Another in the line of folks who should know better, O’Reilly has web spam on some of their sites. This doesn’t appear to be quite as bad as the WordPress web spam because they aren’t using CSS to make the content invisible to visitors. The placement of these “ads” are rather out of the way though, on the bottom left hand column.
With a little bit of looking around I was able to find these ads on oreillynet.com (on the article pages also), windowsdevcenter.com (on the article pages also), macdevcenter.com (on the article pages also), ondotnet.comt (on the article pages also), onjava.com (on the article pages also), onlamp.com (on the article pages also), perl.com (on the article pages also) and xml.com (on the article pages also).
The numbers involved don’t appear to be quite as bad as the WordPress incident either, with Google finding less than 600 pages with these ads for oreillynet.com. If the other sites have a similar number of pages with ads then all told it would less than 5000 pages. A lot of these ads point to freehotelsearch.com, which seems to offer a legitimate service (I only looked up reservations, I didn’t actually place one).
I think one could argue that these ads aren’t completely wrong. The argument would come down to intent, are these links there in hopes that people will actually click on them, or are they more of an effort to trick search engines to increase their importance? They are links, so it is possible that someone might click on them, but they aren’t nearly as prominent as the rest of their ads. I’m leaning more towards the idea that these ads are there more to boost their search engine ranking than as traditional ads. Tim is going to have a tough time making this look legit.
UPDATE 8:30am 24 Aug 2005: Tim O’Reilly has a posted an initial response to the complaints about the ads. The short version: while not completely wrong (and not nearly as bad as the WordPress spam) these types of ads aren’t good for the long term.