Debito.org for sale
Yes, debito.org is taking money from ambulance chasers and other dubious sources, despite a statement on http://www.debito.org/donations.html that:
I also do not wish to clutter the site with sponsored advertisements.
Such links would certainly not be acceptable on What Japan Thinks (I’ve refused a couple of lucrative but unethical offers), and Google takes a dim view of participating in link buying and selling for PageRank schemes, so he is risking his second ejection from the Google index.
Of course, I recognise his right to make money to fund his activities or to pay his server bills (the domain name is owned by HobbyLink Japan, which is surprising and curious, as is the hosting location), but there has to be a more ethical way to raise money, and what impression does such an advertisement leave the average reader with?
Talking of ethical behaviour, I see his blog theme is WP-Andreas09, about which the designer says:
The original template was released as open source and free to use for any purpose as long as the proper credits are given to the original author. This theme is released under the same conditions so please respect this and leave the credits in place to Andreas and myself as we have both put a lot of time and effort into the design and the theme. Other than that you may change the included files as you want.
I don’t see the credits left in place on Debito.org, although he (or his site maintainer) may have done the right thing by making a payment to the designers to allow him to take such a course of action.
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Joe Jones said,
September 25, 2008 @ 23:29
I’m sorry, how is this advertising unethical?
Ken Y-N said,
September 26, 2008 @ 00:30
Hi Joe, Well, first it is against the Google guidelines as I point out, second it is also against his own stated policies, and third abusing Page Rank for established pages like his Black and Green Lists of universities is not a very nice thing to do.
Aren’t you working in the legal field? There’s obvious jokes about lawyers and ethics to make…
James Johnston said,
September 26, 2008 @ 01:12
To set things off first, I read both pages. I’m not a particular supporter of either, just a reader. First of all, he did borrow the design without proper credits. And the author meta tag really doesn’t count.
However, your subjective view of his advertising scheme isn’t quite accurate. “I also do not wish to” is not the same as ‘I will not”. An additional comment is those posts that have the advertisements in them are older posts, with the newest one (i found, feel free to correct) was originally posted in 2006, and updated in 2008. I’m sure if you emailed him about (instead of posting this) he would give you an adequate response or remove those advertisements.
Also, placing advertisements on pages is not part of buying and selling for page ranks. Some more facts about him doing this buying and selling would make your case against what he is doing stronger, rather than just placing a screenshot of a google search looking for sponsored ads. Its also good to note that the main page, as well as none of the newer posts(2006+)(again, correct me if i’m wrong) don’t have advertisements on them.
One last note:
You said “what impression does such an advertisement leave the average reader with?”
If you actually look at the advertisements, its separated into a box of its own with a specific title stating its an advertisement. I don’t really see how that would have any sort of ill impression it would leave with the average reader. Assuming you were posing that question to make the average reader of your page think badly upon his practices.
I have no problem with people attacking other people, even things I read. Its quite amusing most of the time really. But I really dislike people attacking other individuals, making claims (again, your blog theme comment is 100% correct) without taking things into context.
Debito takes most things WAY overboard in his persuit to be a gaijin martyr in Japan. Its really amusing most of the time, and occasionally you get some credible information on right wing propaganda. But what I’m trying to say is I don’t endorse Debito, or what he does, but your attacks to me seem to be on a childish whim due to a dislike of what he does. To me, that is really childish.
Joe Jones said,
September 26, 2008 @ 07:22
I agree with everything that James just said. I would also like to point out that it is much more unethical to post advertising as if it were content, which I have seen happen on this blog.
Anyway, Ken, please stick to your surveys. This sort of tirade is not going to win you any fans in the blogosphere.
James said,
September 26, 2008 @ 08:18
It’s not really about whether or not it is ethical to sell advertising, but whether the advertising in question is of a shady nature. Those ads have nothing to do with Debito’s content, and they look like pretty obvious text links meant to increase the pagerank for certain keywords.. Buying and selling text links is against Google’s policies, and it can result in a banning from the search engine.
