Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I will admit that I have recently created a site for Adsense. But it is a high-quality information site which has an obvious usefulness and can also survive on a number of other business models as a result. And I plan to continue to invest in it (as you can easily confirm through a mutual friend). This is a far cry, I think, from the kind of site that you are talking about, of which there are many.
I would love for Google to become more selective. Not ridiculously so, but it needs to acknowledge some control for the quality of the program. That should also have the side benefit of eliminating a huge amount of fraud since fraudsters tend to be in it for the quick fixes and don't want to create quality.
In the grand scheme of things, I don't think it would be too expensive. They could hire 100 people, I think, and get rid of a lot of the crap sites (give them each 2500 publishers, with the requirement that they audit 50 per day). Fully loaded, it might cost them $10 million.
I think that might be an excellent investment in the future of the program. The larger cost for Google will be the lost revenues from those crap publishers. Hopefully Google will see the benefit, though, in restoring integrity to the web.
Except when they bid via adwords, then PUBLISHERS LOOSE 48+ hours of profits.
Convince G to forbid "Made for Adsense Adword bidders"!
So the real question is, what is good content. And I don't think any of us are in a position to decide on that, nor is Google. What they can do (and do) is look for duplicate content, and site-copying. And as long as you are the first one with the original content, and the good rep with the search engines, your content should win out over anyone who tries to copy (in my opinion ;-).
No Google ad may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant
I think the problem fixes itself. Most of these "made for adsense" sites don't get any respect in the search engine ranks, and hence no traffic,
Do you really think all those sites would be there if they were not making money. Those guys are getting checks from Fed Ex/UPS. Those things are getting churned out by the thousands every day. It is very simple. Google does ban them from the SERPS but they put up so many that they have 3 up b4 google takes one down.
Google does ban them from the SERPS but they put up so many that they have 3 up b4 google takes one down.
In addition, they are ranking on Yahoo and MSN. ;)
Now this is all from an image point of view.
Google, on the other hand, has it well controlled from a performance point of view. This is where smart pricing comes along. If these cheap made for Adsense sites are converting well, then we may not like it, but the advertiser's bottom line will speak for itself. If they aren't converting, then their PPC will be lowered accordingly.
There is a diverse population out there. Our bottom line is to drive sales. To some, a quality site is the answer; to others even Spam still drives the sales. As professionals, we might never stay in a crappy site for more than half a second, but maybe for the untrained eye, that crappy site might be the source of their pursuit of a product. They click on the ad and buy the product. Smart pricing identifies that behavior.
The larger cost for Google will be the lost revenues from those crap publishers. Hopefully Google will see the benefit, though, in restoring integrity to the web.
They're already taking action to reduce clutter on the advertiser side by eliminating most direct-to-merchant affiliate ads. That step may cut ad revenues in the short term, but Google obviously feels that it's necessary to the long-term viability of AdWords. Maybe we'll see Google clean up its act on the publisher side, too--unless, of course, they're hoping (perhaps too optimistically) that they can make scraper sites and other "junk sites" irrelevant through improved filtering in Google Search.
Helpfull my sites are! Yes!
Do you really think all those sites would be there if they were not making money. Those guys are getting checks from Fed Ex/UPS. Those things are getting churned out by the thousands every day. It is very simple. Google does ban them from the SERPS but they put up so many that they have 3 up b4 google takes one down.
Yup. I'm actually surprised how much traffic I get from some of those sites that simply grab the top 20 results out of Google (which includes my site), throw Adsense at the top, and that's it. There's one at least that enough people land on to give me 5 or 6 visitors a day (and my site isn't even in the top 3 for that keyword).
What's appalling is when these guys email and ask for a link.... bunch of keyword variation links down the left side and SE scraped listings for the content. I wouldn't link to that if they paid me.
At least they are making an effort - spending some money - tracking their own ROI
There is nothing wrong with this.
#2 I keep repeating myself - Google should make each pub submit a new site for approval before ads will run. And offer an express review service that we pay for.
I am as much against the scraped sites as anyone (though I don't seem to run into them as often as you guys do, thank goodness), but there is a small problem lurking in G having to approve each new site, even though I very much approve in principle.
I run a site with geographically-distributed mirrors for load balancing and (one day) graceful degradation if a machine fails; the main URL is an alias for all of the mirrors to give simple DNS-based round-robin-ish balancing.
Eg: there's mirror1.site.com and mirror2.site.com and mirror3.site.com which are all separate machines in separate racks with separate IP addresses, and there's www.site.com which is an alias for all three IP addresses; the user's browser picks one at random.
Sometimes, and for some types of recovery, you have to expose the mirror explicit URLs to the browser (I'm just hacking in some code to that effect now in fact).
Does that mean that I would have to get G to approve each individual mirror URL every time I add a mirror? Or just never have ads shown on the mirrors when a user sees the explicit URL? I can't see it as being worth their time or mine, frankly.
At the momemt the mediabot simply notes the access to the mirror URL and decides afresh what ads to display on the fly, which is OK.
G *could* approve *.site.com, which would more or less work for me, indeed might get the right ads showing quicker for mirror URLs, but it isn't quite what everyone has been talking about IMHO.
***ASA: do you have any view on this?
Rgds
Damon
Along these lines, the ultimate simplest solution is for G to forbid Google Ads or any other context based ads (or perhaps for that matter more than one affiliate link) on any landing page that they allow to BID for adwords. Plain and simple.
This had always been our company policy as a publisher selling advertising for years. Until GAd we refused advertising to other portals, many resellers, etc. and came to be THE most respected resource for our subject for doing it. Now we Filter as many as we can find in GAd.
Anyone doing this is obviously just in it to make money on passing on the referrals and doesn't qualify to be a publicher for GAd.
Nor do we consider them good enough for our visitors. If they were truly interested in selling something of their own, they wouldn't be so anxious to send their visitors to someone elses site. If they want to pick up excess funds they can put all the ads they want on a page other than the one they are supposed to be selling their product on. If they have any content of value the reader will eventually get there and find it when they are finished. As a searcher, I've experimented and found I've had to jump as many as 5 or 6 times between sites doing nothing but linking each other via blatant adsense ads like this, before finding the one or two sites who are actually SELLING the item. It's a game. Whoever finally GETS you to click on the money ad wins the big bid bonus. The others end up paying Adwords slightly more than they make from that Adsense click to waste your time. It's absolutely rediculous. It's a waste of the searchers time. The original publisher is the biggest loser in this and the only one who profits for sure in the end is G who gets 1-49% of each jump.
I agree that Adsense arbitrage is a huge problem. (I coined the term just now but then found that many others had coined it before me. No surprise there.)
These are the Enrons of the Internet.
