ronin - 9:09 pm on May 14, 2007 (gmt 0)

I think it's probably helpful to distinguish between the concepts of quality traffic and quality content.

The former is traffic which yields conversions for the merchants - assuming that the merchant site converts - while the latter is well researched, useful, original information. These are two completely different things.

Quality content may or may not yield quality traffic.

Likewise, low-quality content may or may not yield quality traffic.

In an ideal universe all quality content pages send quality traffic while MFAs never do. But we know that isn't going to be the case.

Pages which send quality traffic (ie. people looking to buy) are most likely to be pages which people read as preparation for buying something.

So... an amateurish page which compares credit cards, for instance, is going to be most heavily visited (we might assume) by people looking to obtain a new credit card. Consequently the traffic that it sends through adsense panels advertising credit cards is going to be higher quality (ie. more likely to convert) than an identical panel appearing next to a high quality online newspaper article talking about how the population has never been so up to its eyeballs on credit card debt.

In this case the page with quality content yields lower quality adsense traffic than the low-quality page.