Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I was doing my routine filtering of the MFA sites using preview tool and to my amusement the offensive site I blocked a while ago was back but now it used a public URL redirection address instead on the ad and as a landing page.
There are a few public services avaialble that allow you to shorten a long web address. I blocked couple of URL redirectors as I believe no serious business will use such address in the adwords campaign - it just smells phishy.
Just wanted to share that with other adsense publishers...
Also it wouldn't be bad if Google checked for the well known URL redirectors before accepting the ad.
Regards
albl
Having said this, please don't email Goolge to rant at them about MFA's. Google need evidence to see what the problems are. A good rant may well help you feel better, but if there is nothing specific for them to look into you have wasted their time. There isn't any point in that.
Because I saw plenty of these and they seemed to stay blocked? Its a growing problem thats worse than email spam!
As an aside, lots of the mfas I blocked last month have reapeared again with same "sites" but different url. So blocking them must be more common than we think! And it must be hurting them to make them change url. The real answer is in googles hands of course. But they are not going to stop them anytime soon because the mfas are daft enough to feed most of their earnings straight back to google!
But does the tool not show the url of the redirect? So if this is blocked you still dont get the ad?
But this is the one the tool showed so it works as expected then?
Yes it does, I never suggested adsense preview didn't work correctly.
The advertiser's URL on the ad and in the adsense URL had the redirection server instead of the real advertiser's address. And that is the main matter for concern - why google is allowing well known redirection URL servers in the ads.
However this issue is easily fixed by adding well known URL redirection servers into our filters.
Google need evidence to see what the problems are. A good rant may well help you feel better, but if there is nothing specific for them to look into you have wasted their time. There isn't any point in that.
Wait! You're saying that we should make Google aware of the problem of MFAs? Nah. If I would be running a product like Adsense, I would know it inside out. Which is probably exactly the status at Google. They KNOW about all this, but they don't care. Why? I don't know. I let others speculate about this.
But I don't buy that they don't know about it.
but let's be clear about that: it's not our job to weed out advertisers who break the tos!
we've already got our hands full with blocking shady mfas, that shouldn't be our job either.
few days ago i reported the first issue on my site. an advertiser who uses a redirection script to eb*y.com.
i guess they infrige even several adwords rules:
- neiter redirection page nor redirected landing page equal to url in ad copy
- not marked as affiliate
- keyword stuffed cloaked page with adsense on it for visitors who don't enter the page through an adsense click
i realized the scam as recently as i investigated the case, since the ad appeared constantly in my ad blocks for the wildest incoherent keywords. what beats everything, the ad is in the network for a long time.
i do not see that google has implemented a kind of quality control for advertisers respectively landing pages, let alone enforces them. i wonder if they do something in this case.
Emailing them may not get a resolve in individuals cases, but I don't think anyone could deny they probably are unaware of the magnitude of the problem, and strength of feeling there is about it.
maybe they are still unaware about specific advertisers who use redirection.
That is very unlikely.
I have been seeing mfa redirects for as long as I have been blocking mfa's. It would seemed that such high very percentage of mfa's have doing this that I have always assumed that it's common knowledge to members on this board.
have been seeing mfa redirects for as long as I have been blocking mfa's. It would seemed that such high very percentage of mfa's have doing this that I have always assumed that it's common knowledge to members on this board.
I wasn't talking about private redirects in my first post but use of public URL redirecting services (there is a bunch out there that allow to make your web page address tiny).
It is easy to block those by adding the server names of public redirectors to the filter list.
x2!
