Forum Moderators: martinibuster
If this program is for the real, honest webmaster, only let real sites in.
Didn't blogger just have an enormous splog problem that had to be shut down? These are the same people running MFAs. They can post a few words on blogger.com, apply for an account and then start building MFAs. I mean, come on G.
Remember how thorough they were in the beginning to get an account? Boy have things changed.
[business2.com...]
It seems evident that MFAs, MFOverture, MFWhatever sites are not just trying to capture PPC dollars coming from SE traffic. As a noob, I never even thought about anybody cornering the type-in traffic market until I read this. It only makes sense that G and Y and others would try to make as much $$ as they can from this "sector." Of course, SE traffic will find these sites, and that's not good. But given how lucrative the type-in traffic is (for a very few people, it seems): (1) MF type-in sites will continue to floursih; and (2) there's going to be inevitable overlap between MF type-in sites and MFAs.
The fact that you don't view phony content with all those keywords designed to get indexed by SEs as spam, nor are you offended by Google profiting in such a low class way from adsense on such sites shows clearly why we disagree so often.
Maybe you don't have any MFAs or domainparks, but from my point of view I have to wonder if the MFA defenders have a profit motive by trying to defend them so much. It just doesn't make much sense otherwise.
It is spam plain and simple
It's not spam at all.
Parked domains typically don't show up in the SEs whatsoever which would be spam (I hate terms being misused) as the web sites have been long gone if a web site ever existed for that domain in the first place. If you type in a domain name or click a defunct link and land on a page of ads, you went to them, they didn't come to you, and spam by definition is someone trying to blanket blogs, search engines or emails to get your attention.
Parked domains are passive, spam is active, parking is more like setting bear traps just waiting on you to stick your foot in them.
Back to the original topic, not all Blogger sites have AdSense on them so this MFA hysteria circling around Blogger is a bit overboard IMO. Any blog site can be an MFA, any web site can be an MFA, doesn't make them all MFAs and I'll best most of the people decrying MFAs are probably just as guilty making MFAs and don't consider their site an MFA becase it doesn't look as the spammy as the most notorious MFAs.
If you built the site with the intention of monetizing it from the start, even affiliate sites, it's technically an MFA-type site no matter where you built it.
And more importantly, who cares?
If MFAs didn't work advertisers would pull ads from them and smart pricing would knock them down to a penny EPC and apparently that's not happening so who are we to judge?
My reasoning here is that every sort of value judgement at its best, should (hopefully) reflect a balance between pro and con. If a site has a balance between valuable, original content and ads, then we should naturally, logically be valuing that site higher than a site with little useful (or original) content, like some of the examples of MFAs being used in this thread.
My whole issue with these sorts of sites is not from a perspective of a publisher/advertiser, really, but just of some ordinary bloke who relies on the Internet to find information. It seems that I am sinking deeper and deeper wading through in sludge (gratuitous advertising sans meaningful content) trying to find pertinent info. And it sure seems like this is getting worse, but then, that is just my perception.
It's so out of control that I may have to talk to our lawyer about asking BlogSpot to do something pro-actively to prevent copies. It takes too much of my time to play policeman. Or get promises from the search engines that copies will not affect a site's placement in the SERPS.
This is ridiculous and it all stems from Google's giving AdSense accounts to anyone who asks for one and BlogSpot's providing free blog space and offering to share AdSense revenue with the blog owner.
I just ranted about this issue on my blog, it's "webmaster welfare" at work.
I don't have much of a problem with a site that is made for AdSense. If it's useful, it'll make money and keep on making money. If it's not, it may make money in the short term, but eventually it will go away. It irritates me that a lot of these sites will rank higher in the organics (particularly in Yahoo and MSN, but Google too) than my content-laden sites do, but that's just the nature of the business, and I accept that it's up to me to keep working on my sites to improve their organic positioning. The same is true for my real competitors - I wish they didn't show up ahead of me, but sometimes they do, and I have to get to work.
I do have a problem with MFA (or any site) that uses deceptive practices (the example I see most often, because of one of my clients, is MFA sites that use drug and alcohol detox and rehab words in order to sell Internet Pharmacy ads) or scrapes my copyrighted content. I have placed some carefully chosen misspellings and unique terminology on my various sites, and periodically go through and do a search in order to quickly find MY content on someone else's site, and when I do, I happily report them to Google, Yahoo, and whoever else's ads or affiliate programs I see on their pages. But while these people are mostly MFAs, they aren't JUST MFAs.
Just a quick note here: They didn't. They copied the idea from Overture.
What Google did pioneer was contextual advertising on mom-and-pop niche sites, not just name-brand portals and news/entertainment sites. That created new opportunities for both publishers and advertisers. (Unfortunately, it also opened the Pandora's Box of scrapers and other worthless made-for-AdSense sites, but that doesn't negate the fact that Google has done more for small- to medium-sized independent content publishers than any other search engine or ad network.)
I was doing a search (on Google) in one of my niches recently and some of the results were parked domains with Adsense on them.
So here's the riddle: Google obstensibly wants websites in its index with content. If a domain name is nothing more than a parked domain, it can't possibly have content on it -- unless it has Adsense on it. Since Google knows that it is a parked domain because it's using "Adsense for parked domains", why would it index that domain name and include it in the search results? The answer is obvious but it sure seems like a huge conflict of interest (displaying useful websites with useful content vs. making money on parked domains with no content whatsoever other than ads).
