blauwbilgorgel

Create web pages, rank as a web page.

This is a band-aid by Google. Developers created inaccessible websites (JS-only, no HTML fallback) and Google still wanted to give those sites a chance to be in the index. Like when Google made it possible to index text inside .swf movies. This did not mean that flash sites suddenly ranked alongside accessible websites. No, it only meant that you could now find content with a very targeted search query.

Don't think you are gaining any SEO-benefit from one-page JS-only applications, just because Google made it possible for you to start ranking.

And don't forget your responsibility as a web developer to create accessible content. Forgetting progressive enhancement, fallbacks, a noscript explanation for why you need JS, ARIA is devolution. If Google can index your site, but a blind user has a problem with your bouncy Ajax widget, then you failed catering to all your users. If you lazily let Google repair your mistakes, then soon you will be a Google-only website.

I shouldn't have said that the poster owned that site, that was a mistake, and it detracts from my point. I should have left it as an example of a thin-content page that doesn't really add anything to the web. Of which there are many at MetaFilter. That the view that MetaFilter pages are all quality and deserve to rank well is not realistic. That it isn't a mistake to derank a site when user metrics and a/b tests show that that increases user satisfaction.

>but to downgrade the whole site because of it?

I do not think this happened. I do not think I found the single page on MetaFilter that deserved a downgrade of the whole site. It is but a symptom of a deeper underlying problem with the site's quality. Best of the web? Nope. Clear-cut spam? Nope. Somewhere in between? Yes. The rankings reflect that.

>Links to spam sites will be flagged & then squashed by the moderators in short order.

Except they aren't. Google reports followed links to spammy sites. I found a link to an Indian pharmacy in a few seconds of searching. Moderators ought to work. Nofollow will work.

The problem is not the old links, though they are accompanied by old stale content, which IS a problem. Also these are todays links:

- "Everyone On Wall Street Is A Dick."

- Is Using Lotion a Black Thing?

- #basketball #trickshots

These link to other websites like vine.co or b3ta.com. They are followed by some comments that new visitors can not join in on, lest they pay. This is fluffy content that ranked well around 2006, it doesn't anymore. Why are these comments so special that they deserve a top 10? When 100s of other sites also put up a link and have a small discussion? Where is the unique quality content of MetaFilter? In the comments?

It is also spammy in that it doesn't nofollow external links on comments. Those links should have been nofollowed like 6 years ago. That they still aren't, is telling about MetaFilter's knowledge on SEO. You know that Google sees your site linking to bad sites, and what do you do? Complain about it? Fire people due to an update 2 years ago? Or do you simply take action to fix it?

MetaFilter doesn't have to be (and isn't) excluded from the internet. It just doesn't have to rank well for terms like "Gomboc".

It became alright to derank "inane babble" the moment it increased the satisfaction of search engine users. Which is pretty much from the beginning of search engines. It is user metrics that count. Statistics don't lie.

It does not matter that you are uncomfortable with an algorithm. I think I don't get your "judged as an attack"-part. The alternative is not using a search engine that relies on algorithms.

I did a casual investigation of MetaFilter. It has not changed much over the years. The pages I did look at were all of the level of "inane babble". One line comments. Puns. Not adding much to an already thin topic. Perfectly alright to have a place on the internet to debate how to get your friend to take Viagra. But not much need to rank that for men's health topics, relationship advice or even Viagra.

http://ask.metafilter.com/57406/Bright-light-flashes-in-my-r...

Now would you want to find that page when you are searching for those symptoms? Or would you want credible medical advice?

If it is moving the goalposts, it is moving the goalposts to better quality content. Those visitors not going to MetaFilter are not gone, they are catered to by other sites. Every tag on MetaFilter has a specialist site now. Ranking MetaFilter so high before 2012 was a present. MetaFilter doesn't deserve to be deranked any further, but it doesn't deserve huge pre-2012 rankings either. In my experience, todays SERPS are much better than ever before, and the complaints are biased, reminiscing good old times or influenced by the fact that some paid to post on that site (You'll defend it, as you don't want to back a losing horse, and your experiences with the site are probably good).

Reverse image search is probably too expensive to do this for every image found on the web, but Google could surely do this for a subset. Then they could match alt attributes: If two sites use the same image, and one has an alt attribute of "automobile" and the other "car in street" you can ask Bayes how likely it is that these two sites both made fake alt text that does not describe the image.

