A Government minister has been accused of being behind a company that sells software which increases a website’s ad revenue in breach of Google’s code of practice.
According to The Guardian, the HowToCorp business was set up by housing minister Grant Shapps in 2005, and his shares were transferred to his wife in 2008.
The company sells a product called TrafficPaymaster, which it is claimed plagiarises content – by using a technique called ‘scraping and passing off’ – from other websites to attract advertising from Google.
Websites are paid for hosting ads on Google’s behalf using the AdSense service, which scans a web page and posts adverts related to the content.
Google has strict rules on unoriginal content, with its AdSense policy warning: “Scraping content and passing it off as one’s own is not only wrong, but it also happens to be a serious violation of our policies.”
The Guardian said sources at Google had confirmed that TrafficPaymaster was in violation of its policies and that its search engine’s algorithms had “been equipped to drop the ranking of any webpages created using HowToCorp’s software”.
A spokesman for Shapps told the paper: “Grant Shapps derives no income, dividends, or other income from this business, which is run by his wife Belinda.”
