And now: PMFAs (Pure MFAs)

The latest fad

[mzanzig]

While de-lousing the ads on my sites I came across two advertisers that seem to represent the latest MFA fad: PMFA (for "Pure Made-For-Adsense"):

Logo, Search Box, Home-Button, Contact Us, About Us, Advertise with us, Privacy Policy

So far, so good. As expected, searching for any term results in nothing but two large Adsense rectangles, and an Adlinks section. No content.

The surprise part comes when you explore the footer: Contact us - a large Adsense rectangle (filled with a PSA, hah!); About us - another large Adsense rectangle (filled with another PSA); Advertise - two large rectangles and an Adlink; Privacy Policy - the same.

There is ZERO content on this site. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Nichts. De rien. How, please, how can these guys get into Adwords in the first place? How can Google accept them at all? How can they go undetected by all those Google algos? How? How? How?

The two sites I found, btw, point to the same IP-Address range, making it once more obvious that we urgently need other ways (read: more efficient ways) to block ads and advertisers.

[martinibuster]

There is ZERO content on this site. Nothing.

That's pretty much the definition for unpure MFAs.

• Scraped content,
• no content,
• poor quality content written expressly for adsense
• just photos
• wiki content,
• etc.

[edited by: martinibuster at 5:52 pm (utc) on April 24, 2007]

[Sense_able]

What amazes me is how to they keep their accounts. If I was to try something untoward they would ban me in a flash (Sods Law)

[justageek]

What amazes me is how to they keep their accounts.

They don't have to keep them long. As long as someone can make it through one or more payments then it is possible to make money. They don't care if they get banned and they don't care if the url ever gets used again.

We did some 'tests' a while back to see how easy it would be to have our AdWords clients charged for invalid clicks. It was very easy to do and we never did trigger a Google check. Kids - don't try this at home!

Disclaimer - We did our testing with full disclosure to our test clients and WE PAID for the clicks we generated. We did not push the limits of how much could be earned before getting caught since that was not the goal but we certainly earned enough to be a profitable MFA site even if only for one payment cycle. Google billed the clients accounts and paid us as if nother wrong ever happened.

So the moral of the story is MFA sites can always make money.

JAG

[littlegiant]

I remember back in 2004, webmaster forums were rife with complaints about how people couldn't get accepted into Adsense and what did you have to do to get accepted and it's so unfair, gripe, whine, complain, etc. The going wisdom back then was that to get accepted into Adsense, you had to have a site with at least 50 pages of quality content --each page at least 250 words. So I spent 6 months devoting a good portion of my spare time to building a site that would pass the Adsense 'standards' with flying colors... Got up to about 90 pages before I finally applied to Adsense (early 2005). Got accepted right away of course but, my oh my, have things ever changed since those times. Sheesh.

[chikung]

with these kind of scary stories how can a person empty there filter bags after a long time just to see if some of the MFA's might have changed their sites or banned.

I received the optimized message that I have pretty much urls in my filter back so I may be blocking some who may have potential of giving more money. I tried to empty it for a while but that repeated the same story.

Now this is something new. Pages with no content. I used to get the sites like, best4, best8, shopping, etc. with just lots and lots of links.

I don't know how can I find which site is banned and how can I reduce the size of my filter bag to add few more if I come across these kinds of No content pages.