Ken Y-N said,
September 26, 2008 @ 08:28
James Johnston, they are older pages with some Page Rank and perhaps even Trust Rank, which is precisely why an advertiser has purchased content on them! They are also key pages describing two major campaigns he has taken part in, the university blacklisting and Otaru Onsen case. To choose to put links to one of the most lucrative keywords in the Search Engine Optimisation world (meso lawyer traffic can be worth $50 or more per click in AdSense!) in an almost too small to read font seems to me somewhat jarring. If it were to Japanese lawyers I wouldn’t care. If it were to someone like a company who recently wanted to advertise with me, a Green Card Lottery agent who charge very high fees and have many poor reviews for their service, I would raise an eyebrow and perhaps pass on a message to occidentalism.org. Can you justify why someone looking at hiring practises at Japanese universities would also need to investigate a benzene-related class-action?
Yes, I do agree that my post may appear childish to others, but I was already a bit annoyed at him yesterday before I discovered these sponsored advertisements as he’d berated a poster for not reading an earlier comment that had not yet been cleared from the moderation queue at the time the poster posted.
Joe, I try to ensure that my in-post advertising is at least somewhat relevant to the topic on hand, and that it follows all the Google and other search engine guidelines.
Ken said,
September 26, 2008 @ 11:28
I regularly read your blog and respect your work. Thank you for all the interesting posts.
>ensure […] that it follows all the Google and other search engine guidelines
Wait a minute, why would anyone have to follow “guidelines” which Google set-up by themselves? You may freely choose to follow them in order to do Google a favor or get better ranking, but if someone doesn’t care about these guidelines it’s on Google side to decide how to deal with these links.
Besides the fact that most of these 14 sponsored ads are somehow related to the web page content, I don’t understand why you believe ads *have to be* related to content in the first place. Any property owner can place any advertisement he likes. It’s on the side of the readers to click or not to click, to read or to ignore, to revisit the page or leave it behind. When I open the newspaper in the morning I see lots of unrelated advertisement, and I don’t see any difference with a website, you find tons of unrelated ads on all kinds of web pages, even served by Adsense. This may be bad targeting but not unethical.
I think you posted this too much from the perspective of SEO. No one has to follow these rules that the SEO world set up for themselves. To me having 14 somewhat related, clearly declared ads on a big website like debito.org with no ad at all on the main page looks like quite a waste of monetization opportunities.
Curzon said,
September 26, 2008 @ 12:01
Yup, totally childish. And on a blog that has grown to be pretty established and regular reading, even a fixture on newsonjapan.com, no less.
Ken Y-N said,
September 26, 2008 @ 12:46
Ken, whether you or I like it or not, Google is the dominant English-language search engine, but anyway Yahoo! and others have similar rules, and some of the target sites he links to appear to be in bad neighbourhoods (forms-legal is dubious, for instance), so I do believe he runs a serious risk of getting kicked out of Google again.
In addition, I sincerely believe these links are not there for humans, but for search engine spiders. Look at the links there are - one or two to the target site, and one or two to neutral authority sites. If I’m trying to sell keitai straps, I don’t stick a link to Wikipedia’s entry on “Cuteness in Japanese culture”, for instance, in the middle of my pitch. If I’m trying to con the search engines into thinking that I am linking to an authority on the matter I do.
Quick question to you: Do you think these adverts would be there if they were rel=”nofollow”?
I also agree that debito.org is missing a lot of ways to monetise, and monetise whilst retaining integrity.
James Johnston, as for contacting Debito privately, I did that last year when I had a problem with him revealing personal information about a poster he disagreed with, but he never got back to me about that issue.
Ken said,
September 26, 2008 @ 13:29
Ken Y-N,
I do agree that these adds are probably for search engines. They probably have the purpose of passing page rank to the advertisers and wouldn’t be there with nofollow.
Still I don’t believe this is a problem for anyone except Google and possibly Debito himself. To the readers of the page, the ads appear clearly as sponsored. Google might not like anyone passing page rank but that’s Google’s point of view. Anyone can choose not to follow Google’s rules and risk whatever consequences they enforce for these cases.
If those sites are really in a bad neighborhood and could harm users (I haven’t looked at them) I would partly agree that’s it’s an unethical form of advertisement since it abuses the trust visitors have in debito.org.