Baidu caught in search ad scandal, vows to overhaul system
Although I don’t personally run any ads in China I find this scandal shines some light on issues that plague all Search Marketing Managers.
Search engines in general are not terribly transparent. It’s no secret in the search marketing industry that most of what Google does is a secret. There is also the constant rumor that certain Indian/Chinese/Black hat affiliate companies can easily attack your keywords and drive up your costs. This scandal stirs up those same fears by showing that isn’t that difficult for an engine (or rogue employees within the company, depending on who you blame) to mess with the results, either paid or natural.
I do trust Google a lot, mostly because they give me a lot of free pens, but it’s true that as a consumer I am used to rather transparent auction processes (i.e. eBay) so it takes some getting used to realize that you just need to trust Google. I do think it can be frustrating though and when you read this kind of article you wonder how it really works if you could look into Google’s engineering black box.
I think it would be nice to have a little more transparency in who you are bidding against, without having to check each word on Google itself. When you are managing many countries and tens of thousands of keywords it isn’t particulaly practical.
As a side note, it is kind of funny at the end of the article that they badmouth Baidu for not doing more to combat music piracy, which in my opinion has really nothing to do with the article. Oh well.
Tags: searchengines, SEO, China
