Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I started making list of junk websites who are advertising on my website. And this list doesnt seems to come to an end. They are simply too many!
What do you do when you are bombarded by such junk ads on your website? Obvioulsy such ads reduce your earnings, your visitor experience and quality of ads. I can already feel increase in my income when I blocked many of them. But still, I have many websites and every industry seems to come with its own set of MFAs
Serious suggestions needed!
The filter fills up.
But AdSense could give you room for 10,000 sites in the filter and that wouldn't solve the problem. To weed them out, you need to be looking at each of your pages each day. Every new page you create makes that task more difficult. It doesn't take long until the task is overwhelming.
I think 90% of the problem is within Google's grasp right now if they would just do it. All they need do is review some of the sites that have been reported, issue one warning and then if the warning is not heeded, close the accounts of those who continue.
Google does not need to hire enough people to review every site that gets reported. As soon as word gets out that sites are being reviewed and banned, 90% of this problem will go away.
Just think how concerned people on this forum are about getting banned for clicking on their own ads. Why is that? Because on a regular basis someone comes here and says, "I got banned."
Viral marketing works. Enforce the terms, ban a few and the word will spread.
On the other hand, the constant reports here of the terms not being enforced just encourages more and more people to follow the herd because they think they are being left out of something.
AdSense's refusal to do something and even their refusal to acknowledge the problem to those who are playing by the rules makes me nervous about either the ethics or the competence of the company. That's why I continue to work on diversification of my online income sources.
I think the ship has a hole in it. The hole could be easily repaired. But I'm not willing to go down with the ship all the while cheering for the repair crew who are ignoring the incoming rush of water.
FarmBoy
Some sites have "content" if you can call it that on 10.000 pages or more. Its meaningless drivel but who decides on the quality? And how good is good enough?
I thing they should only allow sites that do NOT exist on advertising and that have legitimate business adresses and phone numbers displayed. And that actually sell a product or service.
I ban ALL sites that dont fit this description already because they are my competition.
How do they decide though.
They wrote the terms. If they don't even know whether a site complies with the terms they established, that goes right to the remark I made about competence.
FarmBoy
How do they decide though.
Undoubtedly there will always be debate regarding what contitutes good or bad content quality. As there will always be difficlties when applying tests to determine what should be or not be classed as MFA.
A good start would be to cull what could be classed as 'obvious' MFA's. The ones that have sub domains for every keyword, maybe some of the fake search engines, sites with nothing but links, sites with scraped content etc.
These types of MFA's would be easy to target and such an operation would be a good starting point, more than likely requiring fairly large resources to implement. Never mind about borderline sites for now.
A good start would be to cull what could be classed as 'obvious' MFA's.
I agree. If the search engine side of Google can define "duplicate content" the AdSense side should be able to define "insufficient content" or "useless content."
...more than likely requiring fairly large resources to implement.
I disagree. See message #32 above.
FarmBoy
Yep shopping and all the similar ones. They are your competition!
That is the purpose of the competitive filter - to block competitors.
But that's different than the subject of this thread.
FarmBoy
Thing is ANY site that exists by advertising is the same as an MFA. They buy your traffic cheap enough to be able to make money on aff links!
They pay peanuts just like an MFA. They take some of the afvertisers budget (that you could have had directly) and offer nothing. No content, no value. They are considered as MFAs by me.
FarmBoy
Not a MFA but maybe even shadier.
[edited by: jatar_k at 6:16 pm (utc) on Mar. 31, 2006]
1) Please increase the competitive ad filter - 200 is not enough.
2) Allow publishers to opt out of any clicks below a certain ammount. Or to not show ads that pay only 5 cents, 10 cents etc.
This is 2006 - Where can you get targeted leads for less than 5 cents a click?
Adsense publishers unfortunately :(
1 When I block all the MFAs (and every site not DIRECTLY selling a product) my revenue goes up straight away, and by a large margin. Its a shame the filter is so small at the moment. Google have hinted at they understand the problem and will be doing something about it soon.
2 Why would I want to share the real advertisers high paying clicks and total revenue with a bottom feeding extra layer with no content and low bids?