Basically if Google Images can show you images relevant to your search term, then Google Search can find out if an image is relevant to a topic in much the same way.

Directly: It adds rich content to your posts (video's, audio, images). It adds keywords in the image alt attribute and image description. Good images will increase your ranking on Google Images.

Indirectly: If the images contribute to the topic/post (not merely decorative), then you get more user satisfaction, which will increase repeat visits, word-of-mouth and links.

Do the all-things-equal test: Two pages on the same topic (let's say 'Bonobo Monkey'), but one has a picture of the topic. Which one would you find more useful? Two pages of equal quality, yet one has a picture of the author with rich markup next to it, which one would you find more credible?

As with all things, don't overdo it, or use it to manipulate: Adding images when they don't make sense for the topic, copying all your images from elsewhere, spamming the alt attribute with keywords, put a page full with unrelated images etc. Basically do not treat it as an SEO technique, treat it as enhancing your content with media to increase overall quality and user satisfaction.

... <a href="#">Sample</a>, an Indian online pharmacy. I have not ordered from them myself. ...

They should look real hard at their site structure and which pages they allow to be indexed. Too many vague subdomains, and 'posts tagged with...' in the index.

I wonder what their user metrics show to Google. I don't think Google is penalizing sites based on a mere hunch, or won't notice that a site like MetaFilter got hit by an algorithmic update.

This site is someone's child, so it's hard to be too critical, but the view that MetaFilter hosts the quality content of the internet is far too rosy.

Pages full like: http://www.metafilter.com/67307/Gampoumlmbampoumlc Which are veiled spam pages. Pages full of inane babble about medical issues or personal drama, with the credibility and authority of a Yahoo Answers page. Just because people paid MetaFilter to post, and a site is heavily moderated, does not mean it adds anything to the search results for most generic search terms.

Then most links or interesting stories are from elsewhere on the web. MetaFilter is kinda like trying to rank with the old Digg comments: not the best place on the internet to read a discussion surrounding a topic. Why deserve to rank for linking to a funny or controversial news article, and riling up 15 comments or so?

In the end there may be far more natural reasons for this. The user signals showed something was wrong with the site. People bounced a lot (be it the design, be it because you can't comment without paying, be it because 15 random internet comments have little value). In the meantime Reddit and other sites grew to large communities. You don't see Reddit comment threads ranking all too high either, unless they are really special, popular or significant, like the president doing an AMA.

Do notice the Apple logo on the side of one of the sketches:

http://www.seobythesea.com/wp-images/yahoo-virtual-reality-g...

And the talk of virtual reality games (without actually building them):

A virtual World Of Warcraft-type overlay can be generated that is superimposed on the real world by wearable device instead of being viewed on a computer screen. According to the virtual overlay, user can be enabled to play in the real world, but be fighting virtual characters.

From: http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/04/yahoo-exploring-virtual-r...

I find this discussion somewhat tiring. It seems that people want to talk about age discrimination, about like-ability, about luck, about SEO being a dirty thing, about 10 minutes being too short for an interview, about outsiders not making it in, about Yelp not being a competitor to online service directories etc.

If they asked: where do you see yourself in 5 years? What is your long-term strategy to entrench yourself in the rankings? And did not receive a satisfying or believable answer, then no amount of help and teaching will suffice. Else YC could better buy that company, outsource some SEO and design and do it themselves. Then they don't have to do it by proxy with 2-year-old founders.

Crude: It does not matter what the point of YC is. The people at YC decide that, not us. What YC does with companies they accept has no bearing on what YC does not do with companies they rejected.

The reason for rejection does not make sense to you (and probably to Yogatrail, because they do not focus on the feedback). It probably made sense to YC, else why take such a decision? Again crude: Why is it relevant that you can not find reason in the rejection?

>unless one is to believe that nobody can ever build a successful specialized directory because Yelp ...

This is not the reason. The reason was that the company was unable to make YC believe that they had a solid marketing strategy and knew what they were doing, now and in the future. Then it does not even matter if they have the best strategies in the world, the take-away is that they failed to convey these strategies. What is more likely: That YC failed to understand what it takes to build a successful online business? Or that these founders kinda flunked the interview?

