Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Anyone squeezing into an already established chain as a middle man when not needed is bound to complicate things for all. I see no reason why there should be a site that is in anyway involved in buying advertising to sell advertsing should have no reason to exist.
Do not see analogy to criminals here.
You miss the point that the way the AdSense system works it's literally set up to be scammed, and scamming something electronic from a distance, esp. hiding behind the IP addresses of others, makes this a very lucrative and "safe" proposition opposed to robbing banks or selling drugs.
Wait until you get involved with anti-scraping and bot busting like I am and start running into some sites from Russia and the Ukraine, these boys are serious.
Some of the stuff scraped from my sites have been done via botnets, you know what botnets are? Compromised computers, home machines, servers, whatever, running commands to spam, crawl and DoS sites out there.
That data, scraped via botnets, then shows up on websites.
That's criminal, let's continue...
The definition of "Unauthorized access" which you can find per state under "Computer Hacking and Unauthorized Access Laws" will show that "Unauthorized access" which basically covers trespassing onto a computer, theoretically even if that service is a public web server as the laws don't specify the server or service has to be private.
Here's an example from the CA law:
(c) Except as provided in subdivision (h), any person who commits any of the following acts is guilty of a public offense:(1) Knowingly accesses and without permission alters, damages, deletes, destroys, or otherwise uses any data, computer, computer system, or computer network in order to either (A) devise or execute any scheme or artifice to defraud, deceive, or extort, or (B) wrongfully control or obtain money, property, or data.
(3) Knowingly and without permission uses or causes to be used computer services.
Scrapers tend to run stealth crawlers masking as MSIE 6.0 to prevent sites to stop them from crawling. The people using stealth crawlers know if they use a real user agent like "Bob's Bot 1.0" that it will expose their presence and they will be blocked. To avoid this, they mask their presence which obviously falls under "knowingly accesses and without permission" to get to the content on the web site attempting to block their trespass.
I ran this past an IP (Intellectual Property) lawyer and got an answer that almost knocked my socks off... that my interpretation of "Unauthorized access" was too "narrow" and it was much wider.
Obviously I haven't done anything with this information yet, but if you follow the logical conclusion, any site that is using "Unauthorized access" to scrape, is theoretically an illegal site.
Now Google indexes and profits off these sites in AdSense, well, you see where this is going...
Nothing criminal going on?
I'd like to see one case make it thru the courts and scrapers MFA sites would be history.
That would be half the problem gone in the blink of an eye.
[edited by: incrediBILL at 4:55 am (utc) on Dec. 31, 2006]
- Some members of the AdSense team (the ones who deal with publishers) are expected to help publishers optimize their pages for clickthough rates and revenue. That's why we get "heatmaps," "Webinars," etc.
SO does Google teach publishers to make MFAs by going out in a market and scraping snippets of keyword rich code from a dozen top competitors in a market to make a page for Google adsense? Do they preach that is a legit strategy? It sure looks like they do becuase that is what the pages I am looking at look like for the most part.
With the impact that all these scrapings send the organic listings that have been scraped south (except for the ones which are technically Google perfect and have no dup content penalty and therefore can withstand some) so that most of the businesses then turn to adwords. And the littlest guys get killed even if they were in the competition fully on their own merit.
Is it now the only criteria of whether a business can survive is how Google savvy it is. Are there no other criteria like quality, price, service? If the customer can't find it.
Google will destroy itself if it continues. Eventually browsers will catch on that the searching is no good anymore and go elsewhere. i certainly am no longer going to rely on Google if I want to find something in a market I know nothing about.
Google isn't trying to develop the "homerun" algorithm to get rid of these sites because many of these spammy sites have been dumped from their SEARCH ENGINE, but NOT from ADSENSE! Therefore, it's obvious that they already know these sites exist and the rules being applied to SEARCH are not the same being applied to ADSENSE.
Excuse my stupidity but what I have been trying to figure out from my own circumstances is that these spammy sites have scraped bits of my content esp my page titles and somehow have hurt my rankings (maybe/maybe something else did that) but how are these sites making money for their publishers when they don't rank themselves? WHo finds them except desperate webmasters like me trying to find out why I've gone south in Google.
