Friday, July 27, 2007

AdSense braindump/gunmen filter

Today's post will continue the braindump subject started two days ago. Yesterday I had small e-mail exchange with CertGuard CEO Robert Williams concerning the ethics of AdSense in the context of braindump or gunmen sites. It happened to me many times that browsing some good, valuable certification web-pages I've noticed Google AdSense ads of those sites.

Let's see an example. Below there is a screenshot with advertisements published on CertCities:



These ads are just next to the article about Certification Ethics (sic!). For those who still do not understand - when you click there you will be redirected to the website maintained by the criminals offering taking exams for people that have no knowledge of the testing materials. And moreover - CertCities will get some money for your click from these bad guys. Does this mean that CertCities is popularizing dirty business?

Actually I am not the only one who is surprised.

CertCities is one of the best site about certification. No doubt. This post is not meant to be an attack, it's just an example. I'm going to publish AdSense in the future as well so I will have to deal with the same problem.

As for now I see one solution. Google offers Competitive Ad Filter. It lets you create your own set of sites the ads of which you do not want to publish on your site. Unfortunately it is limited to 200 URLs, but I think it's still worth a shot.

One can get the list of braindump and gunmen sites from CertGuard organization if one will be recognized as legitimate. Please contact CertGuard in the matter of obtaining the filter list.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I find it interesting that you talk about ethics, but I see that you had posted on certcities early today (7-28-2007) promoting your blog and certguard which is in violation of the posting rules at certcities.com. You had also made several links to certcities.com to several articles without first obtaining permission to do.

You should heed your own advice about ethics and remove all content referencing certcities. I did not give you permission to link to any comments I have or may have made at certcities.com (which in fact does contain comments/articles I have written but are protect and owned by certcities.com). You've been warned.

Personally, I would love to see every braindump vanish and anyone who used braindumps to obtain their certification be de-certified and permanently banned from further testing.

J4 said...

Hi,
first of all thank you for the comment.

It's a pity that you write as anonymous but I can imagine that you are somebody from the CertCities.

You wrote many words in the comment but nothing about the AdSense problem... Too bad...

My post on CertCities Forum was not about to promote my blog, but it was meant to show the example of what I am talking about. I'm also not promoting CertGuard as I have nothing common with them, except few emails exchanged. I just find this site interesting in the context of publishing the ads of braindump sites.

I wrote my post (linking to the article which I'm just commenting) on CertCities "General Site Feedback" Forum, and your only reaction was to remove it. So this is how you take care about users feedback?

As I accented - this article is not meant to attack CertCities, but just to show the problem. I've chosen CertCities as everybody knows it is good certification site and IMO it is worth to show that the problem affects also these big sites

And finally, this is the first time in my live when I hear that one should ask for permission to put links on his own site. You publish content to public network called internet so you should expect that people will link to it. If you meant RSS feed, by putting it on my blog I popularize your website as I consider it valuable. I project as much content as you, the publisher of RSS feed, set in your Feed (in fact only links to your news). This is what for the RSS Feed was invented and I don't do anything illegal.

Anonymous said...

Hi,

This is Becky Nagel from CertCities.com. I am the only employee of 1105 who works on CertCities.com and the only person authorized to speak on the site's behalf. :-) (BTW: Fair warning -- this is a Sunday morning post with no spell checking, so bear with me):

First, I want to THANK YOU for noticing that we have not been keeping up with the Google filter the way that we should be. It can be very difficult -- especially with the number of companies and the fact constantly changing their name (and we're actually already hit the limit, which makes it a bit more challenging, as it sounds like you'll soon encounter :-)) -- but that's absolutely no excuse whatesover!

We completely understand why any reader would be dissapointed about this, and I'll work on getting any new companies that voilate those policies removed ASAP. We're not perfect, so we ALWAYS appreciate it when readers or anyone in the community lets us know what we've missed.

Second, I want to assure about the first post that this absolutely was *NOT* anyone officially connected in ANY WAY with CertCities.com. I'm sure it was just a well-meaning reader, but this person absolutely is NOT speaking for the site. I think becomes obvious when you know our policies, so if you'll indulge me for a moment, I'd like to go through them:

First, to us, all linking is fair use, so permission is NEVER required (we don't ask when we link out, so why would we expect anyone else?), nor should anyone on our site believe they have some sort of privacy expectaiton or ownership -- we are a non-walled site with a public forum, we fully believe (and I think all case law backs this up) virtually all linking is fair use, and we do put out those RSS feeds to make it easy to link to us -- so again, attacking someone for using these would be completely opposite of our policies and beliefs (and best interest).

Also, we simply don't attack anyone for feedback (we *really* do want it -- good, bad and ugly), nor do we post anonymously -- not only is it completely unethical for a journalist to do that, it's just stupid -- anyone can track pretty much anything nowadays, so even if you think you're anonymous you're not. (BTW: Because I have to post this and use a google account, which I don't have, you can see that it says it's anonymous up top, but I've included my name here -- just FYI I'm aware of the top-level irony :-)

So, with all that said, I'd like to post the official CertCities.com take on this post: This is a great blog entry -- not only for CertCities.com (to let us know how we're falling short) but also for the community at large -- the discussion of braindumps/unethical testing continues to be *vital* for everyoe. We appreciate it, and wish you continued success (and have fun with those filters -- they're a doozy! -- but very worth it, as you know).


Very best,

-- Becky

Becky Nagel, Editor
CertCities.com


BTW: Anyone who would like to discuss this further is free to contact me at bnagel@1105media.com or my work line (direct) at (949) 265-1557.

Anonymous said...

I'm glad you brought this out. This has been an ongoing issue with us since the beginning. We removed the AdSense from our site because of the brain dumps that kept showing up. Good luck, I hope you can do something with it.