You have to be aware of Yelp if you are doing this. You have to discuss where you differ and what your plan is to take over their Yoga-services niche. After the latest search engine updates, thin content directories suffer. You have to be aware of this and make others believe you have the strategy to insert more quality content into your sites, to save that channel, and to open up other channels, so one channel can not break your entire business. Educate yourself, especially if you are an online business. Like design, not everyone is naturally good at it, but it helps to familiarize yourself.

>Did YC invite them because they were somehow going to be the New Yelp

At least a similar potential. If Yelp is totally unrelated, then you should be able to convince them of this. But IMO Yelp is not unrelated to an online services directory. Yelp has unique problems like Google taking their traffic with their own rating system, and they adapted well. If Yogatrail will face similar problems in the future, no one can tell, but if I were to invest money into a company, I'd want to know they have a strategy ready for when this happens, that they are aware that this can happen, that they know the webmaster quality guidelines and don't make million dollar SEO blunders. You can't really help and teach preparedness like this. Help and teach yourself: convince YC you know your stuff. You can't change it if YC does not get it. What you can change is your pitch: You did not get YC to get it.

Unfortunately, we were unable to get to believing that you had a strategy for supplanting Yelp as the top Google search results — having worked on SEO extensively in the past a better product often times isn’t enough.

I read this not bluntly as: You should be able to beat Yelp, else you will fail, I hone in on: 'unable to get to believing that you had a strategy'. From an outsider perspective this is unfortunately what happened: You did not have a solid enough online marketing/acquisition strategy (social, search, advertising, partners, email etc.), or failed to convey it during the interview.

I don't think yCombinator failed to see the market potential, in my view they are actively looking for potential (from SF-based sleeping bag site to world-wide bed and breakfast replacement). I also do not think you were invited to make them seem more outsider-friendly, only to have you be rejected for being an outsider. It is about the online marketing strategy. In their (and my) experience, just having a better site is not enough. For an online directory company, SEO should be in the companies DNA. Preferably a founder has knowledge on SEO and can weave marketing opportunities into the decision making process.

If you think back to the interview part about online marketing, do you remember there being confusion? Or not having a concrete answer at-the-ready? Did your pitch include a slide on marketing strategy?

Also, the questions they asked like: How are you different from competitor X? Were these questions unprovoked? If so, enhance your pitch by listing your competitors, and their differences, pro's and con's compared to your company. This preemptively clears away such doubts.

Take a look at Mint's pitch deck: http://www.slideshare.net/hnshah/mintcom-prelaunch-pitch-dec... They make you believe they've done their market research and have a solid customer acquisition strategy from the get-go. Perhaps you can use it to improve your pitch.

I'll have a deeper look at your website and perhaps will send you over some on-page SEO issues to fix or ignore. But strategy/conversion/campaigns will contribute a lot more.

Also, your site already looks great, you've told us you have decent numbers, a nice community, a great team, so probably: you will get there, wherever 'there' is.

By submitting an application to use the Services, if you are an individual, you represent that you are at least 18 years of age.

If you are 18 now I would try again. That they ignore requests from underage people is understandable, when their terms of service state that they are not allowed to join.

Did you not know this or did no one ever notify you of this? It seems that this phenomena does play a role in the online debate. People will say they've been banned and that they have no clue as to why, and that Google gave no reason or ignores their plight. Perhaps some of them did not read the terms of service too?

I see the same cognitive dissonance on SEO forums. People are most vocal when their site got hit with a manual penalty ("for no reason"). They'll ask why their SEO does not work as well, and then you see their sites and everything seems to violate a Webmaster Guideline.

It is not too nice to lose your payout days before you'll receive it. But it is also not too nice to steal money from Google and its advertisers with click fraud. I do not think that Google ONLY bans the fraudsters, never making any mistakes. But I also find it hard to believe that more than 50% of banned users are innocent. This tactic of killing accounts days before payout is to discourage the fraudsters and TOS-breakers, and I still think that is the majority of bans.

They do give you increasingly more information in Webmaster Tools about "unnatural links to your website": https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2700611?hl=en They task you to read the guidelines on linking: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356 and to apply your new-found knowledge to clear any suspicious links from your incoming links list. Then to kindly ask those other webmasters to remove those links (instead of spamming them for link requests). It is like a spammer rehabilitation program :). The spammer mindset is pretty cruel, selfish and destructive. You can't be too nice. That forms a pretty complex game theory with difficult opponents. Yet Google is somehow changing their opponents to clear up the spam they've created and cower in fear every time they announce an algorithmic update.

