There’s an interesting article over at Forbes which discusses arbitrage with Shoemoney & Graywolf which is worth a read. The article takes a look at how artbitrage started, how it has since developed with the ppc algo and how profits in some cases are in fact flourishing further since the landing page algo was introduced for those experts who know how to play the system.

A couple of interesting points from the interview -

Schoemaker insists he and others have in fact found a way to circumvent the crackdown. He says he uses techniques like “cloaking” to fool Google’s algorithm. Arbitrageurs know the search engine’s IP addresses, the fingerprints that reveal the source of any Web page visitor. So Schoemaker says he sets his web pages to automatically display legitimate content to the Google spider, while giving other users the ad-filled arbitrage page. Schoemaker says that makes him virtually immune to Google’s quality-regulation measures.

The article continues -

In fact, search engine marketers say that cloaked arbitrageurs profit from Google’s attempts to shut down their schemes. Each new restriction in quality scoring weeds out less-professional competitors, lowering the auction price of the Adwords used for arbitrage

It certainly looks like Google have someway to go yet to get even close to stopping arbitrage. Thats going on the basis that they actually want to remove it all…

UPDATE - Check out Shoemoneys new post where he is pretty adament that the Forbes article completely misrepresented him.