Forum Moderators: martinibuster
The overall topic is "widget ------ling." The site's home page consists of links to pages optimized for keyphrases such as "widget ------ling in Springfield," "widget ------ling in Shelbyville," "Christian widget ------ling," and so on. The site has several hundred pages in all.
If you go to the page on "widget ------ling in Elbonia," you'll find a block of standard text that has been modified via a script or search-and-replace program to read something like:
"This page is about widget ------ling in Elbonia. If you're interested in widget ------ling in Elbonia, you can read our information on widget ------ling in Elbonia or chat about widget ------ling in Elbonia to learn all about widget ------ling in Elbonia."
The left column consists of AdSense ads disguised as a navigation bar. (Colors have been modified to eliminate ad borders and make the the "Ads by Google" hard to see.)
Clearly, this site violates the Google TOS, which state that an AdSense publisher's pages can't be created "for the purpose of displaying ads" even if the content is on target. (One might also think that the borderless ads disguised as a navigation bar would violate the TOS, but they don't, because Google made the mistake of listening to publishers who insisted that control over ad colors was necessary for "site aesthetics.")
I'd like to think that, when Google discovers sites like this, it takes action. Such sites are bad for users, bad for advertisers, bad for Google Search, and bad for the credibility of Google's "content network" among current and future advertisers. The question is, what can Google to do to discourage the creation of such sites? Here are some ideas for discussion:
1) Require that publishers obtain Google's approval for each site or subdomain where the AdSense code is to be used. Better yet, use technical means to ensure that code isn't displayed on non-approved domains or subdomains.
2) "Sandbox" revenues of new accounts and new sites under existing accounts for a reasonable period--say, 60 to 90 days--or until the AdSense QC team has done a couple of spot-checks to make sure that the site is legitimate.
3) Perform regular spot checks of any account that has revenues above a certain figure.
4) Tighten up the color and layout requirements for AdSense ads: e.g., require that the ads have borders and don't allow them to be used in lieu of navigation bars.
5) Work more closely with the Google Search team, so that any site banned by Google Search is also banned by AdSense and vice versa.
These steps might not eliminate the problem of "Made for AdSense" sites that threaten the viability of contextual advertising and clutter Google's search results, but they'd be be a step in the right direction.
They're already using the Adsense data in conjunction with the organic SERPs data to find, penalize, and ban sites.
Personally, I think it all comes down to manpower.
2) "Sandbox" revenues of new accounts and new sites under existing accounts for a reasonable period--say, 60 to 90 days--or until the AdSense QC team has done a couple of spot-checks to make sure that the site is legitimate.
I curious EFV, would you have signed up for adsense with sandboxing like this? I'm not sure I would have.
To me the biggest threat toadsense is the way they allow wholesale adding of the program to unreviewed "additional" sites.
Simply requiring each site to be reviewed would take care of most of those issues.
I understand that the policy of "submit one site; if approved put the code to all your sites" allowed G to have Adsense spread much more faster, and thus dominate the market early on. But now is the time to control quality, and one way is to make sure that the Adsense code is only put on sites that G has approved and reviewed. This change may create a backlog in site approval, but it can reduce the number of manhours tracking unscrupulous publishers.
Banner ad networks require every domain/site to be sent for review before their adcode can be used in that site. It is time for G to follow the same procedure.
requiring each site to be reviewed would take care of most of those issues
True, it would take care of the issues, but there are only so many people on Google's staff who can review sites. If they made that manual review a requirement then there wouldn't be an Adsense program--they wouldn't have the contextual ad inventory.
They certainly make the net less useful.
Obviously it cuts down their workload - but it does invite people to create one half-decent site and truckloads of rubbish.
The site you refer to was absolutely blatant nonsense (every page identical apart from the keywords) - and I'd be surprised if Google didn't remove it if it was reported to them.
The one thing that you COULD learn from it was that placement of an Adsense skyscraper in the left-hand column. I'm quite tempted to test that myself, below my actual site navigation:
The left-hand column is just a place users are conditioned to want to click - bound to get a good CTR there. Changing the colour to match that column is no different to choosing a white background and no border when putting the adsense in your body copy - and LOADS of people do that.