To equate Google.com with a scraper site that scrapes StackOverflow and tries to outrank the original by changing publishing date and other nasty tricks is not too sane. There is no double standard and there is no fair comparison.

It is not Matt Cutts who preaches how bad it is; it is the users (you and me) who are complaining about this and asking Google to take action. It is the user metrics showing something is wrong with the quality or experience.

Finally it is about intent. The spirit of the guidelines. It is only when blackhat spammers start exploiting techniques, that those techniques become punishable offences or are taken away. Google gives us popular search keywords? Spammers will automatically create crappy pages to target those. You can get a site to link to you by writing a quality article for their visitors? Spammers will write or outsource crappy articles and ruin article marketing for everyone. You are a charity and you want to create a widget with a link back to your site? Bummer... better add nofollow, because spammers used baity widgets like "Which zombie am I?" to link back to their clients' websites with targeted unrelated keywords.

If you go to the Google search results do you think: Damn what a commercial site! Animated ads everywhere! And all these scraped results they are trying to rank for without giving credit to the content creators...?

"Ads above the fold" are usually Google's own advertisements. They ding webmasters for forcing their own ads onto their readers. So it is a decision about quality and reputation, not money or bullying small sites.

Do the all-things-being-equal test. Two sites equal in all regards, yet one has animated advertisements above the fold. Which one would satisfy your users the most? It's a tiny factor, but it is there. And it is there for a good, not a nefarious, reason.

So there definately is an agenda. Google banned a few of these people's sites. They are not happy about that. But they still have something worthwhile to say right? Wrong. This is only written to create uninformed controversy and a difficult PR problem for Google.

They are not insiders leaking how big sites do shady SEO. They were creating spammy small sites and sometimes were sourced to write linkstuffed articles for bigger sites. They can see just as much as we can see.

We don't know if these tactics are even working. Maybe Google already discounted any links, through algorithmic detection, spam reports or manual spam fighters. Who knows? Certainly not the spammers that were caught time and time again: Proving Google is way ahead of them. Google can't ever say: These guys are right, we favor big sites. But that is the popular sentiment they are exploiting. One does not have to feel sorry for Google, but I hope people realize the position they're in here.

If you want to know more about how Google fights spam (they probably dinged a few major sites during the time it took me to write this post): http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/fighting-s...

If you want actionable SEO advice for your startup: http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marke... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El3IZFGERbM

Have a look at making your site work without JavaScript support or offer a <noscript> warning why you need JavaScript (and why the page has to be blank without it). Also look at adding fall-backs to your font stacks. If you use Ghostery then Typekit is blocked, which will render all fonts in the default browser font.

As for the content: Coca Cola and a 40$ soccer ball as an example of good design and cheap wheelchairs or prosthetic arms as an example of bad design confuses me. I won't form an opinion on this, as the only thing I could be sure of is that such an opinion would be misinformed, but that was the moment you "lost" me.

I do think this debate is welcome. I would probably be on the side of those that say: intent alone does not make a great product, but the intent is still good. I'd rather see 10 more people try and fail to bring mediocre products to the 3rd world, then to see 10 more sites like this and nothing really happening.

If your vision is so counter to the market, that for it to work it has to change the entrepreneurial mindsets of a majority, then that vision is not too compatible. Is that because the vision is not pragmatic and realistic, or are these entrepreneurs really all building shitty products? It seems like it willingly creates a chicken and egg problem where the rest does not even see one.

If you manage to sell this on the black market, that money is worth half when turned into "legit" money that you can spend. If we leave aside "I'm afraid to get caught" do we mean "caught by the justice system"? What would happen if you sell your exploit to some cybermob and a few days later, some monkey on a typewriter, finds your exact exploit and publishes it online? Not your problem it is worthless now and some mob feels you sold them crappy gear?

As for the moral aspect. Think of anyone you hold in high regard, or have a loving relationship with. Selling an exploit that will be used for harm, might mean harm to those you hold dear.

