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.
"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.
As you well know, there is no requirement to post URL's in profiles - it is my understanding that this is generally thought not to be a good idea.
The bad guys are probably a whole lot better than us at knowing how to game the system - we are playing catch up. Transparency will probably tell us some things they already know.
I would agree that total disclosure is not a good idea, but I'm talking about a relaxation of the complete and absolute paranoia Google have about telling advertisers and publishers anything. They'd even withold the date if it suited them. One example being the recent disclosure re smart pricing affecting all sites of an account. Didn't come as a surprise to anyone here, certainly didn't come as a surprise to anyone gaming the system either.
What happened? Google thrown into a panic, and embarks on a damage limitation exercise.
Why? Simple information that should have been in the public domain in the first place. I fail to see why simple information on how adsense works has to be forbidden knowledge to both advertisers and publishers.
As you well know, there is no requirement to post URL's in profiles - it is my understanding that this is generally thought not to be a good idea.
Exactly. In fact when I was a newbie I used to have a URL in my profile until someone told me privately it would be better to remove it.
I do understand that it can be hard to tell in this forum if a spammer is complaining about a legitimate action or if it's an honest person. But the nature of this place is not to publicize who you are out of suspicion that it's done to promote yourself.
You will have optimised your pages to get the correct Ads showing. Therefore you have a MFA.
If you have Adsense on your website and you haven't optimised your pages to take maximum effect for the correct Google Adsense ads to appear -congratulations! - you haven't got a "Made For Adsense" website - but you may as well remove the Adsense and put something else there in order to maximise your lost revenue by not optimising your webpages.
MFA - if you have Adsense on your website, then you have a "Made For Adsense" website.
Guess what: Quite a few of us had Web sites (real Web sites) before AdSense was invented.
You will have optimised your pages to get the correct Ads showing. Therefore you have a MFA.
Speak for yourself.
If you have Adsense on your website and you haven't optimised your pages to take maximum effect for the correct Google Adsense ads to appear -congratulations! - you haven't got a "Made For Adsense" website - but you may as well remove the Adsense and put something else there in order to maximise your lost revenue by not optimising your webpages.
Or maybe, like some of us, you'll collect your nice monthly payments and be grateful that overoptimization at the expense of advertiser conversions hasn't smartpriced your revenues into oblivion.
As you well know, there is no requirement to post URL's in profiles
You're right: There isn't. But it's a bit hypocritical to complain about Google's "lack of transparency" if you disclose less about yourself than Google does about AdSense.
Guess what: Quite a few of us had Web sites (real Web sites) before AdSense was invented.
Mine is last century's vintage, but I hope that whilst the cosmetic details are a la mode, the info most certainly is tried and tested.
But it's a bit hypocritical to complain about Google's "lack of transparency" if you disclose less about yourself than Google does about AdSense.
By the rules of this forum, none of us are required to give any information about ourselves, or our sites. The fact that you do is your choice. I'm happy to provide information about my site and myself if people ask me privately.
Comparing adherence to the general rules of this forum with Google's inability to realise that letting advertisers and publishers know what the spammers already know is not constructive.
- Publisher creates content and sets aside space for AdSense ads.
- Google fills space with ads.
- Publisher gets money from ads.
If Google isn't happy with the publisher, or if the publisher isn't happy with Google, the unhappy party terminates the relationship.
You will have optimised your pages to get the correct Ads showing. Therefore you have a MFA.
OMG that's too funny - I almost wet my chair.
Assuming everyone that optimizes or fixes their site targeting is doing it solely for AdSense (MFA) is somewhat odd thinking.
So my website started in before the existance of Goto.com, Overture or AdSense is now an MFA just because I optimized the site?
If you don't have your pages optimized properly you won't get the correct SEARCH ENGINE positioning, you aren't getting the proper visitors and traffic, likewise the ads are probably off target as well. It's not that people optimize just for AdSense but I would say that AdSense, if nothing else, has helped shoddy [most] webmasters understand their site design and keyword targetting is junk and they learned to fix their SEO thanks to AdSense, not necessarily because of AdSense.
If AdSense pushes them to be better webmasters then I'd say they should fly that MFA flag proudly ;)
We have had our sites 7 plus years before adsense and will have them well after, but optimizing it does not make you a MFA, scraping and auto gen of content does!
But please feel free to rationalize your pursuit of auto generated scraped content MFA sites on the backs of honest webmasters all you want and please post in 7 years how your doing;)
Is G fighting MFA's? No, of course they arent. It would be in direct violation of the new golden rule since they went public.
Only one thing will drive them now, quarterly earnings to boost stock price and if the tens of billions of auto generated scraped pages serving Ads by Gooooooooooooooogle doesnt show proof of that, nothing will.
now back to my vodka tonic...
Advertisers are consistently paying more money with higher minimums even for arcane terms. Instead of being told there is a price hike, they are told the minimum bid is reduced to 1 cent.
Publishers are being told that they are being rewarded for sites that provide better ROI. Yet honest publishers are seeing less money even with increased traffic.
We don't appreciate being told marketing lies when it's all about the IPO. The only reason I can see for people repeatedly defending these practices by Google is that these people are MFA site owners gaming the system and who don't want honest publishers to kill their golden goose.
Advertisers are consistently paying more money with higher minimums even for arcane terms. Instead of being told there is a price hike, they are told the minimum bid is reduced to 1 cent.
A minimum is just that: a minimum. And it won't be available for terms where advertisers are willing to bid more than the minimum.
Publishers are being told that they are being rewarded for sites that provide better ROI. Yet honest publishers are seeing less money even with increased traffic.