(Of course site X took it to extremes by not bothering with site navigation at all! - Fine for a "made for Adsense / affiliate" site - but no use for sites trying to build a loyal following of users).
[edited by: 7_Driver at 8:25 pm (utc) on July 29, 2004]
...there are only so many people on Google's staff who can review sites.....
This is a good excuse for a few months, after that you need to create a program managed by a couple of Google employees in-house, that can have a couple of dozen people working remotely hunting down these sites.
Take your list of publishers and assign 50 to 100 sites to each "contract employee" to review each day. If they find something unseemly, they can kick it up to the two Google employees for second review.
When you show $1.5 billion dollars in revenue in six months and most of this revenue growth is coming from this program. You better protect it and let the competitor {that will surely come} be flooded with those sites.
Please Google do something as we don't want to see our EPC go south.
So whilst one Google team (AdSense review) are waiting to get around to quashing the backlog of M4A sites, another Google team (search results) are actively promoting the same sites with the SERP sandbox behaviour.
[edited by: dmorison at 8:47 pm (utc) on July 29, 2004]
...there is no reason Google has to police those sites! ...
The reason is: That is not how the program is being sold to advertisers.
and users find it ok (otherwise they will not click on those AS ads)
I find your logic faulty. A significant percentage of users will click a text ad if the only exit links are those text ads, especially if the page the links are on did not meet their needs. Clicking an ad in no way implies that the user is satisfied with the page they're viewing, the ads on that page or the ad serving company when those are the only options available (other than hitting the back button or closing the browser).
If you like analogies...
A customer on a flight must love airline food otherwise they wouldn't eat it. ;-)
we place highly-targeted AdWords ads on content pages within our extensive network of [u]high-quality[/u] partner sites and products.
I did not write the above, it can be found in a Google page. Ok, I did underline the high quality part, but just that.
I am not one to brag about the quality of my site, but really lets have some standards.
In a sense, by providing Adsense, you are providing something the visitor finds useful, because they click on it. There are other ways to leave a site besides clicking on an ad. People do not click on ads without reading them.
Tighten up the color and layout requirements for AdSense ads: e.g., require that the ads have borders...
In my limited expirence those users arriving in those spammy widget SEO'd pages are far more in buying mood than those users clicking AS ad on a widget news story in a "high quality" magazine!
>>> It is pretentious to believe that one's own method of doing things is the correct way
Spot on Martini!
Hence the name "contextual advertising".
"Spam" is content as well.
Also, who says it is declining? It is booming. And I agree with gopi that there is better ROI on the spam pages than high quality sites oftentimes. You can test this yourself by running an affiliate program instead of adsense on the spam pages.
If the advertisers get the ROI why they leave the program? ...
As i said before the ROI is far better in a SEO'd site where fresh new targetted users arrive everyday than a high quality established site which has the same repeated visitors and also they are just in a browsing mood (like newspapers or forums )
there is no reason Google has to police those sites! ...
Actually, there are several good reasons, as I'm sure the Google Search team would agree.
But the most basic reason is very simple: These sites are explicitly forbidden by the AdSense TOS.
I wish we could exclude urls, as there are some really bad sites that have never given us a single conversion, and yet they appear in the stats all the time. It's extreemly frustrating that we cannot black list them.
The argument for these types of sites is that ROI is not really affected.
In the post above we have a testimonial that at least one advertiser's ROI was affected.
Hmmmm, what am I missing here?
/edit: Frankly the fact that the program is not being promoted as a free for all, and that EFV pointed out that the sites are against the TOS is like the atom-bomb of arguments. There really shouldn't be an argument at all.
Others that are extremely roi focused grumble when they see sites that are sending them traffic not converting. I imagine that as roi tracking becomes more prevalent, then you might see more people getting annoyed. In the meantime I imagine that its all about getting huge volumes of traffic.
That same friend told me that AOL told him a few years ago that a customer cost 1000 USD to aquire because of their huge advertising costs. He suggested to the AOL marketing director that he would be better off standing in Central Station with a bag full of 100 dollar bills and actually paying people 200 usd cash to sign up! It's a funny world!
