Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I started making list of junk websites who are advertising on my website. And this list doesnt seems to come to an end. They are simply too many!
What do you do when you are bombarded by such junk ads on your website? Obvioulsy such ads reduce your earnings, your visitor experience and quality of ads. I can already feel increase in my income when I blocked many of them. But still, I have many websites and every industry seems to come with its own set of MFAs
Serious suggestions needed!
Not a good idea at all... how many legit business would be blocked? Think about it.
Thought about it. If it's opt-in, then it's something that has to be maintained by the publisher. If not, then ads will not be displayed. Not much different than the publisher choosing to remove adsense from pages. G deals with that just fine. The whole point is to give the publisher some control over the ads on their site, should they want that control. As I said before, all the people who don't opt-in can happily continue to run MFAs.
If the landing page couldn't have adsense I don't think MFAs would make enough to make AdWords worthwhile for them.
I just found a new (to me) type of made for adsense site. They use material from Wikipedia for their content. I blocked it right away.
If Google just stuck to their TOS and didn't allow MFAs there would be no problem. And when I say made for adsense I mean a site with either no content or content copied from elsewhere.
See if you get a response.
FarmBoy
As someone pointed out correctly, scrapers were dealt with by the SEARCH team within Google. Their sole responsibility is to cough up search results that make sense to the end users. This is the core of Google. With bad search results, users stop using Google, and then Googles core revenue stream would break away. - Interesting fact is that Google always has made a point in saying that search is completely independent from other units.
But - with MFAs it's different. MFAs can only be dealt with jointly by the Adwords and Adsense teams. And from corporate experience I guess this is much more difficult than we all think, because they probably have different Key-Performance-Indicators (KPIs), something like this:
Adwords team: "Maximize revenue from Adwords!" and perhaps "Maximise number of advertisers using Adwords", but this would be just a way to reach the key goal. Clear focus is on generating cash from search and 3rd party publishers.
Adsense team: "(1) Maximize number of publishers providing space for Adwords advertisers, and (2) minimize the traffic aquisition cost to increase profit for Google" - If they had a goal for quality, we would see this in the program.
In order to make us publishers happy (and -as we believe- subsequently also the advertisers), these goals need to be balanced out. So I guess there may be a hard fight at Google going on. Adwords team saying: "I don't care where the money's from, we have superhigh targets". Adsense team saying: "With all those crap advertisers, our publisher base erodes." (which is a weak argument, because they managed to acquire enough new advertisers so far to reach their targets.)
But all-in-all, as Adwords are the Sales force within Google (and all other functions just supporting), I guess they basically run the company.
Also, their is the possibility that there is no real conflict. The Adsense team can also opt to not care, because their targets do not conflict directly (yet). Today, both teams can easily reach their targets - Adwords maximizes revenue, while Adsense acquires new publishers (possibly also at lower costs, very handy). Who cares that these new advertisers and publishers are MFAs and Affs., harming the overall perception of Google, Google Adsense, and the publishers?
What can help right now is an intervention from higher forces at Google (Larry, Sergey, Eric?) to stop this and to make a sustainable model out of the Adwords/Adsense combo. But how big is their interest in getting a sustainable model running?
As I have said numerous times before, I am very convinced that any contextual ad system will win that understands that forces need to be balanced out between advertisers and publishers. The main reason being that publishers are soooo fed up with this stuff, that they will run for any competitor that offers better tools to control the ads showing on their pages. (Yo, Microsoft and Yahoo! are YOU listening at least?)
I've seen a couple of websites where adsense is displayed with a few paragraphs of text on the subject - kind of like wikipedia. The paragraphs have links which link to other pages with more information, more keyword links and adsense. This too is an MFA but the website has some use and gives the visitor some information. How would Google distinguish between a useful and partially useful website?
If smart pricing works then Google is getting many thousand small value click percentages. This I'm sure makes them a LOT of money but the problem is the loss of credibility. The problem is that they are letting these MFA people put stuff on THEIR search results pages too and IT WILL eventually reflect upon them.
I think the only possible solution is this: This needs to be incorporated on both the adwords and the adsense sides of the business.
When any advertiser puts a landing page that has adsense on them GOOGLE needs to review it. Redirects are anyways NOT allowed so that should be monitored too.
If they want to automate it a little - just check if the landing page has more adsense code than text. DON'T ALLOW IT. I am sure that will get rid of many MFA ads and I guess the MFA's will adjust by adding more text.
Now we move to adsense side. If the click on the adsense came from a visitor who landed through adwords. Smart price it to a value lower than the value of the click by one cent which the website owner bought. Just for that first click so that actual SERP clicks and subsequent page views are not affected. If there are more than one page views it possibly means the website is decent and not an MFA [higher probability]
People who have genuine content websites won't get affected too much and can even think of making use of adwords to build visitors [without the profit factor]. In a way they will ALMOST break even with their ad budget by the subsequent page views.
very good suggestions on how to overcome this. The central question, again, is:
Does Google regard MFAs as a problem?
If the answer is "no", then every additional word on this is just time wasted.