Just because a publisher is honest doesn't mean that his or her referrals are valuable to advertisers.
That shouldn't be surprising: A person searching Google on "Widgetcam DC-1" may or may not be in the mood to buy a Widgetcam digital camera (he could just be looking for specs and other information), but when he's just a six-page review at Steve's Digicams or DPReview, he probably won't click on an ad unless he's ready to buy or at least to do some serious shopping. This is why some AdWords advertisers report better conversions from the content network than from search. (Obviously, it helps if the advertiser is in a niche where most impressions are on legitimate sites that reach appropriate audiences.)
From what I've read, you are probably one of the lucky ones grandfathered in. They don't want to lose good advertisers who have stuck with them a long time. If you want to see what others are disturbed about, as an experiment, try opening a new account and see if you can get anywhere near the same results you are getting now. Significant traffic on 3 cents a click. Try arcane terms as well. I haven't been able to get more than a few clicks on 5 cents for any term that I've tried. And I tried a lot of terms and experimentation.
EFV,
I just looked at your site. It does seem very well optimized (suited?) for Adsense. You probably got very lucky or just were smart early. You are in a lucrative field and your site is 100% the definition of what adsense and advertisers are looking for. I imagine you're doing very well with adsense and didn't happen to suffer the effects others are disturbed by. So from your point of view, nothing is wrong. May I ask, do you have other sites or is EFV the whole shebang?
I just looked at your site. It does seem very well optimized (suited?) for Adsense. You probably got very lucky or just were smart early. You are in a lucrative field and your site is 100% the definition of what adsense and advertisers are looking for. I imagine you're doing very well with adsense and didn't happen to suffer the effects others are disturbed by. So from your point of view, nothing is wrong. May I ask, do you have other sites or is EFV the whole shebang?
So from your point of view, nothing is wrong. May I ask, do you have other sites or is EFV the whole shebang?
I suspect that it would be inaccurate to say "nothing is wrong," because perfection is an unattainable goal.
I will say, however, that my site is a good match for AdSense, not because I designed it for AdSense (it predated AdSense) but because it meets several requirements:
1) It attracts an audience that's valuable to advertisers (i.e., readers who are researching ways to spend their money);
2) It's a niche site with a lot of subtopics, which means that ads are nearly always matched either to the page or to the site's overall theme;
3) It has enough content to keep readers coming back, which means that advertisers reach prospects throughout the research and buying cycle.
There's nothing groundbreaking or unique about this approach; it's just a mixture of dumb luck and common-sense publishing.
As for other sites, my European travel-planning site is what I do for a living, but I do have a site for aspiring freelance writers. It doesn't run AdSense ads, though. (In fact, it isn't monetized at all--it's a site that I began when I was the contract Writing Forum manager at MSN in the mid- to late 1990s, and I've kept it around out of nostalgia and a sense of public service.)
I tried running AdSense ads on the writing site, just to cover the hosting costs, but I quickly pulled them because nearly all of the ads were for vanity presses, phony poetry contests, and other scams that prey on newbie writers. Because of that experience, I'd be the first to say that AdSense isn't a good match for every site.
That's what I thought. Your site is very well done and I'm sure is quite successful. Congratulations. It isn't easy to do what you've done.
To try to get you to see Adsense from other people's shoes, imagine that in the future you build 2 new sites and give it your all. All very professional. All with great and numerous content and tons of traffic. And let's say at first it builds up income and everything looks normal. Then weird things happen to you and you don't know why. Income keeps going down no matter what you do. You haven't changed a thing on EFV but earnings are down there. And by down I mean 33% of what it was consistently.
After a year (or 2) of wasting time, you find out that nothing was wrong on your end whatsoever. It's just that Google decided to smart price you for EFV because your other new sites are not as good for advertisers as EFV is.
If you still can't see how that would aggravate an honest publisher, try to imagine the burn. Without feeling the burn yourself, you cannot understand how someone else will feel.
David,
I am switching away from Google right left and center. And the change has already doubled my monthly income.
I feel dumb, but what does EVF stand for?
Europe for visitors
If you still can't see how that would aggravate an honest publisher, try to imagine the burn. Without feeling the burn yourself, you cannot understand how someone else will feel.
I lost 70-90% of my Google referrals for two months last spring, so I can empathize with your pain. But, that doesn't mean you're being mistreated by Google. It could be that smart pricing has caught up with you, that advertisers aren't bidding as much, that ad inventory for your keywords isn't keeping up with publisher demand, something else altogether, or a combination of the above. But the fact is, you have the power to act if you aren't happy with the effective CPM that you're earning from AdSense.
I am switching away from Google right left and center. And the change has already doubled my monthly income.
Sounds like you've found a solution to your problems. All's well that ends well. :-)
Ahyhow, I really think that being an AdWords advertiser since 2001 or 2002 helped me a lot, I think about AdSense in different terms.
Interesting comment. Any more details on that?
EFV,
Indeed.
BTW, I am expecting YPN to be less valuable after the beta is over, or when they introduce some version of SP. If they are more straight about the relationship, I won't be bothered about it as I was with G. That's the crux of it.
As this is an "Adsense Forum", and, at one point in this discussion, we were talking about MFA websites, I naturally assumed that that is what we were talking about...
For normal websites, i.e. any other website whose sole purpose in life is not to gain it's only revenue from Google Adsense - (which includes all websites created before Adsense arrived, and all websites who use Adsense as an additional form of income) - then naturally my previous description of a MFA website would not apply.
Far be it for me to have people wetting their chairs etc over something I've said ;)
