Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I say arbitrage as that's what they are clearly engaged in, as they have loads of ads plastered everywhere and obviously don't get traffic without buying it. They aren't all pure MFA's. Some of them actually contained minimal content, but the authors clearly know squat about the topic. I guess there is a difference between pure no-content MFA's and ones that have had a stab at putting some content up for the purposes of engaging in arbitrage.
Anyway, the content of these sites is not really relevant. What is, is the fact that Adsense works ONLY because there are advertisers with products and services to sell, and end customers flexing plastic to buy them. All of the MFA's and arbitrage sites exist as an un-necessary layer of middle men who simply take a cut of the earnings and don't supply a customer.
I don't know if the figure of 85% is typical. However, I'd say that it certainly isn't far from normal. But I'd certainly be considering if Google was the right place to advertise if I was an advertiser. How on earth can they hope to find customers with that sort of percentage of sharks circling? The other worrying thing is that Google can't see (or don't care) where this is leading.
Still, I suppose it's a good way of spotting what MFA's Google are likely to place, so you can ban them in advance :)
Or perhaps benefeting and stopping those could affect share price?
How do you say others are MFA's? If they have content and provide some guidance to potential customers, they may be said to be providing some service?
Just becuase they pay for traffic does not mean they are MFA's.. Lot of new sites pay for traffic.. I do too, for my e commerce site. Right now, organic traffic is very small for me. Some surfers click out from my site using adsense and technically , I am enjoying an arbitrage as I am able to pay for my ads this way.
G will need a big team of guys to find all MFA and also the borderline cases may be hard to detect and categorize.
Do you have a yardstick?
As for their use, so is garbage, useful as compost, but I don't want it rotting inside my house!
Or perhaps benefeting and stopping those could affect share price?
Obvously google benefit, and the shareholders will be happy in the short term. Millions of low profit clicks add up to a lot of money for Google, and that's reflected in the share price.
There will also always be a percentage of people gaming the system, some of them even useful. The problem is that 85% of the ads with nothing to sell is too high a percentage for a long term business plan. The difficulty being the user experience, and how surfers on Google react to that experience. If you have 85% of MFA's, then the chance of clicking on an ad that leads to another page of the same ad's you've just seen that have nothing to sell are high. How many times will visitors click on ads in the search for information only to find they don't get the advertised info? Surfers will learn not to click the spammy ads on search or content. I know some feel that most surfers are too thick to know what they are clicking, but I personally feel that's not the case. I personally never click Google ads except to see what MFA's to block. People are learning that google ads = spam, and that's worrying, especially if the majority of ads are in fact spam.
How do you say others are MFA's? If they have content and provide some guidance to potential customers, they may be said to be providing some service?
I tried to make a distinction in calling them arbitrage sites. Some of them are pure MFA's. But the trend seems to be providing some information in order to avoid being charged a lot of money to be listed by the quality scores algorithm. That doesn't necessarily make the content worthwhile.
Just becuase they pay for traffic does not mean they are MFA's.. Lot of new sites pay for traffic.. I do too, for my e commerce site. Right now, organic traffic is very small for me. Some surfers click out from my site using adsense and technically , I am enjoying an arbitrage as I am able to pay for my ads this way.
There is nothing wrong with this, your site clearly isn't mfa or arbitrage despite the fact that you use adwords. Using adwords doen't make a site arbitrage - content does.
G will need a big team of guys to find all MFA and also the borderline cases may be hard to detect and categorize.
I suspect that would be an impossible task to do manually or by algorithm from the adsense point of view. I think the only answer would be changes to adwords to ensure that the percentage of ads that actually had something to sell were in the majority.
Do you have a yardstick?
My personal yardstick still remains "Does the landing page have a product, service to sell, or offer genuine information?". When I look at the site, if it has clearly been set up for the purpose of arbitrage then I zap it. I guess gut feeling comes into the equation a lot.
I think the nature of MFA's is changing from three ads on a blank page with back button disabled to something more sophisticated that has minimal content. If these class as MFA's or arbitrage sites is a good deffinition I am not sure at this point. However, the same rule applies - not selling products or services then zap.
You have repeated this for a couple of times now
so I'll repeat my usual response;-)
I too have pages where 100% of the ads lead to pages with more ads. But the weird thing is that they pay me well. You would expect that that kind of MFA advertisers wouldn't bid too much, but in my case they provide me with good earnings. At least, I think that clicks in the 10 to 20 cent range are fine.
Right now, Google and us are into Adsense for exactly the same reason; we all want to make money from it. Not only do we want to make money today, but also in the long run. I am pretty sure that as soon as Google thinks there is something going on that endagers their long term cash flow, they will do something about it. And I am sure Google monitors everything and is updating their algo's if needed to make sure that their business model remains solid. As long as that means I make money from Adsense, and I sure hope it will remain that way for the years to come, I don't care about MFA's.
The problem as I see it, is misleading copy in the ads.
If the ads said something like this :
Welcome to xyz
we provide links to
sites with subject ZYT
www.oooppp.com
I would be fine with such a MFA . They are being representative about their site and surfers have a choice.
The problem is when they misrepresent and get clicks which they donot deserve.
The new G algo and the Quality of Landing page initiative should and may address this issue .
Also there are hundreds if not thousands of sites ( very well designed and all ) which have good content ( not super content) but are primarily designed and exist keeping in mind the adsense opportunity.
So many sites giving information on astrology, history & forums etc donot sell any product or service and exist primarily to make money from G. They are all not MFA's in the normal sense of the word but the underlying logic is the same.
I think it is the crude approach of the Greedy MFA's which actually hurts G in the long run.....
Sorry for disagreeing with the normal thinking on this WW forum ;-)
Sorry for disagreeing with the normal thinking on this WW forum ;-)
I think the whole point of a forum is that you don't have to apologize for disagreeing;-)
