Nothing escapes Jay Weintraub.  Jay reports on a relatively tiny but very significant shift in Google’s (NasdaqGS:GOOG) legalese—changes in terms and conditions that govern its relationships with advertisers.  I believe the re-wording to be no accident.  This is a defensive move… a sign of weakness that could give additional hope to class action lawsuits currently underway against Google.  This news on the heels of a new, more dangerious click (syndication) fraud tactic launched by what’s being called the Kmeth Worm… again, aimed at Google and receiving relatively no coverage in industry or traditional media.

Says Weintraub about the updates…

- Previously, the language said “Ads may be placed on (y) any content or property provided by Google ("Google Property"), and unless opted-out by Customer (z) any other content or property provided by a third party ("Partner") upon which Google places ads ("Partner Property").

- Now, the language says “Customer understands and agrees that ads may be placed...” and “unless Customer opts out of such placement in the manner specified by Google...” As well as “Customer authorizes and consents to all such placements.”

With regard to Google’s Limitation of Liability…

i) - Previously, “Google disclaims all guarantees regarding positioning or the levels or timing of:”
- Now, “Google disclaims all guarantees regarding positioning, levels, quality, or timing of:”

ii) Brand new, “Customer understands that third parties may generate impressions or clicks on Customer’s ads for prohibited or improper purposes, and Customer accepts the risk of any such impressions and clicks. Customer’s exclusive remedy, and Google’s exclusive liability, for suspected invalid impressions or clicks is for Customer to make a claim for a refund in the form of advertising credits for Google Properties within the time period required...”

Don’t miss the words “exclusive remedy” folks.  Jay didn’t emphasize it but I sure will.  This is “nothing earth shattering” according to Weintraub, who I greatly respect, but given his strategic business interests I’d expect him to downplay this change.  This IS, in fact, very, very important and I have yet to see anyone report on it.  Advertisers need to understand.

Already under fire from the likes of Ben Edelman and others Google, like Yahoo, has been sending lower quality traffic to advertisers for years and often at inflated cost, according to Edelman and others throughout the industry.  The changes noted above are clearly motivated by these swirling questions which have largely gone un-noticed by advertisers.  Who’s noticed?  Affiliates have because they (in whole, having more experience in paid search than advertisers) have more to lose.

Stanly Wong suggests…

“This type of Syndication Fraud is running rampant across the web particularly among parked pages (where domain speculators purchase domain names for the sole purpose of monetizing the natural traffic on them) and dynamic doorway pages (dynamically generated pages are created to fool search engines so they can show up on natural/organic search results).”

“I believe that Yahoo! (& Google) has a contractual responsibility to deliver what was promised to their advertising customers. I feel shortchanged!”

Well… consider that Google contract changed!

K-What?
In related news (that advertisers don’t seem to pay attention to), famed spyware warriors Wayne Porter and Chris Boyd of Facetime Communications recently unearthed the latest version of syndication fraud brought to us by what the company has dubbed the Kmeth Worm.  In effect the company’s research team has discovered a new, never-before executed means to conduct syndication fraud—this one aimed at Google.  If you’ve NOT heard of botnets by now you’ve been living on the moon and this Kmeth Worm provides fraudsters with all the benefits of botnets (namely high volume clicking of high-priced ads on sites they own) with an added bonus—it’s nearly impossible for Google’s network quality team to catch… or Yahoo’s team for that matter.

According to Boyd, “Effectively, we have a Botnet without bots, and the potential for financial fraud is in some ways more severe, because of the ease with which this particular attack spreads.”

He concludes, “Typically, financially-driven malware tactics use botnets to fraudulently increase traffic to specific online advertisements. In this case, the hackers have very cleverly borrowed tactics from botnet-creators to create a bot-less network of hijacked PC users to drive traffic to sites populated with these specific Google AdSense advertisements.”

For more insight in layman’s terms I encourage giving the Spyware Warriors: The Digital Underground audio series a listen.