It's been a very hectic 36 hours," Santorum said. "Life in the Santorum family has dramatically improved since the late afternoon."

RECOMMENDED: 10 things to know about Rick Santorum

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/o8hhGfqLKQk/Rick-Santorum-says-3-year-old-daughter-recovering-and-he-s-back-to-campaigning

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The Walmartization of the Web (Literally)

Walmart is getting much more aggressive with their online strategy:

With some 1.4 million employees on its U.S. payroll, Walmart's world is about as large as the state of Maine. That's massive by any standard, but when you consider how social media amplifies that number, it's not simply a huge group but an influential one. No small wonder, then, that the earth's largest employer is taking greater measures to motivate and mobilize its people -- and opening up more opportunities for consumer brands to also reach them along the way.

These brands can not only leverage internal resources to further build off the boost Google offers them, but they can then take that attention and sell it back off to the highest bidder:

It's not clear how much ad revenue Walmart World has made or whether MyWalmart.com will become a profit center. But the former already takes in millions of dollars annually in ads from vendors seeking an audience with Walmart employees, according to people familiar with the matter.

If Google consolidates markets too aggressively then ultimately they create competition for themselves through vertical ad networks. In some cases (say travel) Google can buy out the market plumbing & then reassert control:

Wertheimer drew some criticism when he explained that ?our airline partners were very clear? that they wouldn?t participate in Google Flight Search if online travel agency booking links were included in the core flight-search results.

But Google doesn't have that same influence over retail & each time they put the big brands front and center the more they reinforce that 3rd party dominance.

In addition to leveraging their workforce, it is also quite easy for these brands to use customer incentives to dominate social media.

Amazon.com is also carrying far more ads these days & they sell ads on 3rd party sites.

The above is another reason why Google is pushing so hard to control the second click. If they can taste the traffic again they add efficiency to their own model while introducing another layer of friction to other retailers.

When users finally manage to leave the Google click circus, Google tries to pull them back into Google with the Google Related toolbar

In the above quoted AdAge article there is some skepticism around how much a company like Walmart can get out of underpaid wage slaves:

"It's really hard when you're a person making poverty-level wages, just had your health-care premiums raised 60%, and you can only get part-time hours, to be a good ambassador for the brand, no matter how much you love it," said Jennifer Stapleton, spokeswoman for Making Change at Walmart.

However I think that skepticism is misplaced, as the less a person has the more thankful they tend to be for the little bits they do have. Most people who have nothing do not realize how systems are engineered to screw them over.

It is only when you have free time to think & are not clouded by arbitrary short-term stress that you can ponder the bigger & more uncomfortable questions in life. As long as you don't consider those uncomfortable questions it is far easier to push anything, because you don't know any better.

"The entire web has become full of garbage. The web has become almost a digital Detroit." - Roger McNamee.

If Walmart's strategy works then this ultimately will be why Google's brand-only approach to search will fall flat on its face. If this is successful I would then expect Google to put out some public relations drivel about celebrating the diversity of the web & move away from brand in the next 2 or 3 years.

In the meantime, I expect Google to keep increasing search complexity such that it's prohibitively expensive to make & market a small independent commercial website. That will force many smaller companies to live inside the Google ecosystem, with Google ranking the Google-hosted pages/products/locations for those companies, so that they can serve ads against them and get a bigger slice of the revenues.

Google's ad network is far more profitable than even the lowest waged employee, as it doesn't need to be fed & is designed to be an agnostic & amoral yield optimization tool. And it is effective enough that the biggest retailers are now becoming ad networks.

Average products for average people - with ads everywhere.

Welcome to the WorldWideMart. ;)

Categories: 
google

Source: http://www.seobook.com/walmartization

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Was Google Caught in a Sting Operation in Kenya?

Wow...this is pretty...um...transparent.

According to this post, Google was caught scraping Mocality, calling the listed businesses, soliciting that they move to Google "Get Your Business Online", disparaged the directory they were scraping in the client call, and then lied about having the permission of the directory they were scraping to try to con businesses into working with Google.

A few select quotes:

There are absolutely no costs, and this will be agreed on before it?s put on? No one will come and tell you like Mocality used to do, someone tells you it?s free and then they come to ask for money. You know that Google doesn?t fool around here.
...
Mocality used to charge people and many of the people who used to be in Mocality we have taken them and transferred them here. Didn?t we also find you on Mocality?
...
Ai?they used to?but some people didn?t used to pay. They [Mocality] used to go and ask people to pay them around Ksh. 20,000 and people refused. It was things like that.)

Google's business model *is* buying or building things that are free and then later pulling back features and/or sneaking costs in on them. Whether it be clubbing Android carriers with compatibility, saying search ads are evil then placing them everywhere, Google Maps API terms changes, terms changes on the Google AdWords API, Google hotel place listings with endless price ads, or keyword (not provided) in web analytics while trying to force you to register in Google Webmaster Tools to get any keyword data at all!

As if that wasn't bad enough, when the fake business asked Google if Mocality was ok with this, this was the exchange:

My question is does Mocality know that you?re getting their con?our contacts from their directory?
~~~
Yah. They know. They know that very well. They have agreed with Google when they were on that thing.

I have long stated that the difference between spam and quality content is who is spamming. With the recent widely criticized over-promotion of Google+ in the search results and this sort of scrape, lie & disintermediate the source Google's true character is shining through.

Facebook & Twitter are smart not to leave the barn door open for Google.

All information wants to be free and wrapped in Google's ads. Or so the saying goes. But until they can be trusted it won't be. They have done A LOT of brand damage to themselves in the past couple months.

Update: Google was mortified that they got caught doing this:

We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality?s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites. We?ve already unreservedly apologised to Mocality. We?re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we?ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved.

Categories: 
google

Source: http://www.seobook.com/google-caught-sting-operation-kenya

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