The Guardian yesterday reported, in regards to Shapps:
"In 2010 the family firm launched Traffic Paymaster - software that inflates a website's advertising revenue by copying and retouching other people's content,"
This is fraud and is in violation of Google's policy on various counts.
Firstly, it implies plagiarising other people's published online work; secondly, it involves making money in the process of plagiarism.
The Guardian from 2 Sept. reported:
"These sites might look like normal news sites, but the information is completely plagiarised. Scraping content and passing it off as one's own is not only wrong, but it also happens to be a serious violation of our policies."
However, there is more to it. Plagiarising content and making it look original, perhaps through a "touch effect", could bring the hoax page to top page-ranking when specific search key-words are used.
If this includes making money through Google adverts which pay revenues when the ads are viewed by readers, not only does it bring in a revenue to the hoax-page, but damages income on the original page or pages that were scraped and plagiarised.
According to the same Guardian article, Google has confirmed Traffic-Paymaster is in breach of its policies, and that "its search engine's algorithms had been equipped to drop the ranking of any webpages created using HowToCorp's (Shapps) software."
As we see here, page-ranking is important to attract viewers, but to get to the top of page 1 on Google by cheating certainly doesn't demonstrate a sense of fair play.
The article also goes on to explain how Shapps' twitter page got 57,000 followers.
It came about in an artificial fashion, on an industrial scale, using gadgets in the way of mass "following and unfollowing" other people.