Then there is this simmering thing in your subconsciousness. Some know how to put out that fire. Others wake up in a sweat years later, after a dream where their exploit is used to find and execute a political dissident. That is: You may very well come to regret a "bad" deed in the future, when your situations and responsibilities change. You won't lie on your death bed and think: "I wish I hadn't build that school, but taken the money and put a down-payment on my new bathroom."

It would have information like a unique security email contact, bounty for responsible disclosure and congratulations on a job well done.

These heartbleed attacks do scare me. They scare me enough that I get the feeling that resistance is futile. Changing your password on a few sites is not going to help when the opposition controls every bit of fiber between you and the website you're logging in on.

I do think that sites should disclose much more prominently when they were hacked. A few days ago there was the headline "Chrome inadvertently blocks wired.com". I think such a headline should be "Wired possible serving malware for a few hours yesterday". No "heartbleed.txt" hidden away, but a large banner across the top of the site: "We were hacked! Read more here! Update your virus scanners and scan your computer."

I think, actually, the core idea is a terrific one.

From [1]. [1] also has professor and doctor state that her models improved after adding GFT data. Data from search behavior does not have to replace CDC data. It can improve it. No myth.

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/03/13/289802934/googles...

A combination of GFT search behavior and actual CDC numbers produced the best model for the authors of this paper. The (media) spin is "GFT as a stand-alone flu tracker fails".

Perhaps the article would be of a different tone if the researchers had full access to Google's data. I don't think the mentions of irony, failure, misleading and hubris are deserved nor offer a fair portrayal.

Stop reading entreporn (blogs and forums celebrating the entrepreneurial lifestyle). It's an echo chamber. It gives you a warped view of success and what it takes to get there. Actionable content is remarkably thin. You are not learning from reading Techcrunch articles, you are procrastinating with the delusion of learning about business. It's entertainment.

Start meditating or exercising. You need something to take your mind of things or regain balance. Try 20 minute exercises.

And for the medical symptoms. Talk to a medical professional and listen. When they say: Sleep more and keep a healthy schedule, then do so.

Good luck and feel better soon!

I would hope that Google is able to detect abuse of their infrastructure for (D)DOS.

  All rights holders are certainly entitled to enforce their
  legitimate rights in a legitimate way. But they should not
  be permitted to do so in a manner that is abusive and/or to
  misuse these rights.

I would advise against this solution, over hosting your own images for some of these reasons:

- Accessibility issues: embedded images link target _blank to an unrelated page and source shows a lack of an alt-attribute and link description.

- Privacy issues: Embedding adds user tracking for Tumblr, Twitter and Getty Images. Unclear what is done with this data and which companies have access to it.

- Security issues: Embedding adds a third party website to your site, with all ability to execute code. Do you know for sure that Getty Images will disclose a hack, that their security is up to par with their target size?

- SEO issues: Google image results and iframed externally hosted duplicate images without a user-specifiable alt-attribute do not work well together. Furthermore you can't enrich your content with media, which may hamper web search results.

- Continuity issues: You won't know how aggressive, or low-quality the future advertisements will be. If your site happens to trigger for a porn related term, you run the risk of them bouncing your referrer (or breaking out of i-frame) for breaking their terms. Will you be notified if they discontinue an embedded image and what will the replacement content look like? How fast could you replace a few months worth of images if you want to switch?

- Legal issues: Their terms are clear. You can't use it commercially. So if you ever add advertising to your site or somehow monetize it, you run the risk of skirting the terms of service of a company that is known to aggressively litigate. You put your users at risk of downloading the image, hosting it somewhere, and getting fined, and you yourself probably run an increased risk, increased attention from Getty Images, when you embed their images. I know I would like to know what keywords appear on a page where my images are embedded, I know legal would probably like to add a PicScout scan to that crawler. BTW PicScout is known to report non-public placeholder images stored in hidden dev directories (http://www.extortionletterinfo.com/forum/getty-images-letter...)

  "Look, if you want to get a Getty image today, you can find
  it without a watermark very simply," he says. "The way you
  do that is you go to one of our customer sites and you
  right-click. Or you go to Google Image search or 
  Bing Image Search and you get it there. And that's 
  what's happening… Our content was everywhere already."

