Is the Inter­net mar­ket­ing indus­try implod­ing? I think it is. But if not, it sure seems like it. In fact, it seems to be a sign of the times.

For exam­ple, we see it with the FTC crack­ing down on mis­lead­ing adver­tis­ers, Visa and Mas­ter­Card clos­ing down mer­chant accounts for forced con­ti­nu­ity billings, and Google per­ma­nently ban­ning adver­tis­ers for rea­sons still unclear but some­how related to the lat­est crackdown.

Harsh? Per­haps. But we can’t say we didn’t see it coming.

Remem­ber, it was about three years ago — wow, has it been three years already? — when my wife, Sylvie Fortin, put out her scathing report, called “Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Sins.”

It was highly con­tro­ver­sial at the time because peo­ple didn’t expect it. How­ever, since then many mar­keters, blog­gers, jour­nal­ists, dis­grun­tled clients, unpaid affil­i­ates, even social media experts have joined in the cho­rus. Some, qui­etly. Oth­ers, not so quietly.

For instance, copy­writer Ryan Healy ruf­fled a few feath­ers recently by post­ing a scathing report, enti­tled “Inter­net Mar­ket­ing on Life Sup­port,” in which he sin­gled out a few mar­keters for their ques­tion­able, uneth­i­cal, or allegedly ille­gal practices.

One com­menter praised Ryan for his will­ing­ness to name names, and by the same token crit­i­cized my wife for not doing so in her Sins report. In fact, since it was pub­lished, we received a lot of flak for not nam­ing names. I cer­tainly under­stand their cynicism.

So I’m tak­ing this oppor­tu­nity to elab­o­rate on why we chose not to name names.

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Thanks for being patient with me. I haven’t posted in a while because of some­thing that hap­pened last week.

You see, my blog was hacked (not by a per­son but with mali­cious code that creeped into my blog), and as a result I was blocked by Google. I’m sure you’ve heard about it, as peo­ple talked about the news.

How did it get blocked?

When­ever my site(s) came up in Google, there was a “this site may harm your com­puter” warn­ing. And when peo­ple clicked on my link, it lead them to a Google error page pre­vent­ing peo­ple from access­ing my site.

Appar­ently, Google checks its indexed pages against a data­base of “known offend­ers” (at Stop​Bad​ware​.org, which is sim­i­lar to many IP black­lists for spam), and turned all my list­ings on Google to unreachable.

So my site wasn’t banned. But the worse part was, Google not only blocked my site but also dis­played a dire warn­ing that my site was mali­cious! (You can only imag­ine what kind of dam­age this can cause to someone’s reputation.)

But that’s not all…

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