3 Why would I subject my visitors to this garbage and lower the tone of my sites?
4 Why would I put any future return visitors off with the loss of revenue this entails due to "my sites dodgy links"?
5 Why would I want to reduce the click through rate in adsense generally by turning the average surfer off adsense links permenantly
6 most important of all. Why on earth would I want to help the scrapers, fake search pages, mfa, and all the rest of the talentless bottom feeding scum that think they can get rich off the back of genuine content sites publishers like myself? And at the expense of advertisers and publishers. MFAs are just an extra money sucking layer between the real content publishers and the advertisers. They add nothing of value, just take.
Not to mention the advertisers we all depend on are bidding less and less or turning off the content network altogether because of the garbage mfa sites which means yet again the genuine sites get a lower epc.
Is that clear enough?
MFAs are not beneficial to the publisher. If they were then my earnings would have gone down when I banned them. Instead earnings went up by about 30%.
The only problem now is that I am about maxed out on the filter so I won't be able to filter new MFAs and then my earnings will drift back down.
LOTS of average internet users are fast learning to ignotre the "ads by google" because they (and I quote my GF) "THEY JUST LEAD TO PAGES OF ADS" ... She like many others is becoming adsense blind because they dont do what they promise
And LOTS of advertisers will not advertise on the content network at all. They have seen too many MFA style "scam" sites and they hate giving these people money too! But the REAL publisher is losing out as well. We miss the budget, and get lower bids because of it. And unless every real publisher bans all the mfas it will get worse until google ads are as ignored as banner ads now are.
Adsense would have an opt-in ad-screener. This would give the publisher right of refusal for all adverts that are lined up to possibly show on the site. If a publisher opted into the programme, only ads which had been approved by the publisher would show up on the page. The screen would would have new ads showing up all the time which could be approved or blocked. The screen wouldn't have anything to do with the price of ads, just the advert itself and the landing page.
As I mentioned this might be fairly labour intensive and would keep some people fairly busy, but no more so than constantly updating the content filter. This would give the publisher a little better control than the current content filter, I think. Also, since it's opt-in, the people who don't opt-in are free to serve all the MFA adverts they please.
Any thoughts or better ideas?
Anyway, one option that Google could introduce (besides the obvious increase of the competitive ad filter) would be a check box that says 'disallow Ads from sites that display Adsense'.
I don't think that anyone can look at this too cynically and say that "Google ignores MFAs because it makes money from them" since the reality is that the money is being split 3 ways rather than 2. It would be unbelievably short-sighted of Google to think otherwise.
(Then again listed companies tend to become short-sighted)
No. It should be "dissalow ads from sites that display adverts or aff links of any kind". But thats an excellent idea!
I dont want to supply ANY bottom feeding extra layers. Even if it actually COSTS me in the short term. Its better for my (everyones site/adsense) income in the future that the adsense system is seen as "safe to click" and useful to visitors.
On a side note, this has been discussed NUMEROUS times and yet Google seems to not care. That is because they are making money, so why would they? If they didn't care about it months ago, why should it be different now?
As it has been mentioned before, MFAs drain the advertiser's budget. This issue should be treated similar to invalid clicks since they are invalid in a way too. Additionally the internet is becoming crap - Google has to make better SE filters to filter what they encouraged to grow in the first place.
Bad Google, bad.
Now the same crew have made and are making MFAs without even pretending they have "content" ad per the TOS. They are allowing these people to build dictionary / expensive keyword software generated sites that have almost no content with 10s of thousands of pages. They display adsense. Its against the rules.
Some display other ad networks ads, or aff links. Its the same thing. If they allow people to advertise on their network that dont sell a REAL product or service directly they cheapen and begin to destroy the adsense network. People dont trust ads anyway. Once they realise that half the links are garbage sites just after money with no intrinsic value they wont click the good ads either.
Getting the scraper site out of the search results just made them buy your traffic cheaply! 3cent clicks! Or less.
Anyway, one option that Google could introduce (besides the obvious increase of the competitive ad filter) would be a check box that says 'disallow Ads from sites that display Adsense'.
I think this is a good idea. Come on lets hear some more creative ideas. We know that G'plex folks are reading.
I think this is a good idea. Come on lets hear some more creative ideas. We know that G'plex folks are reading.
Not a good idea at all... how many legit business would be blocked? Think about it.
I think if Google warned and then banned MFA's everything would be better.