If, however, the answer should be "yes", then a couple of questions have to be asked:
- Who within Google thinks this is a problem?
- What is holding them back?
- Are these people empowered to change the situation?
And only then we have to ask, whether they have got the right tools to change it?
My analysis brings me to the conclusion, that currently the Adwords group is driving the company, because they are the only group generating cash (i.e. providing ad space in exchange for cash).
Just think about it:
Search team - caring just for the core product, making sure that suitable ad space is available for Adwords team to sell.
Adsense team - just making sure that there is more ad space available for Adwords team to sell (Adsense has a lower priority than Search, though, as the Adsense network has just a profit margin of roughly 20%, while search has a profit margin of 100%)!
All the others - Earth, Print, Mobile, GMail, Froogle, News, Base, Groups, and so on and so on, are neglectable due to missing relevance (in terms of cash generation). These are either PR stunts in order to keep the attention level high, or labprojects-turned-products without real value to end consumers. Also, maybe Google shells out new services by the dozen because they hope that one of these new services is the next killer application?
All-in-all, I think that some people at Google ARE AWARE of the situation, but they can not react properly right now, because they are not empowered.
Right now I think there are too many people in their management who have to care about the money Google generates for their shareholders. I hope they will understand in time that it's the peoples' trust that is making them money and these things are just degenerating Google's value in their eyes.
All these MFA's can make them a temporary "big money" generating Media Company but it won't last long. Unless they do something concrete about it. It's about trust and Google seems to be loosing ground on that front.
Okay many of you guys said that if the website runs adsense you block it.
I don't see that many people are saying they block just because a website happens to have AdSense displayed - other criteria is involved. It's certainly not my view. There are many very good sites that have AdSense and I gladly link to them. Many newspaper sites have AdSense now for example. I think you need to consider what else is on the site - not just whether or not it displays AdSense.
When any advertiser puts a landing page that has adsense on them GOOGLE needs to review it.
I've said previously and I'll say it again that I don't think that's a feasible approach. A site can be changed at any moment. What they review and accept today might be different tomorrow.
They could stop accepting new sites into AdSense today and just reviewing all the current sites on a regular basis would be an overwhelming task.
If they would just enforce the terms they have now (make the terms less ambiguous if necessary) by warning a few sites each day and then banning those that persist - word would spread like wildfire and 90% of the problem would disappear very soon.
They seem to be serious about click fraud - review some of the "I was banned by AdSense" threads. The word spread and people are scared about clicking just one link on their site by accident.
FarmBoy
My father-in-law is a web newbie, and recently asked me 'what are those useless sites with no content which I find when I follow links'. I asked him to show me what he meant, and he was referring to MFA sites using adsense.
I've been running adsense for some time and have optimised with different positions, ad block sizes etc, but never filtered out anything other than 'head-on competition' before. After reading this thread a couple of days ago I decided to follow the example of several posters and block everything which I see as competition.
Two days in the results are startling: a marked improvement in CTR and an even larger improvement in effective price per K. But most interesting: referrals to, and sales via my main affiliate have perked up a treat.
But they dont bring anythint to the network. They just form another layer between the real advertisers with a fixed advertising budget and the real content publisher.
They take the money from real advertisers and then feed most of this straight back to google. Net result is that real publihers are sharing their advertisers budgets with the mfas who in turn return the majority to google. Google and mfa win. we lose. But real content users will migrate to better networks, eventually, if it continues. Then the mfas, mfyahoos, mfaff. etc will have nobody to "piggyback".
It should tell us something that Google has not acted YET in this respect. I think that they are currently more focused on fulfilling short-term analyst expectations (to keep the share price up, allowing them to sell more shares to the market) than on building a quality service.
Then again, I still have hope that they are aware of the problems and have silently begun to work on a solution that will be introduced when Y! and MSN go international?!
What we are calling MFAs are often pages of affiliate links, yahoo ads, as well as or instead of adsense ads.
So even if google ban adsense being displayed on contentless sites, or sites with little or dubious content, the problem will still exist.
The only real solution is for google to only allow adwords ads for sites that have zero advertising. Only allow sites that actually sell a product or service. Not just the landing page either, all pages.
Anything else is not worth implementiug. They will need to thoroughly vet all sites advertising on their network if they do not want adsense to go the same way banner ads went years ago. Everybody soon learned to avoid those.
If the click on the adsense came from a visitor who landed through adwords. Smart price it to a value lower than the value of the click by one cent which the website owner bought.
So nothing gained.
Adwords need to look at EVERY site the ad points to. If it has ANY ads its bad. It needs to be removed. Eventually we get back to the original system where genuin useful content pages have ads gfor real products and serviuces.
Nothing else will work. Other than a huge filter and a webmaster with lots of time on a weekly basis.
The only real solution is for google to only allow adwords ads for sites that have zero advertising. Only allow sites that actually sell a product or service. Not just the landing page either, all pages.
So let's say the Dallas Morning News' website has an article on a political corruption investigation they did. The page also has an image ad for a Dallas Chevrolet dealership. You wouldn't allow the DMN to purchase an AdWords ad for their article because of the Chevrolet dealership ad?
