no one would ever know, there would be no lawsuit, no privacy issue...
your site gets sandboxed/penalised/de-indexed... whatever you want call it...
how would you possibly know that G had found reports in a Gmail acc?
you wouldn't...
Orders/reports from G email account = NOT SMART
- Thread starter 4rch3n3my
- Start date
no one would ever know, there would be no lawsuit, no privacy issue...
your site gets sandboxed/penalised/de-indexed... whatever you want call it...
how would you possibly know that G had found reports in a Gmail acc?
you wouldn't...
Split testing. The moment people get a hunch its gmail and test out a non-gmail account, their suspicions will be confirmed.
Yes, no one is going to look into your google account and hold you accountable. Just like this guy:
Spam Suspect Uses Google Docs; FBI Happy | Threat Level | Wired.com
Oh ... wait ...
Spam Suspect Uses Google Docs; FBI Happy | Threat Level | Wired.com
Oh ... wait ...
People don't properly consider the reality that this data is so easy to access... if you sit behind 'privacy laws' and say it'll never happen that's just plain stupid.
Knowingly listing your spamming reports on the computers of the business you are spamming is just a stupid thing to do....
If your income means anything to you why on earth would you risk it?
What about when the rules change? G decides to change it's 'policy'. What will you do then? Send them an email and ask if they'd kindly ignore all the data from before when the policy said they wouldn't look at your stuff?
My point is it is just as easy to use a different host and not use gmail...
If G never scans for serp spam, you win...
If they do scan and you don't have your reports on their servers, you win..
It's the only win/win
If you have reports on their servers you are relying on the fact (hoping) they don't scan. My business is important to me and I don't want to take that risk.
Knowingly listing your spamming reports on the computers of the business you are spamming is just a stupid thing to do....
If your income means anything to you why on earth would you risk it?
What about when the rules change? G decides to change it's 'policy'. What will you do then? Send them an email and ask if they'd kindly ignore all the data from before when the policy said they wouldn't look at your stuff?
My point is it is just as easy to use a different host and not use gmail...
If G never scans for serp spam, you win...
If they do scan and you don't have your reports on their servers, you win..
It's the only win/win
If you have reports on their servers you are relying on the fact (hoping) they don't scan. My business is important to me and I don't want to take that risk.
Alright, I'll throw you a bone, OP.
Your 100% right that they CAN do it. I bet they have done it before as a proof to themselves.
You're also 100% right that 'Privacy laws' would not deter G from doing it often. It happens under the radar of any privacy auditing.
What you're not calculating for here is the amount of processing power needed.
There are BILLIONS of gmail accounts. Each has mail flowing to it at different rates, but many as often as 1 email per 5 minutes.
There are also only 24 hours in a day, and luckily for us, the cost of electricity is still somewhere around $0.10 a KWH. (Not to mention there is a cost of hardware for the data banks to run this heavy scanning on.)
Running a program to constantly scan billions of gmail accounts for something like this would result in massive costs. I don't want to even try to calculate that but I'm guessing the costs of doing so just don't justify the gains by slapping a few linkspammers.
Edit: Of course with moore's law prooving itself truer than ever, this won't always be the case. Perhaps in 10 years?
Your 100% right that they CAN do it. I bet they have done it before as a proof to themselves.
You're also 100% right that 'Privacy laws' would not deter G from doing it often. It happens under the radar of any privacy auditing.
What you're not calculating for here is the amount of processing power needed.
There are BILLIONS of gmail accounts. Each has mail flowing to it at different rates, but many as often as 1 email per 5 minutes.
There are also only 24 hours in a day, and luckily for us, the cost of electricity is still somewhere around $0.10 a KWH. (Not to mention there is a cost of hardware for the data banks to run this heavy scanning on.)
Running a program to constantly scan billions of gmail accounts for something like this would result in massive costs. I don't want to even try to calculate that but I'm guessing the costs of doing so just don't justify the gains by slapping a few linkspammers.
Edit: Of course with moore's law prooving itself truer than ever, this won't always be the case. Perhaps in 10 years?
And how much did/does that tech cost them? It's a huge cost and mandated by their core business model.
Do you really think they'd do it again (this time scanning for something totally different, not just keywords from the advertisers' bid list) just for the sake of stopping a few SEOers?
Sheesh, ok, let's play this game then...
Now imagine what that DB is going to look like, and how big it is going to be.
What was the search criteria? If it is simply listings of URLs then they'd have PETABYTES of data to sort through daily.... Most of it not being our promoted urls.
If they are searching for phrases like "promoted domains" or "Backlinks From" then they are still going to get more false flags by far than they will the stuff we're afraid of. -And that would take another query on those flaggeds or worse; human reviewers to sort them out! :hollering:
Any more sophistication than this in their search criteria though, and it won't be just one more parameter of the existing search... It WILL be a separate search altogether. (Therefore won't be done.)
Can you think of a simple search phrase that will result in a high # of positive matches in these emails to expose them to SEO bought links? Because that's what it's going to come down to... A very strong Footprint.
If the footprint exists then they're likely to do this somewhat. If not, they can't. Simple as that.
I can't think of any surefire footprints... Can you?
