gethan - 9:21 am on Jun 15, 2004 (gmt 0)

A <low quality "sewer"> site had the URL posted here about a week ago; since snipped (rightly). Now I reported this site to see what would happen, as I imagine many others did too.

Now:

- adsense still runs on the front page (before on every page)
- the "content" pages now run redirects to other sites - mostly gambling.
- the content is still just a huge pile of computer generated/stolen crap.

I'm very surprised that the front page still has ad's, no response from google to my complaint. I had also hoped that some kind of minimum quality of the site as a whole, would be required from google in order to be part of the adsense program - *sigh* - this doesn't appear to be the case.

I think one fundemental problem with adsense is the use of publisher id's rather than accepting and reviewing domains individually, OK so they avoid the problem of millions of domains to review - but the quality of sites that run adsense now is sometimes so low it's truely unbelievable.

Additionally - this type of site does impact revenue for the better quality sites in the program. The budgets of advertisers are used up on the sewer sites, leading to less money available for the quality sites. How can this be a good thing?

We all have different opinions as to what constitutes quality, some advertisers claim that it doesn't matter in any way except cost per conversion. But adsense on sewer sites will damage the programs longterm reputation - quality sites will move away from adsense to either the competition or to other forms of advertising. Adsense and it's format will become ubiquitous with low quality dross - this will mean lowered returns for those in the program - and so on. Hopefully the long term success of the adsnse program is important to google and they will start to operate more rigorous quality control on the sites in the program now.

Opinions?

[edited by: Jenstar at 5:17 pm (utc) on June 15, 2004]
[edit reason] corrected keyword [/edit]