MFA's

Had to ban a lot today

[LeChuck]

I looked at my stats and they were unusually low. Fired up the preview tool and I can see why the CTR had gone down: Most were poorly written ads for MFA's.

Hey you MFA jerks, I know some of you read this forum: If you have to keep bidding on my keywords then write better ads please. No one clicks the spammy stuff you write, especially on sites made for people with an IQ over 60.

If I see something that to my somewhat trained eyes looks like an MFA but doesn't look spammy I don't block it, but I instantly block ads along the lines of 'Is You CompuTer not Work? We have Done the WORK Free! whitepaper".

I guess their logic is that if you're dumb enough to click their ad, you'll be downright impressed with the ads on their MFA sites.

Idea: a collaborative list of MFA's. I guess it would be useful for both advertisers and publishers. What do you think?

[martinibuster]

My sites aren't scrapers or anything like that. Neither are those of my clients.

I'm good at writing ads, but I'm bidding from a penny to a dime per click for myself and clients.

Thanks for not blocking any of them.
;) Y

[LeChuck]

It's not that I doubt that they can write less spammy ads, It's more like they're intentionally bad to attract a special kind of clicker.

[ann]

We could start a 'secret club' vis sticky mail and take turns adding to the list and sending it around. :) Just kidding.

Ann

[thinkbig]

Im trying to get this straight, if you are seeing ads on adsense for MFA sites than that means the MFA guy is buying adwords specifically to get people to his site to click ads.

It seems like he would be paying more for the traffic especially since an MFA site cant convert very well or so i would imagine. Do they actually make money paying for clicks? It seems like it would even out in the end or result in a loss.

[Tropical Island]

This whole phenomenen of MFAs & MFO/Ys seems to have only exploded in the last 4 weeks or so and every few days I keep adding more and more to the list.

At the beginning of the deluge I could only find one or two. Now every time I check it's 6 - 10 new ones.

It's becoming a bigger problem than "click my Google ads".

[ndaru]

Whenever I discover 2 or 3 cent CPC, then it's time for Ad Filter hunting. Add some new URL filters, and the average CPC rise back to normal ( > 20 cent).

I scan these keywords for MFA's :

central
database
directory
exchange
find
free
guide
hub
info
link
online
resource
reviews
search
sort
source

Hope this helps.

[Play_Bach]

It's been my experience that using the competitive ad filter winds up hitting the bottom line and sucks too much of my time trying to play cop - so I've given up using it. Serving quality ads *should* be Google's problem - not ours. My hope is that someday the price point to run an Adwords campaign will be high enough that spammers will look elsewhere. Given how fast things change on the Web, that day may not be too far in the future.

[ndaru]

I hope for the same Play_bach. Contextual advertisement is supposed to give publishers more time to write content, not worrying about advertisement details. With the MFAs' running rampant, more and more time are wasted to find and block them.

I hope those new Adsense's competitors will raise the bar for minimum CPC bid.

[bumpski]

Since Google Adwords decoupled bids for the "Search" network versus the "Content" network you can expect lots more MFA stuff. Ads on the content network are even cheaper now. You could disable the content network but you could never disable the search network. You could make second ad with a low bid that only showed on the content network, but your ads were rated by their performance CTR on the search network exclusively. This limitation has just been removed by Google so now keywords that could never be successfully used may make it on the content network.

As an Adwords advertiser I used to have ads that did really well for CTR on the content network, but poorly on Google's search network so the keywords would actually get disabled solely due to poor search network performance. Now there's no limitation like this. It can be good in some cases, BUT, it's got to be an excellent situation for MFA's.

So here they come!

MFA's make money because the visitors hurry away from the site by clicking on the ads! Google search seems to be doing a better job lf giving poor placement to MFA's in search, so that's one good thing.

If you truly have good content, the true end content or product your visitor was looking for, you'll probably never be able to compete with MFA's!

A travel site will have Adsense click throughs to the airlines. The airline sites sell tickets, they're not going to get many Adsense click throughs. The only click through an airline would get is too alternative airlines or MFA Adwords ads!

[rytis]

Google, why not compiling list of 100-1000 "most blocked domains" in adsense, and trying to understand why ;)