Forum Moderators: martinibuster
These people are hurting honest publishers in:
- Taking away visitors for pennies
- Paying pennies where you could make more
- Reducing our CTR and income
- Affecting visitors' trust in your sites
- Wasting everyone's time (visitors and publishers)
You can argue that Google provided the means to block those, but its like G opening the window and arming you with a tiny fly swatter, given the sheer number of pages you can have on your site and multiply that with the number of countries available for Geo Targeting, the task is almost impossible.
You can argue that they do generate some income, but 3 to 10 cents a click is about the maximum they can give, and if you think your content and time is not worth more than that, think again.
These people will target your site, and use every trick in the TOS to lower their pay, while honest retailers whose ads are 100 times more relevant to your content are being shouldered out!
The point for this long post is to ask:
- Why in the world is Google not finding them fast
- Why is Google allowing them in the first place
Their pattern is very easy to identify, the media partners bot does scan their pages right?
- What happens when you click the "Ads by Goooogle" link and report them?
- How come they are making money in the first place, if they are "exploiting a market inefficiency" as some here put it, why isn't big G analyzing those inefficiencies and sending more money our way and theirs?
- What is stopping Google from giving us an opt out option for ads that lead into pages containing AdSense?
- Does Google really stand to make more money if they seriously combat MFA?
Want to hear your views on this.
This high moral stance against chancers who are trying to play the algo (not break laws) worries me. This has happened since the web was first commercialised. Why all this vitriol against others when you should be getting on with your own great content? In the end only Google will sort it out with their algo.
One thing I will say is that the atmosphere on a black hat forum I read is often a lot friendlier than on WW.
Although personally I find the serps a mess right now I cannot and will not critisize webmasters who have found a sucessfull business model. Good luck to you.....and if Google decides you do not qualify under the adsense TOS then so be it, Until then ride the wave as long as you can.
Seems the business models of some webmasters has become an unacceptable proposition to some here. There is nothing against these sites as such in the TOS.
That depends on which sites you're discussing - and they all don't fit into a single "nothing against the TOS" category.
On the program policies page, AdSense writes of upholding the quality and reputation of AdSense and then lists respective do's and don'ts. The don't side of that list includes not placing ads on non-content-based pages and not placing ads on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant.
Some of the sites being discussed miss the mark.
farmboy
This high moral stance against chancers who are trying to play the algo (not break laws) worries me. This has happened since the web was first commercialised. Why all this vitriol against others when you should be getting on with your own great content? In the end only Google will sort it out with their algo.
I think the vitriol is aimed quarely at google. Why have a TOS if you simply won't enforce it - no matter how many rules a publisher breaks?
Example. There is a site I know of simply because it's advert appeared on my site (now blocked). No content - not even scraped. Adlinks unit on the left pretending to be site navigation, adsense unit on the right pretending to be content, and just in case you miss the adlinks / adsense combo, another adsense box as the footer! And if you wanted to go back to where you were you cant - back button disabled.
I don't normally bother to report sites - I just block them. However, this one I did report. Many times as both publisher and advertiser. It's still there unchanged. Why even bother to have rules if you have no intention whatsoever of inforcing them?
If this is Google's policy then fine - just re-write the TOS so we all know where we stand.
Not due to more tolerance or 'nicer' people Iguana, but due to hard working TOS abiding people fed up with this particular "black hat" technique going unchecked. I am yet to find a friendlier packed with like minded people forum.
Maybe you will understand with a little background:
I will never forget the feeling I had when I first discovered MFA ads on my site, I had been running my site for a year when I added AdSense, back then I did not even know what MFA is (obviously many still don't till today), many months pass and I heard about the preview tool and it was not nice, you know when you feel like you have been taken for a ride, I really felt sorry for my visitors, and the way they could have looked back at my site for sending them there, you see, most of the people that click those ads (at least on my site) are new to the web, not technical savvy people, people like you and I do not click on ads, they do, It was me who blended those ads within my pages, I felt bad for taking money for those clicks, even 1 cent, I just felt like a whore! I was offended and pissed, I take my content seriously, and feel responsible for the trust that many visitors put in my site, this is not a marketing cliché, this is how things are! Later I read here about their effect on your income, I have every right to ask why Google is allowing this, its the least hostile thing I can think of!
Obviously Google is not sleeping on the job. Why dont we give them more time to deal with the problem? MAYBE theyre still developing a better MFA filter, one which will never include the legit sites. Talk about mistaken identity.
And if you cant stand the thought of sending surfers to MFA sites thru your Adsense ads, you can always filter them out. :)
However, the best method (and the most responsive one) is to send an email directly to google support, adsense-support@google.com . They will respond to your message and forward it to their team of specialists. In some cases, they might even disable the website right on. I am talking from experience.
Right now, if I am correct, Google employs 5000 people. It's very generous if 20% of them work in the AdSense department (if such department exists). Just try to imagine how many thousands of people you'd have to hire to ban MFAs.
I remember when I was a kid I was with my dad and we needed to get into a remote locked gate. We had lost the key. Dad got out the bolt cutters and cut the lock off. I asked why bother with the lock if it was that easy to defeat. He told me, "locks are to keep the honest people out." He was right.
The same principle applies here. AdSense doesn't need thousands of people reviewing thousands of sites to make a huge dent in the MFA problem.
People on this forum and others are careful not to generate invalid clicks because they have read, again and again, the "I clicked on my ads and was banned" posts.
If AdSense would devote just a few people to warning or shutting down MFA sites and then notify those site owners of the reason, the word would spread fast (viral marketing).
The "honest" people would quickly make changes, cancel future plans, etc. to avoid choking the Golden Goose. Knowledge of consequences is a deterrent.
