I came across an Adsense Ad for a new search engine: ipselon, and thought I might try it out. Typing Schinckel into the box brought up the usual results: interestingly my old blog, which has not been updated since April 9th, was the top hit, followed by this site, on Blogsome. Then a news story about Simon Schinckel (and his blubber pot. Ironic since the last time I saw Simon he was blubbering! - at our cousin Nick’s funeral.), and some other links, mainly mine.
Then, I happened to notice the Sponsored Links section on the right.
A whole lot of these were links to my Blogger blog. I think that means Google pays other Ad revenue sites to link to blogs on Blogger! Because I certainly don’t. And these links are through click.search123.com.
And the irony of this is that the ipselon search engine is in breach of Google’s Terms Of Service.
Actually, they might link to http://schinckel.net in some form, as clicking on some of them brought up this site. Bizarre.
Nope, that’s not it either. I just tried it, using my son’s band’s name as the search term. The first two “sponsored” links were pages on their site. Good links - one of them was the tour dates page- but I can assure you, we’re not paying for those. They only advertise on three or four particular sites and don’t use an ad network or ad words.
21 hours, 14 minutes after the fact.
I did get an email from a member of ipselon, telling me they don’t use sponsored links in their results list: I hope I didn’t imply this (I didn’t mean to).
But it still makes me wonder: who is paying for the links in sponsored links that go to my/our sites?
1 day, 14 hours after the fact.