By the way I agree, I think Google is complicit, I think these sites or something else is driving small businesses to adwords and then google is upping the price of adwords and raking in the dough while killing small businesses. It is short term thats how AMerican business operates, by the quarter folks.
how are these sites making money for their publishers when they don't rank themselves?
Many of them spam like crazy to get traction in search engines.
Besides, Google isn't the only show in town, they may be getting traction in Yahoo and MSN and in my experience they are profiting off long tail keywords, not simple keywords, which is why they love your titles and anything in an <h*> tag.
Trust me on this, they CAN get traction in the search engine.
From my main site some porn spammers have included a large chunk of my site navigation in the bottom of a page they cloak to Google, and some of my DIRECT ADVERTISERS and MEMBERS (i run a directory) have found themselves associated to PORN thanks to being added to my site and have asked for removal from the directory and canceled advertising due to the actions of scrapers.
Scraping is the least of your problem when these jerks start to cause you, your members and advertisers to have a reputation management problem.
If Google knows about a certain network of subdomains featuring a photo in the center of the page, and AdSense to the left and right of it, and AdLinks directly below the photo, and after a year of knowing about that network does nothing about it, what does that tell you about how Google AdSense feels about that network of subdomains?
If Google was concerned with the quality of their AdSense network why would they leave a site in AdSense that they remove from Google search results?
I offered two possible reasons earlier in this thread. Emphasis on "possible reasons."
Or maybe you answered your own question in the next paragraph when you wrote:
...it's obvious that they already know these sites exist and the rules being applied to SEARCH are not the same being applied to ADSENSE.
If that's true, then thoughts turn back to the comments made by martinibuster about MFA sites being valued members of the AdSense community, or whatever descriptive term was used.
Of course I asked if anyone here believed that and was willing to start putting up their own MFA's without fear of consequences. As of now, not one person has responded in the affirmative.
It's a bit ironic I'm writing this just after visiting Instapundit, one of the most widely read political - cultural blogs, and reading a post about declining trust in Google.
FarmBoy
.it's obvious that they already know these sites exist and the rules being applied to SEARCH are not the same being applied to ADSENSE.
Of course, if Google can keep the scrapers and click arbitrageurs out of search, the owners of such sites won't be able to make as much with AdSense.
Also, as members have pointed out in other threads, keeping the scrapers and click arbitrageurs out of Google Search while allowing them to pollute other search engines (such as Yahoo and MSN) has the benefit of making other search engines less competitive.
Again, I don't think Google as a corporation is stupid, and it's unlikely that what we say today will exist in unchanged form a year from now. Either Google will find a way to clean things up (as it has tried to do on the AdWords side) or we'll see more choices and controls for advertisers.
There's a tendency for participants in threads like this one to assume that change never happens, and that what they see today is the permanent status quo. But we have seen some major changes since AdWords was introduced (smart pricing being a prime example), and we'll likely see more changes in the future. After all, with nearly all of its revenues coming from Internet advertising, Google can't afford to let AdSense become the equivalent of a remnant banner-ad network.
Google doesn't encourage MFA's...
When a body establishes rules and has the authority/responsibility to enforce those rules, yet does not enforce those rules even with direct knowledge of those rules being broken, I think a reasonable argument can be made the body is encouraging whatever rule breaking is taking place.
FarmBoy
I have no inside information but after a year++ of seeing these type of business model flourish under the adsense program have to believe they are acceptable. My opinion of whether I like it has no bearing on the reality. Google has made no moves directly to eliminate this model....so have by default said it is ok.
Just curious if you've ever tried (I haven't) picking out a MFA, sending the URL to AdSense support and tell them you want to build a similar site on a different topic and ask whether it's acceptable?
FarmBoy
Actually, I can make that claim. :) And so can jenstar, brett, and any number of people. I make it my business to be connected and have access.
Here's a related and interesting bit of trivia. When I go to jensense and do a site search for "MFA", I find exactly one reference.
FarmBoy
Matt had a post on his blog with one phrase I couldn't resist:
So how do we keep the tipping point firmly in the “Google is Good” range?
[mattcutts.com...]
To which I asked the hard question:
How about getting rid of the Made For AdSense (MFA) sites that are the current scourge of the web and all the search engines?
