Forum Moderators: martinibuster
They do not WANT us to filter.
Google must be losing a lot of content network advertisers and/or making a ton of money off MFAs.
p/g
Who told you that all the .info sites are MFA or worthless sites?
Regards
Kb
noone said that all .info domains are useless. It's just the majority of them. A look into my filter list tells me that I am currently blocking about 30 .info domains. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of useless .info domains (selft-appoited "Directories") containing nothing but ads. These arbitrageurs advertise their arbitrage business using Adwords. I want to get rid of them.
When I think (as a user) about actively using .info domains for, er, information, I can't remember when I last saw exciting unique content on a .info domain.
As someone said in this thread, I do not care if I accidentally block a legit website along the line. If I was able to block .info, I'd do it right away. And with the free slot, I'd block .biz as well.
noone said that all .info domains are useless. It's just the majority of them. A look into my filter list tells me that I am currently blocking about 30 .info domains.
Does that mean the majority of .coms are useless, simply because the majority of domains a lot of us block are .coms?
Furthermore, the majority of sites we are blocking (at least among my circle of friends) are almost all arbitrage/MFA combo sites.
Those kinds of sites are going to work whether they are .com or .net or .info or .what. They push ads that are designed to get people to click through to their sites, and then to click away from the resulting MFA site.
Joe Blow is not thinking "oh, that site has .info or .biz, I'm going to stay away from it". Joe Blow is thinking "ohhhh, cheap gadget I want *click*" and then he's going to arrive on the MFA and he's going to go "oh, they don't have whatever, but this ad says they do *click*".
If Google addressed the arbitrage/MFA sites, then we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Among the group of people I talk with regularly (about half a dozen), everyone of them had more .coms blocked than anything else.
They've got more .coms blocked than anything else because there are more .coms than anything else; that doesn't show that a high proportion of .com sites are spam.
The problem with .infos is that a high proportion of them are spam, so filtering out all .infos is a crude but effective spam filter.
As someone who's developed a number of blue-chip, non-spammy sites on .info domains (and who buys AdWords for some of them), I wish that this weren't so, but it is.
As someone who's developed a number of blue-chip, non-spammy sites on .info domains (and who buys AdWords for some of them), I wish that this weren't so, but it is.
As you know .info domains are 100% MFA
Really? I have a .info domain and it is not MFA in the least.
noone said that all .info domains are useless. It's just the majority of them.
The majority of sites with AdSense may be useless, for all we know. Certainly a lot of them are. Maybe Web users would benefit from browsers that had built-in "sites with AdSense" filters.
I'm not saying that there aren't spammy .infos, I'm just saying they are not the problem, but merely a symptom. The real problem is arbitrage and MFA sites.
Yes, you are right. They are using .info because it helps them to grow their business (handling, credibility, cost). By blocking .info TLD, we could at least make it harder for the spammers to distribute their ads.
@netmeg
Actually, now that I think about it, 90% of my .info MFA filters probably trace back to one guy (or one entity)
Same here. I could trace that one to an "entity"
[edited by: jatar_k at 10:09 pm (utc) on May 15, 2007]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]
By blocking .info TLD, we could at least make it harder for the spammers to distribute their ads.
As I said, I have a friend who does consulting in regards to dealing with the effects of spam and how companies can fight it, and the amount of automation that the big-league spammers are using, ones that probably account for easily 75% of all spam generated (depending on who you ask, it could go 90%+), means that it wouldn't impact them at all.
You would only be hurting legit .info users, and the spammers would continue to use .com, .org, .net, .biz, etc.
The spammers can and do bounce around sites, can register dozens and even hundreds of sites in the time it takes you to register one. They can change IPs and DNS servers as needed.
TLDs mean nothing to spammers. .com is probably their preference, based on the number of MFA/Arbitrage/spam .coms, but they don't care what's at the end of a domain name, whether it's .com or .info, all they care about is their bottom line.
You would only be hurting legit .info users, and the spammers would continue to use .com, .org, .net, .biz, etc.
Actually, he'd really only be hurting himself; if he blocks (accidentally or intentionally) a perfectly legitimate .info domain, then he doesn't earn any money from it. The advertiser will no doubt be shown elsewhere.
I for one don't really have time to go ferreting out individual sites and figure out which .info (or .biz or .tv or whatever other) domains are legit and which aren't - if, on the basis of percentage, most of the ones I see are garbage, then I'll happily block the whole TLD if given the opportunity, and I can live with the consequences.
