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View Full Version : Big adsense partner garbitrage master or disaster?


Discovery
10-19-2007, 11:30 AM
I have read through the T and C's of adsense and can't seem to find anything in the legal speak that suggests an adsense partner cant cloak, hide, or otherwise replace their URL with another.

I'm not calling these guys out in a negative way, nor am I suggesting they are intentionally trying to violate Googles terms. But I want to figure out what is going on here.

I found an underperforming website in my referral reports.
The referral domian is: www.mybestdebtconsolidation.com
This domain resolves directly to:
https://www.lowermybills.com/lmb/debt/p3786/debt1.lmb

The referral page URL is: http://www.mybestdebtconsolidation.com/chucrh.php
and Resolves to a very interesting garbitrage page.

The page seems to be auto generated with a list of navigation links in the left column and the typical full set of adsense ads in the middle, and right column - the page is loaded with adsense ads and a small paragraph on the page's weak topic. A click on any of the site navigation links results in a new page with the exact same set up, but a NEW set of navigation links.

However there is one constant. The link to home goes to www.mybestdebtconsolidation.com which of couse redirects to Lower My Bills. And then there is a "read More" link at the end of the pages only piece of content. This link again goes to: www.mybestdebtconsolidation.com which redirects to Lower My Bills.

There seems to be no end to the number of pages being generated.

To make this even more interesting; a look at the source code shows a snippet of code to: http://www.vretool.com/atrack/ast.php and a close look at this resulting code shows calls to both Google and YPN (Yahoo Publishers Network). This is basically a tool from AdsenseGold.com which is supposedly tracking all adsense/ypn programs for you. This again could be purely innocent, but digging through the multiple websites and offshoots of vretool and AdsenseGold and you start to get the feeling your in a bad neighborhood.

Is this just an extremely clever and technical way to deliver and track garbibrage pages for both Google and YPN and cloak that you are doing it? Or is there more going on here?

How can Google let this kind of activity exist from such a large advertiser and publisher?

Discovery

abbottsys
10-19-2007, 12:53 PM
Discovery - nice piece of investigation. Looks like you've found yet another MFA twist - an endless MFA loop! And we're not surprised it's debt are we :)
Ah, the constant sale of debt, the markets are roiling from it.

jimbeetle
10-19-2007, 01:16 PM
I don't see any cloaking using User Agent Switcher, just a bunch of weird redirects. I could see a simple redirect from the first domain to lowermybills with an aff id, but it looks like there are 302s through three other nonsense domains, the last setting two cookies. Not really sure what the heck is going on here.

As for the auto-rewritten "content" pages, well, there's really not much to say except, yep, pure garbitrage.

AussieWebmaster
10-19-2007, 01:20 PM
I wonder if the lowermybills page loads as part of a traffic share.... some get the garbitrage page others get the lowermybills redirect.... cookies and tracking would help... IPs could be used for insight as to what should be shown etc.