"And that's what's happening". Yes, and what happens next is that Getty Images places the misleading "royalty free" on their sites and that using an image found on Google Images on a personal blog gets you a letter from one of their lawyer companies. First few years those letters were sent, not over snail mail, not in the Dutch language, but addressed to postmaster@example.com with references to Irish laws that don't apply here, yet with a deadline to pay up.

With claims of on average a few hundred Euro's vs damages of max. 20-30 Euros, many suspected that Getty profited heavily from having their pictures "everywhere already", preferably not with the original license intact, adding to the profitable confusion.

"Free to use" I don't believe in with this company. It wouldn't surprise me if heavy use of non-watermarked image embedding will lead to more spurious copyright infringement claims [2].

Disclaimer: I received such a letter a few years back when a client provided a thumbnailed image of a pizza they had right-click-saved somewhere. The letter claimed damages for using a full-resolution image with all the publishing rights totaling 750Euro.

[1] English source: http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/2008/05/watching-getty-i...

[2] About Pic-Scout, their image crawler, not respecting robots.txt and being very difficult to block, search "picscout robots.txt"

No, you probably do not necessarily need a Hadoop cluster to work with a 120GB file. With Python and Pandas you could probably run through it on a budget laptop. But data will always be relative to your companies size and current know-how. In the most banal way: Data can be big data, because some manager can't open it in Excel.

I wonder how realistic this goal is. Forcing states to pass legislature to ban offering help in any way to the NSA? Million dollar contracts down the drain, because a local government official turns off the water tap, turning data centers into ghost towns? Seems like a very long shot.

Secondly I wonder how the pro's and con's weigh up. I think even the staunchest supporters of (internet) freedom would, at least to some extend, agree that intelligence gathering and spying is a current necessity for a world power like America. It would probably put their entire military in danger for intelligence efforts to drop to zero.

That "the people" in general want things to change is clear and efforts to create such change are mostly noble. I think a balance can be found where the NSA acts within bounds, with oversight and transparency. Where companies can disclose the numbers on information requests. None of these secret court shenanigans anymore. Versus an NSA that does what it is made to do, does its job well (hiring proud academics included), and generally works in the interest of all American people (and their allies). There should be a balance between boundless spying and no spying at all.

The blocking of TBP and all known proxy IP's was a huge stink. Persistent pirates will find it easy to circumvent this. They may even abandon public tracker torrents and flock to Usenet. I think the goal is to make the life of the common pirate more difficult. Many moms and pops only knew how to download a movie from TPB. Once they saw the "The court ordered us to block this page" they stopped watching movies or went back to ordering DVDs.

Just a few weeks ago BREIN send its threatening letters to amateur subtitle sites and their uploaders (for unlicensed derivative works). Piracy on the whole will not be hampered when pirates can't download the Dutch subtitles to an English movie. Just a few kids, deaf people and older folk who have trouble understanding English, or the few anime lovers who can't fully speak Japanese. So what _have_ they accomplished with this? A big stink. A nice report to give to those that fund them. Shown that they are willing to align themselves with Hollywood's agenda (I bet the idea to start going after subtitle sites originally came from there). Shown that they are deserving of (more) funds.

If we all agree that facilitating copyright infringement is against the law, then blocking sites that exist to facilitate copyright infringement does not seem too harsh or close to censorship to me. If you want to avoid sites being closed for being against the law, then lobby to change/overhaul copyright law.

It is worth looking into from an SEO perspective, site (index) health perspective and to ultimately prevent/minimize problems like these.

In my opinion these links do not belong in the index. https://mail.google.com/mail/ should have been the Canonical. Big companies expose the contents of SMS messages, who contacts who, and sometimes even what their users search for.

Now these pre-filled "to"-field links were picked up by accident with the automated sitelinks algorithm. It could have contained a pre-filled "body" too, maybe some spam or maybe a crude online link to make an appointment and have certain fields filled in.

Webmasters can prevent this by specifying Canonical and cultivating the search index quality by only letting bots index unique quality pages, not for example have pages and pages of user-generated search results (Consider noindexing /search/results/), open redirect link(spam), or indexing every possible way a user may change your URL parameters and posting a link of that somewhere to be picked up by the search bots.

>Use of the Google Publisher Plugin is governed by Google's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

This is also a first for me. Anyone know of other Wordpress plug-ins which enforce their own Terms of Service and Privacy Policy?