A family member (who we’ll call Bob) sent an email to my wife on the subject of Health. It was one-link to a nutrition-site product (sunflower oil and other vitamins). My wife uses Gmail for all her email needs. Bob uses Yahoo for his needs.

The email contained a single link with no other information and not even a signature. The one-link email was flanked on its right side with sponsored links from Google. Ok, this is normal.

What was not normal, and was terrifying was that the ads where for Illuminati, deep secret governments, and a whole host of underground conspiracy ads. My wife was puzzled by the ads because they had nothing to do with nutrition. She knows how the ads should work because she has an Adsense account.

Our curiosity of the misinformed ads grew quickly.

For the heck of it we decided to call Bob and ask him if he was into these types of websites? He said, “That’s where I mostly visit. And how would we know this intimate information?”

We explained; Google reads email content with electronic robots and delivers ads based on ‘The Emails’ content. So if your email is about cats, ads should appear on the subject of cats. Google has always claimed it does not track content of users email. It simply provides content-based ads.

This came as a shock to Bob! He said he spends his life investigating threats to the U.S. constitution and expects that to remain ‘private’ to his household.

With that, we all felt a chill down our spine. How is it that emails from Bob now reveal where he surfs to his recipients?

This is no mistake on Google’s part. They are beginning to profile its users through toolbars, email content, collaboration with Yahoo databases and where we visit frequently. Then targeting our associates to see if they too are interested in the same subject matter? Or is that all its for?

I have never been into conspiracy before, but this smells rotten. We have clear evidence that Google and Yahoo somehow track our behavior “Personally!”

Look at the facts:

1) Bob only uses Yahoo for all his needs. This includes email, surfing and purchases.
2) My wife received the email from Bob in her Gmail account.
3) Yahoo and Google are two separate company’s right?
4) Bob has never revealed to my wife his personal Internet life.
5) Ads about where Bob visits frequently appear where content ads should have under Google sponsored section in Gmail email.
6) Bob confirmed that these are the primary sites he visits.
7) Gmail ads should only be focused on email content.

It is becoming ever clearer to me that we are heading towards George Orwell’s 1984. By the way, I can thank Google for those conspiracy ads, which lead me to this book. What a freekin’ irony!

Google is becoming the threat that so many predicted. I guess I am just starting to wake up.

~ BigD of reflexologynation.com

Editor’s Note: From time to time we will be featuring guest commentary here on Gevil.org. I’d like to thank BigD for being the first such post. If you’d like to contribute to Gevil.org, contact us at info[at]gevil.org. Thanks!

Well folks, you knew it would happen sooner or later. Google has once again been caught with their hand in the proverbial cookie jar. You see, according to Google’s (painfully outdated) Webmaster Guidelines, you should, “Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.” as well as “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.” In fact, Google feels so strongly about the issue that they allowed Web Dominatrix, Matt Cutts, to discuss it on his blog. His post “Text links and PageRank” is quite appropriate to this discussion. Specifically these bits:

• “Google does consider buying text links for PageRank purposes to be outside our quality guidelines.”
• “But these [paid] links make it harder for Google (and other search engines) to determine how much to trust each link. A lot of effort is expended that could be otherwise be spent on improving core quality (relevance, coverage, freshness, etc.).”
• “Using nofollow is a safe way to buy links, because it’s a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine.”

So, given the fact that Google has discussed this issue several times, you’d think they’d be clear on it. However, as the Web Professor discovered earlier this week, that’s not quite the case.

Apparently the wonderful people at the ‘plex have applied that wonderful nofollow tag to all the links on Google Video’s home page… on all links that is except those belonging to their paid advertising partners.

As you can see, only links from Google’s paid partners will actually pass PageRank. In effect, Google is doing the exact opposite of what their Webmaster Guidelines and Matt Cutts have told the public to do. And, since this is obviously a concerted effort to funnel PageRank only to those “paid links”, we can only conclude that Google is trying to

• “make it harder for Google (and other search engines) to determine how much to trust each link”
• and of course to dilute the internet’s relevance, freshness, and coverage by diverting “a lot of effort is expended that could be otherwise be spent on improving [these things]” .

And there you have it, proof positive that Google participates in the very type of schemes it claims to be against. This is not just some webmaster’s opinion or a bitter opponent claiming Google is in the wrong here. It’s Google’s own words that are condemning their actions this time. They have painted themselves into a pretty tight corner. Either they lied when they said that paid links and linking schemes are bad for the internet, or they’ve once again abandoned their supposed motto of doing no evil. I’ll let you choose for yourself which option is more likely the case.

I’m sure a lot of you have probably already seen this cartoon that made it to the front page of digg.com (albeit quite briefly), however, in case you haven’t… here it is again!

For those of you that don’t know, that’s google engineer Matt Cutts, and SEO/Blogger Skitzzo. The cartoon was drawn by Jim Cook of ToonRefugee.com and introduced on SEOrefugee.com, however, you’ll notice our logo makes not one but two appearances. I’d like to thank both “refugee” sites for help in officially launching Gevil.org. We received quite a bit of traffic, on our first day of existence and it looks like several people are helping spread the word. Thanks again everyone!

Just as I thought, the problem with this site will definitely NOT be lack of post material… keeping up with it all, maybe, but we’ll certainly have a lot of subjects to choose from.

Anyway this most recent G-rievance was brought to my attention via Jim Gilbert’s post over at SEM Clubhouse. As Jim points out, google has begun serving Search Network ads on Myspace.com. The deal to make this possible of course was announced via a press release in August of last year, however, the WAY google would go about doing so, was not.

In Jim’s words:

Adsense publishers who use the Adsense Search Network get ads delivered from Google’s SEARCH Network (NOT the Contexual Network). What does this mean? [It] Means advertisers in AdWords will have their AdWords ads displayed on MySpace for every search done there — and MySpace has so far proven to NOT be the best converting area for traditional advertising.

Well that’s a very polite (and understated) way of saying it… Basically MySpace traffic traditionally converts like crap. Now sure there are probably some niche markets that won’t suffer from this, but the majority of Adwords advertisers likely will. No problem right? Advertisers that don’t want to market to 13 year old girls and 50 year old perverts can just opt out right? WRONG! Google has offered no such opt-out option. And really, why would they? As usual google will peddle as much low quality traffic as they possibly can until enough high volume advertisers complain and threaten to dent Gevil er google’s pocket books. Until then advertisers, try not to do anything rash while you watch your ROI plummet.

Before the launch of Gevil.org, there was no central place for people to air their grievances (or as I like to call them, G-rievances). But, that doesn’t mean people haven’t discussed the issues they have with “the big G.” So, just to get you in the right state of mind, here’s a list of posts, threads, and articles you should read. The list is by no means complete, and we will surely be adding to it as we go.

• http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/googles-policy-on-no-follow-and-reviews-is-hypocritical-and-wrong/
• http://searchengineland.com/070122-090836.php
• http://www.seorefugee.com/seoblog/2006/09/19/get-any-adsense-account-banned/
• http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070119-8661.html
• http://www.seo-scoop.com/2007/01/17/getting-tired-of-google/
• http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/24/technology/24valley.html (subscription required)
• http://www.seorefugee.com/seoblog/2006/12/11/google-takes-bribe-of-3-billion/
• http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2005/08/is_google_evil.html
• http://www.blakeross.com/2006/12/25/google-tips/
• http://news.com.com/Google+balances+privacy%2C+reach/2100-1032_3-5787483.html

If you have a link that should be included in this list, please feel free to drop me a link at tip[at]Gevil.org!