Well, this is pretty appalling.

I click a link in an email I received via Google Alerts and am taken to a website, but before I can actually view the page, I have to click “not interested” to a pair of roadblocks preventing me from seeing the page.

Really?

For a moment, can you imagine what the web would be like if even a tiny percentage of sites adopted such a scheme?

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re considering adding this type of functionality to your website or, worse, if you’re engaged in selling this boneheaded idea to websites, you need to be taken out and flogged.

Or so it seems from the message Klout is showing today:

Soon, Klout will release an update to the scoring system that will make your Klout Score more accurate and easy to understand. Please note that you won’t be able to access your previous Score and history after this release.

We will also update the website to give you greater insight into your Klout Score and to provide a fresh outlook on your influence. Stay tuned…

So it sounds like they’re pretty much throwing everything out and starting over from scratch. At least that’s how I read the fact that previous score and history will be heading to the recycle bin.

Whatever they’re doing, it can’t be worse than whatever they’re doing now. I find that it’s not unusual for me to have a very active week on social media and my Klout score goes down, followed by a very meager week of activity in which my score goes up.

None of this would be worth the proverbial tinker’s cuss, of course, except that a lot of job descriptions that involve social media are asking for Klout scores of a certain level.

Takeaway for marketers: Keep it real: Take anyone’s Klout score with a Brobdingnagian grain of salt.

Chris Abraham has a terrific post addressing this question over on Business 2 Community. Go read it.

As to the central question Chris poses: Blogger outreach is, hands down, earned media. Oh, and by the way: If you’re going to be doing outreach, do it right. Anti-Social Media has some good advice.

Takeaway for marketers: Sure, you can buy blogger coverage, but by doing so you’re effectively buying lousy ads; the best result of blogger outreach is unbiased positive coverage of your product or service.

Thinking about advertising on Facebook? You might want to think again: According to one advertiser, 80 percent of the ad clicks are coming from bots. WordStream reports.

Takeaway for marketers: This is another reason why clicks really don’t matter. It’s all about performance. Getting a million clicks with zero sales is pretty worthless, isn’t it?

One Page Love showcases the best ones you’ll find anywhere … or, perhaps better expressed: the best ones they’ve found so far.

Takeaway for marketers: Do you really need all that website? Sometimes not so much.