Matt replied:
IncrediBILL, that’s a good example where we have a lot of internal discussion; I don’t want that sort of behavior rewarded either. About a month and a half ago, Google decided to pursue this more aggressively, and quite a few people have already been dropped from AdSense for webspam (violations of our quality guidelines). I’m sure I’ll have a chance to talk about it more in 2007.
Note he said dropped from ADSENSE, not just dropped from SEARCH which is the what we've seen to date. So keep an eye out for Matt telling us more about the spammy MFA sites getting punted from AdSense.
I have a HUGE list of them and I'll be keeping an eye on them to see when they get booted! ;)
If you have a script churning out junk AdSense websites, you might want to look for a new career as it appears Matt's about to issue your unemployment notice.
[edited by: incrediBILL at 7:52 pm (utc) on Jan. 1, 2007]
That is encouraging, because he said "dropped"--Google is taking action that goes beyond QS and other algorithmic approaches.
Like you, I'm looking forward to seeing what develops.
Note he said dropped from ADSENSE, not just dropped from SEARCH which is the what we've seen to date.
Good one, Bill. I've long been concerned about the impact on content bidding by AdWords advertisers from their perception that content sites are full of low quality sites. I brought up this concern to the previous ASA about two years ago at one of the pubcons.
Although Matt says they've kicked some off, I can confirm what Bill says about his having lists of tons more MFAs using rogue and impolite bots. So their actions may have a long way to go before it satisifies their critics.
So, although we shouldn't read too much into one paragraph on the blog of one Google employee, it looks like at least the SE and AS parts of Google *don't* consider at least some sorts of MFAs (ie "webspam") to be valued business partners.
Good.
Rgds
Damon
It also proves, contrary to some posts in this thread that different groups in Google don't work in unison, that Google's departments are trying to coordinate some of these efforts which is also a good thing.
There's a difference between "working in unison" and "trying to coordinate some of these efforts." However, I agree that any coordination between the two departments' efforts is a good thing.
But, just look at the targets of each unit:
Search:
1) Create the best search results to end-consumers in order to not let the core business slip
2) Create a good environment for ads to be sold through Adwords
Adwords:
1) Monetize advertising space on Google Search (i.e. sell ad space to advertisers) without harming the Google experience
2) Monetize advertising space on Google partner sites (i.e. sell ad space to advertisers) acquired by Adsense team
3) Monetize advertising space on other Google products, e.g. maps
Adsense:
1) Acquire new publishers that provide advertising space to Google to be monetized through Adwords team
2) Keep existing publishers happy
3) Ensure that the quality guidelines are met sufficiently
Looks pretty different to me. Surely, all of the teams have some generic overall goals (ensure that Google is making money and not doing evil), but the individual goals actually steer the company. E.g., if there is no incentive for Adsense team to control the quality guidelines more strictly, we will not see this behaviour. It's very simple, really.
Of course, having no insider information, this is all guesswork on my part. Having seen several large corporations, however, I doubt that Google is run any different. It's almost always the same: management puts out rules with attached incentives, and the workforce changes behaviour in order to get the maximum benefit.
If I was looking to read some useful bookmark-worthy information on a topic, say a family vacation to Salzburg Austria, what would be of more use to me to find in the serps: landing on EFV's site with loads of on-topic unique content, or some parked domain-portal mockup with nothing to offer me but a few minutes of my life wasted on a labrynthine maze of ads for EU vacations? The answer to me seems pretty clear.
The only thing you can objectively say about MFAs is that they must benefit their owners and G alike, or else they wouldn't exist. There is however, IMO, no tenable ethical argument that you can offer as to how MFAs benefit the average user of the Net (to whom they constitute a time-wasting annoyance). Likely, the only thing that will kill them is some form of regulation at some level, eventually. Add to that, more and more people, disillusioned with misleading ads, using ad-blockers. "Natural selection" seems to be working in collaboration with MFAs, just like it did with cockroaches.
From the Matt Cuts comment, I don't read exactly the same as you.
They're not getting ride of MFA Adsense specifically, but for low quality adsense sites.
That means that "quality" MFA (bidding cents on adwords and wining on arbitrage) like wisegeek or knowledgestorm will still exist, and actually, some been rewarded as premium publisher.
