Rip-off Report Rips off Google, Yahoo, and MSN?
How classic, the irony is priceless. Here you have a site that just rips on so many businesses for not being ethical, and the site largely subsists off its search engine rankings… meanwhile it, itself is being totally unethical from a search engine guidelines perspective. Funny considering I recently heard “RipOff Report’s technical people indicate that they site is NOT violating Google’s Guidelines” (apparently quoted from one of their attorneys).
Out of all the types of businesses that Rip Off Report could sell text link ads to… you’d think that they could have at least tried the old “Well, we’re only selling relevant text links. They aren’t just to game the search engines… our visitors see them as a resource.” Right, you would think. But wrong, Rip Off Report clearly is not a place where people say “Gee, now that I found out Countrywide is a rip off, I think I’d like to buy some concert tickets.“.
So imagine that, a business probably worth tens of millions of dollars is risking the very search engine rankings that create much of that valuation for a few grand a month at best.
Personally, I’m surprised there haven’t been 10,000 spam reports to our dear friend Matt Cutts’ report paid links page.
Hear that all you thousands of businesses who are smeared on Rip Off Report, albeit true or not? While even if the report is FALSE you can NEVER get it removed (read “2. Ripoff Report’s Policy: Why We NEVER Remove Reports“), you can take this opportunity to possibly have them stripped of their visible PageRank.
Now, it’s obvious that monetizing RipOffReport.com is probably not the easiest thing to do since AdSense or other contextual products would result in them promoting the very brands each respective page is bashing. But, there’s got to be a better way. I guess there reputation advocacy program isn’t working out so well.
So the question now is, will Google and the other engines step up and ban or penalize them or will they let it go?