The Voice of Reason

This disease is really getting out of control. Earth4Energy now gets 222,000 hits on Google (October 24, 2008), and it is all a fraud. There are even thousands of fake negatives, like “Don’t buy Earth4Energy” and “Earth4Energy Sucks” that lead you to yet more sales pages. Negative reviews are totally drowned out by the massive, cancerous marketing campaign.

Imagine registering Earth4EnergySCAM.com and Earth4EnergySCAM.org so that a search for Earth4Energy + scam will get a hit on the domain name leading you to a page that promotes the product. These con artists are masters at abusing search engines. Not that Google cares — they make a lot of money off all these keywords.

I set up a page to debunk this crap and have also posted links to honest material. Their ideas are a load of crap, which is a shame because home energy generation is a serious subject, just one that isn’t currently profitable.

Any ideas on how to combat this new marketing disease? It seems outrageous if consumer groups have to publish hundreds of thousands of negative reviews to balance out their marketing spam when simply deleting their domain and removing it from Google would work as a form of chemotherapy. Sure it would grow back, but it would definitely set the cancer back a few weeks.

If we end up with thousands of people in low wage countries hired to write tens of thousands of blogs and web pages, and use tactics like PPC (pay per click) impression spamming to drive competitors costs up, writing bots to click competitors thousands of times an hour to exhaust their budgets, generate fake news releases, registering thousands of domain names with misleading names, even spreading their frauds through social networking sites — what will become of the net? Or search engines? Search engines rank pages by, among other things, authority derived from incoming links. What if all the seemingly unrelated incoming links are manufactured by The Amy of SCAM ?

Spam filters have evolved quite nicely, but there is little we can do against thousands of low-cost human adversaries who can craft fraudulent messages that are indistinguishable from other writings on the net.

It is analogous to cancer. The immune system can’t distinguish the cancer cells from the original because they are so similar. The same thing happens when you hire writers (either directly or indirectly via commissions on sales) to craft phony testimonials — they look just like everything else out there including the frequency of posting. Just think how many people in poor countries would write for a dollar a post — and how far a $100,000 budget could take you towards saturation marketing.

Perhaps it will happen to other things. Why bother with censorship when you can just bury dissent.

Will we see the day when you can register GMSucks.com and have it point to how GM is making environmentally friendly hybrid vehicles, or PPC advertising for ads like “Don’t buy GM until you read this shocking report!” which leads to a site that states “We decided to test GM vs Toyota and to our amazement, all the GM vehicles got better fuel mileage than any Toyota - click here for a dealership near you”. Of course, then everyone will have to get into the act, and the resulting avalanche of marketing hype would make internet p0rn look scarce.

The detailed analysis of their claims is here.

Update: January 2009
It looks like this kind of garbage is now mainstream. Check out “Jeff Paul’s Shortcuts to Internet Millions”. They sell mini web sites ready to install, and it shows in the Google hits. “Jeff Paul Review” gets over 3 million hits.

In case you have any doubt, please don’t. You cannot load up “mini sales sites” and start receiving piles of cash so that you pay off your foreclosed house in cash and get that pair of Lamborghini by next Friday, or starting earning a hundred thousand dollars a week for doing nothing. Even more ridiculous is that thousands of people are loading identical sites. Anyone can host multiple sites or purchase domain names cheaply. The perpetrators of this scam could host these sites themselves — but don’t because what the the real money is in selling get rich quick schemes to the desperate.

Maybe politicians will get into the act. Give out free CD’s of mini political web sites and flood the internet. With a little thought, the sites could be dynamic and updated via party headquarters. All messages from from political opponents could be drowned out in minutes, all searches in Google for the hot topic of the day would lead to these dynamic sites, and be one link away from the White House.