Personally I rarely see parked domains in Google's SERPs (NEW parked domains anyways; sometimes dead sites stick around for longer than they should). I seriously doubt they would reduce the quality and integrity of their search results solely for the purpose of showing AdSense ads. They know that the quality of their free search results is the engine that drives all their other businesses.
I just think that it's interesting that they say, "Don't make MFA's" and the domain park program is all MFA (and in the search results to boot).
Even if that's true, so what? Google is perfectly entitled to have different rules for itself or for premium partners than for rank-and-file AdSense publishers. As for parked domains turning up in searches, that's obviously a search glitch, since it isn't a constant or even frequent occurrence (at least not in my experience as a searcher).
OK, so what? By the same token publishers are entitled not to like it and complain about it in public.
If it's not, it may make money in the short term, but eventually it will go away.
That's true enough, but the person who made the site will just make another one. Some one here that said he or she had many MFA sites said that when one is found out they just make another one. The cycle is endless.
Well, those websites are ranking above some other websites with real content so there is an effect.
Seriously, when the day comes that Google ranks AdSense sites higher than others in the SERPs, or that Yahoo and/or MSN go out of their way to downgrade such sites for that matter, we'll all know about it. It'll probably make page one of the NY Times.
They're entitled to be hypocrites, that's true.
I think you'd better look up the dictionary definition of "hypocrite."
OK, so what? By the same token publishers are entitled not to like it and complain about it in public.
Nobody's saying you don't have the right to complain. I was merely questioning whether it's "interesting" that Google doesn't allow publishers to do everything that Google does. I don't think it's interesting at all--it's no different than, say, a company's having different rules for itself and a distributor or dealer. (For that matter, would you call Brett Tabke or this forum's moderators "hypocrites" because they get to play by different rules than you do?)
Even if that's true, so what? Google is perfectly entitled to have different rules for itself or for premium partners than for rank-and-file AdSense publishers.
Do as I say, not as I do?
Do as I say, not as I do?
That might be a legitimate comment if Google said, "Ads on parked domains are bad." But they aren't saying that. They're merely saying that you can't have ads on parked domains. It's no different from a company's letting dealers sell some products, or to some markets, while the company keeps other products or markets for itself. That isn't hypocrisy; it's just the way the company has chosen to distribute its products or allocate its markets.
To put it another way, just because you want something doesn't mean the other guy is evil for not giving it to you.
My beef is that thanks to Google's paranoid secrecy we don't usually have a clue what the rules are, who they apply to and how they affect us as publishers / advertisers. You are expected to give them your cash / real estate and "trust" them. This is not a good way to treat business partners - and that is what advertisers and publishers are.
I'm not expecting them to disclose everything they say and do, but more information on how the program works (especially smart pricing) would be good for both publishers and advertisers for a start.
I think there would be a lot less moaning in here and at adwords forum if how adsense worked was more in the public domain. It would help both of us to work with the program to the good of all.
For example - Google's use of using smart pricing to scalp the income off of profitable sites. Yes, I know that this is a matter of debate here and I'm only using it as an example - not opening the discussion. Now if Google said that we pass on x% of income to publishers, but give smaller publishers an enhanced payout (all subject to smart pricing), that would be the rules, and nobody could complain. After all, the payouts to publishers and income are all declared in their public accounts so hardly a secret.
An example where there is no need for paranoid secrecy, and where some disclosure would help everybody, and not harm Google. There are many others I'm sure.
On the subject of Blogger, I have a blogger account with adsense on it, and I don't see that blog accounts are any more an abuse of the system than MFA's outside blogger. I've seen a lot of good blogs with adsense on that are perfectly legit.
As to if Google is tackling MFA's, I suspect they are, but it's not an easy task. I did a search on my keywords at MSN, and the results were apalling - at least Google's serps had shuffled the MFA sites away. My problem is with the ads for MFA's appearing on my sites.
Knowing Googles love of automation, I's like to see a reporting system where surfers can report a site for TOS violation via a tick box. Google then counts the clicks and at some pre-determined point this triggers an automatic review of the site, or even better automatic cessation of serving ads pending investigation. That would save them having millions of spam reports to wade through.
Now if Google said that we pass on x% of income to publishers, but give smaller publishers an enhanced payout (all subject to smart pricing), that would be the rules, and nobody could complain.
On the contrary: The affected publishers could and would complain, probably with hysterical cries about "communism" or "social engineering." And if Google had such a compensation policy and made it public, you'd have big publishers looking for sneaky ways to create multiple accounts so they could get the enhanced "small publisher" payout. "Transparency" is often touted around here (usually by members who post under aliases and don't include URLs in their profiles), but it doesn't always make sense, because it helps the bad guys abuse and exploit the system.
That might be a legitimate comment if Google said, "Ads on parked domains are bad." But they aren't saying that.
Absolutely true, I agree with you 100%.
I'm not saying Google shouldn't allow parked domains to show AdSense, neither am I stating that ads on parked domains are bad. Sorry if you thought I was implying that.
I believe ads on parked domains are good. Obviously they're good for the advertiser because they convert.
The way they're going about it is a way to get webmasters with type-in domains into the program in an orderly manner and limit the abuse. The way Google is going about it is perfectly logical.
Google is perfectly entitled to have different rules for itself... than for rank-and-file AdSense publishers.
I'm just saying that your statement is another way of saying do as I say not as I do.
I didn't say it, you said it. I'm just pointing that out.
;) Y