Then, with the size of the problem reduced, Google could allocate resources to the "dishonest." With some encouragement, the good publishers would report offenders and allow the Google staff to work on the response end instead of having to search for the bad guys.
farmboy
What David is suggesting is missing the point 100%. There aren't millions of entities creating these MFAs. There are probably 100 people autogenerating millions of pages/thousands of sites. And google has a name on each of those people. Put just ONE human being on the case, and it will take one week to get rid of the MFA problem for 90%.
If it exists today it's because Google wants to exist. Thinking any different is plain naive.
good, Google get a pencil and paper and add this to your list:
query the blocked URLS for all publishers, make a list arranged by most frequent occurrence first, work your way down this list till you bump into real publishers, and repeat every 3 months. I could do that for them on a home PC!
I wish it was a matter of smarts and simple common sense, we would not be all here talking about it if it was.
MFA pages problem is not a problem that google does not solve because it makes money. That's a faulty statement. I'm sure that Google is more concerned with MFA pages littering the search result. We all know that resent downgrade for directories was done to combat MFA and spam sites that looked as directories.
Smartpricing is the most effective way to fight MFA without hiring a huge staff off people.
Why doesn't google fight spam by people manually looking through all 8billion pages? Because algo is more efficient.
I totally agree with you. Like I said, the world is gray.
Guys,
This is AdSense forum. I believe everyone in this forum wants to make money with AdSense. If anyone doesn't, you shouldn't be here. It is hard to draw a line between MFAs and no MFAs since they both have AdSense in their sites.
My question is: why do you spend time and efforts to run your sites? Maybe all the sites we've created are MFAs, huh? Let's be honest.
[edited by: JohnDoealias at 7:04 pm (utc) on Nov. 15, 2005]
OK, the world is bright gray. :-) But still, it is between black and white.
Guys,
OK, I confess! I write my own contents. But I am not writing my contents for world's peace. I do it for better AdSense income! I hate to confess but I run MFA sites.
Cheers
MFA - Made for adsense. Most of our sites.
MEFA - Made exclusively for adsense.
MEFANOCO - Made exclusively for adsense with no content.
"Hey, I've seen some mefanocos lately searching for travel info"
Sounds funny! ;)
What's the diffrence between MFA and MEFA?
MFA: Most of our decent sites. Sites that you build thinking on adsense income, however they have nice content and you don't exagerate on ads unit. You made them for adsense. You wouldn't do it if adsense didn't exist.
MEFA: The kind of sites that most people hate. Look spammy, have many ads units, most ad units are blended, so getting high CTR based on clicks inadvertently on ads is the way of living. They may have good content, but adsense income seems the only important thing without thinking on getting a base of returning users.
Still I hate the mefanocos a lot.
Man, do you read newspapers? Have you read about click fraud, particularly cases when people create MFA sites and hire others in China and India to click them? 100 people creating MFA sites? How about more like 10000 to 100000? Simply check for ads that take people to MFA ads.
I am all for reporting abusers, but this approach is doomed. Next time you drive down downtown and see a dope dealer, pick up your phone and call the cops, see if that's stop drug dealing in your town.
100,000? No way. Not even close. Even if the people doing the tough labor are in India and China, the people hiring them are a handful in the U.S. Track down the people doing the hiring and you've made a huge dent overnight.
Let's see if we can get authoritative about this. There are some public numbers about advertisers and publishers. The info is dated, but I do remember reading about it. Anyone have that info offhand?
If this is a problem with 100,000 Google accounts (I don't about people, what matters is accounts), it is totally manageable. They can hire some people in India to combat the problem ;)
If the problem is 10,000, a team of 2 given a month to three can handle it.
If the problem is 1,000, it isn't even worth mentioning as a problem. I believe it's a problem no bigger than 1,000 using some home grown software.
Nothing is being done because Google is making money off it. Plain and simple.
P.S. Does Google allow publishers in India or China? If they do than the number is higher than I thought. But then the solution is easier too ;)
Firstly, MFAs don't convert. Sites that provide all the info required by the searcher probably don't convert - they've got the info so an advert click is pure fancy. These MFA sites work on the 'long tail' i.e. very specific queries that they can rank on. If a searcher has typed in an obscure or long phrase then they may be the most likely to convert - and obviously the MFA site has no real content to obscure the relevant ads. They probably convert better than those of us with quality sites.
Who to blame? I remember the Florida update, suddenly insted of getting the pages I was looking for I got a load of 'directory' sites that had outgoing links on the phrase I was looking for. The problem was that the links were just to other 'directory' sites. I had to leave Google for a while to find the pages I wanted. I'm sure this alerted a lot of blackhats to the possibilities of the chance to profit from rubbish sites and it's snowballed from there. I think it may be the Google algo that's the problem.
I've got to admit that I'm confused about the 'Made for Adsense' clause in the TOS. From what I know, people who buy 500 domains at a time and expect the sites to be banned from the SERPS after a month have not had their Adsense accounts rescinded. Obviously they are not stupid enough to click on their own ads or get click bots to do it (they are not kids). Why would they when they can make thousands of dollars a month by staying within the other rules.
Personally, my sites are not made for Adsense - they existed before and they will continue even if I never cover hosting costs. But as a programmer (who lives by developing web applications) I appreciate the ingenuity and sheer volume of what these rubbish sites are doing. Truth is, I worry more about the domination of the big commecrcial sites like Amazon.
The web has been like the Wild West without guns for a long time now. And a 'morally correct' web would be horrific with the control of the United Nations and licences issued for domains after filling in 20 page forms (and $100+ fees). Enjoy it while you can.
