Search’s newest and potentially biggest attraction may be in danger of dieing out before it even outgrows its infancy. A bill was recently passed by the House of Representatives that was part of the new online child protection laws, which essentially bans minors from using any web site that allows personal information to be posted.

Cnet.com reported, “The list could include Slashdot, which permits public profiles; Amazon, which allows author profiles and personal lists; and blogs like RedState.com that show public profiles. In addition, many media companies, such as News.com publisher CNET Networks, permit users to create profiles of favorite games and music.”

MySpace, Friendster and Facebook are but a few of these social networking sites, where users not only put information on themselves on the web, but also create many outbound links to their favorite web sites, such as music, sports, and entertainment sites. If those social networking sites do not have the profiles of millions of minors, then millions of inbound links to web sites will never be had. If those inbound links are not had, it will be more difficult to gage the popularity of a web site and as such the search rankings for those sites may drop off the SEPR for many competitive terms, unless, those sites have huge search begets for paid listings and pay-per-click ad words.

If blogs are blocked from minors, then so many of the RSS feeds that power content on thousands if not millions of web sites will not exist any longer. Without many of the RSS feeds from blogs, tremendous amounts of content that is relevant to a web site’s topic will not appear, and the web sites will not be able to continue to provide new content as quickly, again unless large budgets are had.

It seems as if the good intentions of those who voted for this bill may end up not only protecting a minors, but also may end up significantly damaging the viability of many smaller web-based companies, and socially acceptable child and teen related web sites.

"This bill is well-intentioned, but it is highly overbroad and would create big obstacles to accessing sites that pose no risk to children," said Attorney Halpert, a lawyer at law firm DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, who is the general counsel for the Internet Commerce Coalition.

Before the Senate votes this bill in to law, hopefully some revision can take place, where specific web sites can be names, and not blanket the entire industry based on the lack of proper security measures by a handful of web sites.

Google's settlement offer has been accepted in their click fraud case. TheArkansasw Judge, made the decision to allow Google to pay out $30 million dollars to the advertisers’ lawyers and $60 million dollars in ad word credits to click fraud affected advertisers.

In a Califonia court, a similar offer is on the table for customers of Yahoo sponsored listings, (many of which are the same as the Google plaintiffs) who have lost money due to click fraud. However, the Yahoo settlement would give 100% of damages in Yahoo sponsored listing credits to the affected advertisers from 2004 to the present. Yet, both settlement offers deny any financial gain for the advertisers who lost money.

Under the Google & Yahoo settlements, thactualul funds will never be refunded. Instead the search giants expect that the users will just want moradvertingng on the sites which caused them to be financially damaged in the first place. Perhaps an even larger problem then Google applying only a small percent of the loss to more ad words is that industry analysts have estimated that click fraud is at a minimum 14% of all pay per click advertising. This means that the small amount of credit can be expected to be cut short by no less than 14%potentiallyly much more.

After the court granted Google's offer, a Google lawyer stated, "We look forward to continuing to manage invalid clicks effectively and provide our advertisers with an outstanding return on their investment." This statement seems to indicate that Google is taking proactive steps to limit this type of injury froccurringing again. It is unlikely though that Google will be able to totally eliminate this issue, and could easily find themselves in the same situation again, if something drastic is not shortly invented in the Google Labs.

The judge on this case said the settlement was, "fair, reasonable and adequate … approval of the stipulation and the proposed settlement embodied therein will result in substantial savings in time and resources to the court and the litigants, and will further the interests of justice."

The above blog was written by Mike Goldstein, Esq. - SEO Manager at Rock Coast Media.

It was reported on Cnet.com that Google has addressed the concerns about click fraud in the online-ad industry; Google will be disclosing to advertisers the number of invalid clicks on their ad words campaign, in addition to the percent of invalid clicks representing the total clicks registered for each user’s account.

Click fraud can occur in two separate ways. First there are web site owners who subscribe to a Google service called ad sense, where relavent ads populate an area of the owners web site, and the site owner gets paid every time someone clicks on the ad. Click fraud occurs in this case when, a site owner clicks on ads on their site to increase their revenue. The other form of click fraud stems from ad words, which are those ads appearing on the right hand side of a Google search result page in the blue box. Advertisers pay a premium each time someone clicks on their ad, sending the user to the advertiser’s web site. Click fraud occurs in this case, when companies click on their competitors' ads to consume their advertising budgets. According to Google, when a user accidently double clicks on an ad, this is considered an invalid click and Google does not charge the advertiser.

A business product manager for Google stated, "Advertisers asked us for more transparency on this issue, … Until now advertisers haven't had a great deal of data to compare from their own accounts in order to be able to understand what Google is doing for them."

It has been reported by various industry analysts that click fraud account for as much as 20%, but not less than 14% of all online ad spend. It seems as though the only reason Google is going to start disclosing more information to its advertisers, is that they are concerned the level of distrust has risen to such a point that they will start to loose significant ad revenue from untrusting advertisers. Those advertisers surly will want to continue spending their marketing budget on a proven commodity such as search engine marketing, if they had a decent ROI. As such, they may put more of their budget into Yahoo, or MSN. Google can not let that happen, as they do not provide nearly as many alternative sources to generate revenue as the other two major players in the search industry.

It should also be pointed out that Google did make a $90 million dollar settlement offer to eliminate a suit pending against them by Lane's Gifts, et al for click fraud and over charging advertisers.

The above blog was written by Mike Goldstein, SEO Manager at Rock Coast Media.

Last week, (July 18th) for some mysterious reason, personal Blogs were being blocked from anyone with an internet connection in India. This is a rather strange occurrence, especially considering much of the world’s outsourcing of web site development ends up in the hands of Indian developers. It can only be presumed that some percentage of the work these Indian development firms are hired to do deal with Blogs and other web-based communication forums.

The Indian government took steps last Thursday, July 20th, to rectify the situation, but as of this writing, Monday July 24, 2006, what many have called government censorship, or a blog blockade, is still in effect. The Indian Government as claimed the blocking of personal Blogs is a 'technological error'. It would seem though, as if the Indian government has shot their own economy in the foot with this technical error. This blocking of Blogs, can only slow if not completely stop production of millions of dollars in web site development, without the web developers having the resources of accessing Blogs, or being able to test any blog they are developing on a live internet connection.

The inability for the developers in India to access or post to Blogs has a direct impact on search engine ranking as well. One of, if not the biggest source for creation of inbound links and refreshed content on web pages, which is one of the key elements search engines look for, is RSS feeds. One of the primary sources of RSS feeds on the planet is personal Blogs.

What was the official government reason for all of this? The New York Times reported today: In an e-mail message sent early on Thursday, an official at the office of the Consulate General of India in New York said the order to block a handful of Web sites, including the popular blogspot.com, which plays host to thousands of personal Blogs, had been prompted by the discovery of a site that contained what the official called “two impertinent pages” rife with material considered to be ‘extremely derogatory references to Islam.”

In an effort to prevent possible violence from those sites, the government’s Department of Telecommunications instructed Internet service providers to block access to the two pages. “Because of a technological error, the Internet providers went beyond what was expected of them, which in turn resulted in the unfortunate blocking of all Blogs,” the official explained.
Hopefully, this technological error, will be remedied soon, and the people of India can once again join the world wide community of bloggers, adding to the rich RSS feeds which populate so many of our web sites.