The internet is being filled with junk. Sure, there have always been a lot of useless pages and sites out there but there are new trends happening and we have only Google to blame. Google ranks sites based on how many links come into a site (a simplified explanation I admit). The result? The internet now has millions more web directories than it did. People in the quest for better rankings visit these sites or hire some SEO people to do it for them. There are even people promoting the addition to a large number of these web directories at once. Yay! Lets be honest. Who visits these random web directories? Sure someone may stumble upon one from a search engine and happen to click through it but its purpose and usefulness is extremely limited. I consider them junk sites that clog up my search results on occasion and make the quest for rankings as meaningless as the millions of web directories themselves. Lets fill the web with decent content like this site instead of useless junk like web directories shall we?

Another trend of junk sites are sites that just contain a bunch of Google Adsense links. These sites are everywhere these days and are always coming up in my search results on Google. These sites are even more useless than the web directories. They fill up the internet with ads that and screw up rankings and search results for everyone. If you’ve ever used Adsense and tried out the content networks you’ll see how pointless they are. Sure you’ll see a huge amount of impressions and maybe even a few click-throughs. If you actually take a closer look at that traffic and where its coming from you’ll see that it comes from these pages with just Adsense crap on them. Really good ad targeting there. Where do I sign up? I wonder if I had a few thousand Windows zombies out there if I could make easy money by having them all click-through my ads whenever their ips changed. Maybe I could just use Tor and save myself some time. I place the value of a content click-through at negative or at the most 0. I think they are just a waste of advertising money.

Which is why I have Google Adsense running at the top now? I’m not adverse to advertisements on legitimate sites that have content. Sites that are filled up with ads are not legitimate content in my opinion. Its rubbish. I think the content network is a good thing and should be more targeted to the site’s content but that’ll only work if Google could somehow get rid of all the junk sites.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 at 2:38 am and is filed under Google, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.