Or a blog about the plastics industry wouldn't be able to purchase an AdWords ad because they don't sell any plastics from the site?
FarmBoy
The only real solution is for google to only allow adwords ads for sites that have zero advertising. Only allow sites that actually sell a product or service. Not just the landing page either, all pages.
This isn't going to happen. One of Google's examples on how Adsense or Adwords can work for a client showed them how they can gain more business by advertising, yet offset the cost by showing ads. Arbitrage is fine by Google, and they aren't going to change.
I have run adwords campaigns to get more traffic to my site. In my case, it wasn't to make a profit, but to get extra "Bum's on seats" looking at the content. As it happened most of my campaigns usually manage to either break even or have minimum loss. You would ban me from doing this. I admit I'm a rare case though.
You aren't going to get shot of all junky ads. Having better facilities to manage the blocklist are reasonable requests, and that's what I believe we should concentrate on lobbying for.
Even if content sites do manage to become MFA free, there is still a problem that Google aren't going to solve. Namely that the vast majority of ads that show up on Google search pages are MFA's. people are reaslising that most ads aren't worth clicking, so the trend is increasingly becoming one of "Don't click on the spam". Whilst Google continues to show MFA's on it's search pages, this message of don't click the spam will be reinforced, so people will exhibit the same behaviour patern when visiting content sites - even clean ones.
I was doing a search on Google for site: my site, and right up there in third place was this site that did not have my name anywhere in the url. I went there and saw a page with a block of adsense ads and nothing else.
I did a view source to see what the heck was going on and I was floored!
The source code was my entire index page in the top half BUT In the bottom half was my son's web page of his largest site ( he is way above the UPs club and earns a ton of money for Google).
I promptly reported them did not hear anything back from Google AND the darn thing is still on the web a week later!
I just spent a half hour picking more fleas (MFA ads off my site and I am disqusted! I think my visitors have gotten clickshy, since November my clicks have gone down to half of what they were.
Ann
I promptly reported them did not hear anything back from Google AND the darn thing is still on the web a week later!
If your experience is anything like mine, you won't hear anything. Google isn't interested.
My son got diagnosed with a huge abdominal cyst the size of a grapefruit last Monday (it was removed and he's doing fine now). In my search for information on the particular cyst, I looked at the ads appearing on the search pages. I didn't actually see an Ebay affilliate advertising "New and used cysts at rock bottom prices", but all the ads I did see displayed were MFA's - mostly scrapers. OK, I probably wasn't in the best of moods to appreciate the valuable services these advertisers obviously have to offer, but it only goes to show that the serps are currently infested with fleas, and unless Google resolves the MFA problem, including MFA's on search pages people will simply not click on ads, and Google will have killed the goose that was laying their golden eggs.
RIP Google Inc. I wonder who will be the top search engine then? Maybe someone will buy the search engine bit at rock bottom prices from the liquidator, and restore it to being a search engine that worked well, as opposed to the biggest collection of spam on the planet.
I'm resolved not to click on the ads on search pages now even moreso than ever.
Ann - if your Son complains to Google they will probably listen. If he's a big client then threatening to pull the ads off his site and go to the media with the story should make them resolve this for you both :)
Oh, what the heck - go to the media anyway!
FarmBoy
One of the problems is that we are calling these things MFAs when only about half use adsense on their sites.
MFA can equal "Made For Ads", can't they? Affiliate links are basically ads. Adsense is ads. YPN is ads. Maybe we just need to agree on what the "A" stands for, since MFA can cover a lot of sites that are pretty much built for showing ads only.
I didn't actually see an Ebay affilliate advertising "New and used cysts at rock bottom prices"
Okay, I had to laugh at this one. My grandmother was having some problems (eventually they found colon cancer), and I was searching for some of her symptoms.
I kid you not: I saw an ad that said, "Want Cheap Rectal Pain?"
(It wasn't an adult site, either.)
I could not possibly make that up.
Sometimes, you really don't want to fill in your ad with the keywords people are searching for.
JK
[edited by: jatar_k at 6:52 pm (utc) on April 4, 2006]
I kid you not: I saw an ad that said, "Want Cheap Rectal Pain?"
Amazing how a mindless algorithm can generate such marketing genius. I wonder how many curiosity clicks this ad produced.
It appears that they have changed as before the ads by google was in a foreign langage but now they are like everyone else's.
that has to be a part of those MFA's that has a 1000 pages or more out there.
Son trusts Google to handle it so......... He's too busy with his sites. :(
[edited by: martinibuster at 4:02 pm (utc) on April 5, 2006]
*************
<SNIP>
Please note that #*$!xxxxx.com is not that much traffic exchange but MFA pages. After requesting a little bit more info here is what I got:
*************
<SNIP>
*************
IMO this is either "We are working on getting those MFAs out" or "I can not tell you that we will not stop them, but we will not."
Go figure
[edited by: martinibuster at 4:06 pm (utc) on April 5, 2006]
[edit reason] See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
