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March 18th, 2008 
QuadsZilla Via party poker blog, we find an article that starts off “A record $160-million VC investment. A rich Web strategy. A quirky founder. For a few weeks last spring, Guelph, Ont.’s Geosign had it all. Then mighty Google stirred. And it was over.”
The whole article is worth a read, here are some snippets:
“As the possibilities of the arbitrage business became apparent, however, other more ambitious players got interested. One of them, it seems, was Geosign.
By 2005 . . . Nye crafted a maze of Internet sites that included tens of thousands of Web pages and bought up even more keywords from Google. By connecting the keywords and the websites, Geosign was indeed generating more than $100 million in annual revenue and was extremely profitable.
Nye began to run Geosign like his version of a California dot-com at the peak of the investing craze in the late 1990s.”
This gem was priceless:
“One Geosign staffer recalls being asked to work through weekends in late 2006, in order to add text to Web pages that appeared to be nothing but ads. “They told us it could be our B-grade writing,” the ex-employee says. “We were writing for strange sites like roundtables.info and sticks.info. And we were just writing a paragraph or two. It didn’t seem to matter what we wrote.”
How dose the story end?
I’ll give you a hint, it has to do with Google’s Smart Pricing for adwords. . . read more.
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ah so lessons learned in the area of arbi and putting ones eggs in only 1 basket…
I worked there for like a year and a half and I loved every minute of it.
Great read. Notice they part where they were making $100 million a year from arbi. If the Google vs Yahoo arbi was the smash and grab then, I wonder what it is for 2008?
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[...] Here is a excerpt from the article. I found this article from SEO Black Hat. [...]
Well I’ve been a long time reader of SEOBH and thought I’d do my first post on this as well I was the Director of SEO for Geosign back before and after this Google incident.
There is a lot more to the story that could ever be printed, most if not all the articles that have been printed have gotten it wrong, but can’t blame them they are all looking in from the outside and even from the inside it is very complex & confusing to understand.
One of my staff members who quit Geosign did give some information to a local newspaper, shortly there after they had legal issues and it basically showed that Geosign means business on those NDA’s and sadly due to NDA’s and other things those who actually know more about what happened will probably only talk after a couple a drinks in the back of some bar when they’re much older and finished spending all their money
If you catch up with my someplace around the world, buy me a drink, check to see if I have any money left and then ask me some questions…
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