So, thanks to a Wall Street Journal article today titled “For These Sites, Their Best Asset Is a Good Name” by Julia Angwin click fraud is a legitimized business. How long will this last? It could be wiped out in two to three weeks with some algorithm updates to weed these bogus sites out of the index, but with Google and Yahoo getting paid (by-the-click) to keep these sites in, I suppose they could be here for a while.
Eventually the search engines will be forced to realize that they’re destroying their very reason for existing by serving up bogus search results, but if someone else (like Microsoft or Ask) offers a better search result and we start to see a shift in market share, then Google and Yahoo will be forced to eliminate these sites from the results. But could it be too late?