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.
2 Comments
LB · January 18, 2009 at 12:30
Looks like you were exactly right, Debito has had debito.org ejected from Google. And I heard through the grapevine the reason was the PageRank problem. He’ll probably find it a lot harder to get relisted this time around.
Ken Y-N · January 18, 2009 at 12:44
LB, indeed he has! His listing has been dodgy for ages; he was PR3 when he should be PR5 or 6, for instance, searching for “debito” didn’t give the enhanced results, etc, etc.
I’ve zero sympathy, and to all the people who sent flames (which got deleted when I moved my site), I told you so!