I know, I know, that sounds like a silly question. I’m not really that naive to think that all those spam blogs and made for AdSense sites are not fueling some undetermined portion of Google’s revenue. But do they really need to be this obvious?
This is a screen shot of what I saw today in my Gmail.
If it is difficult to read, the PPC ad copy encourages you to “steal your competitors [sic] traffic” with blackhat techniques. The URL, which I’ve obscured for obvious reasons, even contains ‘blackhat”. So next time the monolith of Mountain View gets sanctimonious about living within their quality guidelines, remember they are direct participants in the flow of cash around this stuff.
Update: In the comments I stated that Google may have stopped running this ad. I was wrong. It was served again today, one week after I first noticed it. Who knows how long it was running before then? If this ad just slipped through the cracks, those are pretty large crevices!
You tell it like it is. Sounds like the days of Google crying foul with paid links and taking money from paid links services through its ad system.
I realize that it it impossible to police all the ads that are placed. This just seemed particularly over-the-top. It seems as though the ad in question is not serving anymore. I sent my Gmail account an email that was crafted to trigger it, and it served different SEO related ads.