His quote specifically mentions webspam sites, and I specifically said people running scripts generating new sites need to find a new vocation.
One thing that seems to not be covered, or at least, not countered is the assumption that Users and Advertisers don't like MFA sites.
It seems there's an assumption on this thread that because we (Adsense publishers) don't like them, then the average user doesn't like them.
I disagree.
maxgoldie said... If I was looking to read some useful bookmark-worthy information on a topic, say a family vacation to Salzburg Austria, what would be of more use to me to find in the serps: landing on EFV's site with loads of on-topic unique content, or some parked domain-portal mockup with nothing to offer me but a few minutes of my life wasted on a labrynthine maze of ads for EU vacations? The answer to me seems pretty clear.
I don't disagree with you. BUT, if you were looking to buy a vacation and kept ending up on sites with nothing but content, then you may finally be relieved when you hit an MFA with nothing but ads for buying vacations.
I say this based on watching my Mother-in-law the other night. She was visiting for the holidays and wanted to quickly buy a last minute gift. I loaned her my laptop and watched as she searched for bla bla. She selected the first result which was a review site that had reviews of bla bla. It probably had great content and maybe the site was bookmarkable. Who knows, because she quickly scanned the page and didn't see a price or buy now button, so she hit the back button and selected the next result. It had nothing to do with the bla bla she was looking for, so once again, she clicked her back key and hit the 3rd result. It was an obvious MFA site. By this time, I'm thinking, we're gonna be here all night. She should have let me do the search, and maybe we'd find what she was looking for. To my suprise, she said, "there it is" and clicked the first adsense ad that said "Buy blah blah free shipping". I'd say she was grateful for that MFA site. I'd also say the advertiser that got the conversion was grateful also.
Because of that, I don't have any problems believing MFA's convert well.
Remember, I'm talking about MFA sites, not arbitrage. Arbitrage MFA sites probably do upset normal internet users and I do believe Google understands this and is starting to do something about them.
I also don't believe a lot of Adwords advertisers have a problem with them. They are happy for the traffic and the conversions. There are probably some that raise the ethics flag, but it's funny sometimes what happens to ethics when you get a conversion. Adwords advertisers DO have a problem with clickbots (some MFA's use them) and paying for search advertising and ending up on a parked domain, but I haven't seen them complain too much about MFA's that send them traffic that converts.
[edited by: Jordo_needs_a_drink at 9:16 pm (utc) on Jan. 5, 2007]
I also don't believe a lot of Adwords advertisers have a problem with them. They are happy for the traffic and the conversions.
You wouldn't think that after reading some of the complaints on the AdWords forum, but then again, people with complaints are usually more vocal than people who are happy with the status quo.
Also:
- Generalities are just that: generalities. One advertiser might be happy with MFA clicks; another, who's paying a premium for what he thinks are qualified leads, might not be happy at all.
- Some advertisers won't even consider the content network (or AdWords, period) because of perceptions about low quality, click fraud, etc.
- In some sectors, such as [can't say], the bigger advertisers seem to be gravitating toward display ads, which isn't surprising since (a) they're used to spending money on display ads in other media such as newspaper, glossy magazines, and four-color collateral, and (b) they're used to having control over where their ads appear. Getting such advertisers to buy AdWords (and especially AdSense) for anything but short-term, quick-and-dirty direct-marketing promotions is an uphill battle at the best of times, and it's likely to be tougher if the advertiser who's used to appearing in quality media is faced with a lowest-common-denominator "content network."
I may have overstepped on saying I believe "most" advertisers don't care if their conversion came from an MFA or not. But I still believe, most of what is said in the Adwords forum regarding low quality or MFA sites is geared more towards click fraud and not the actual real traffic they get from it. I believe Adwords advertisers (and I am one, albeit a small budget one) are more concerned with paying for traffic that doesn't convert like click fraud or sites that trick users into clicking ads, than they are from legitimate traffic from MFA sites.
The big guys do care where their ads appear and where their money goes. If Google wants to reach them, it will need to offer suitable products and selection options. Otherwise, AdWords (including AdSense) will remain a niche online direct-marketing tool in an advertising industry where 2007 revenues for the U.S. alone are projected at more than 230 billion dollars.
