Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Basically it bills itself as a "Web directory", and consists of pages of links. It has no actual content relevant to the topic apart from a news ticker.
It carries no other advertising apart from Adsense, and has two or more adsense banners per page.
Thing is, a fair proportion of the links are to my content - and according to the web logs I'm getting traffic from the site. The other good thing in a way is that the links are all to reasonably good information. The problem in my sector is mis-information!
Therefore I personally am not bothered by it's existence, but I get the feeling that if it's made for adsense then I should consider reporting it.
My query then is from the description above, could it class as a genuine links directory, or does it sound like purely made for adsense?
Advice please?
It's too subjective, let Google make the call.
Why in the world should you make yourself Google's Policeman? You're just one guy -- they have a MUTLI-NATIONAL CORPORATION worth BILLIONS OF DOLLARS at their disposal.
I'm always curious by posts like this. Is it all altruistic, I wonder, or is it because of some sense of jealousy? Some envy?
Mind you, I'm not accusing you of anything, but it does make me wonder why strangers are so overly concern about what other strangers are doing, when the chances of that person's actions having an impact on yours is absolutely nil. Do you really think this guy's site, or a thousand like it, or millions, will impact your earnings? I highly doubt it.
Instead of busying yourself complaining about other sites why don't you concentrate on your site because long term these scraper made for adsense sites will not be around forever and the likes of you and I will not make any difference to the enormous job google have of cleaning up this garbage.
If you want to bring undue attention to YOUR website, go ahead and report it.
As I said in the original post, I get referrals from the site, and in a sector where there are a fair few Mis-information sites, having a site that does link to quality information (even if it was MFA) is a good thing. Of course it doesn't affect my visitor stats or adsense earnings, except potentially in the positive direction. Clearly the correct course of action is to work on converting their referrals into clicks for me!
In my opinion there is nothing inherently wrong with making a site to produce adsense income as long as there is good quality content. Those scraper sites are wrong because they use other people's content to do so.
The site in question didn't steal my, or anyone esle's content. Nor did it have any actual content of it's own - just pages of links. I personally didn't see anything wrong with this. I was just curious as to if the site fitted in with what others consider would describe as a) some form of MFA site, and b) reportable.
I suppose the only thing I'd say is that if it were me making up this site, then I'd at least have addded a moderate amount of content!
People underestimate the quality of clicks comming from MFA sites. I keep repeating this, the clicks from such sites are equivalent, or at most a slightly lower quality than not-MFA sites. Do you honestly think that, after reading a review about a device, and clicking the adsense ad about it, the costumer is gonna buy it imediatelly. Lets not lie to ourselves here.
MFA sites provide the basic service of collecting traffic from obscure search queries and directing possible customers in the right direction.
Google has the ability and their own methods to deal with MFA, spam, click fraud and all. Unless your buisness is DIRECTLY victimized by someone's practices, you have no right to report that person.
Unless your buisness is DIRECTLY victimized by someone's practices, you have no right to report that person.
Sure, you do. Nobody has to give up a legal or moral right just because an anonymous stranger said "you have no right" on this forum. :-)
I don't go around reporting made-for-AdSense sites to AdSense Support, as a rule, because I'm sure that Google is well aware of them. However, if I'm searching on a topic and find a scraper directory site (with or without AdSense ads) in the #1 spot, I'll often report it to Google Search via the "Dissatisfied?" form because it's in my own interests to help Google Search do a better job. (Just the other day, I was looking for information on a prescription drug's side effects, and all of the top 10 search results were pharmaceutical affiliate pages or AdSense scraper sites. You can be sure that I complained to Google about those search results!)
If it isn't, it won't make that much and the webmaster himself will probably get rid if it.
Just let it be - things work themselves out in the end.
