AdSense Disabling Arbitrage Accounts by June 1st

[Freddy81]

They told me my account will be disabled at 1st June, and also added that I'll receive payment for all outstanding earnings in accordance with the standard AdSense payment schedule.

For this day (17 May), does it mean that they will pay for April 1-30 earnings, or for May (1-18) also?

[Play_Bach]

Given the huge sums of money some of these guys were making, I wonder where they'll go next. Seems to me there isn't any place that'll even come to close to what they had with Google.

[gendude]

How can one filter per account with 200 domains limit can work for larger publishers? (or any publisher) I have 7 larger websites and this filter does not even hold all the MFA for one site.

Just give advertisers the tools to pick and choose and give the same tools to publishers and you will have natural and healthy network.

Advertisers will pick high quality websites and publishers would approve high quality ads. Very Simple.

I would like to be able to filter a lot more arbitrage MFA sites. Maybe Google will do this. This would help cut down on the arbitrage/MFA sites in the future.

Also banned. Common denominator is that he too was using PPC traffic.

If this is a fact, then maybe they want only sites with organic traffic to display adSense and should clearly say so in the TOS.

However, my gut feel is that they are banning sites with poor user experience because the adWords Quality Score mechanism has failed to weed such sites out. They are now going at it from the adSense side.

Either way, it's good if they are banning such sites. Helps the rest of us with quality sites out.

[kashifkb]

Hi there,

What will be done with the Arbitrage sites that are performing well for the Google's Advertisers.

Can anyone explain me what's wrong with the arbitrage sites that are providing good user experience and are performing well for the Google's Advertisers too and still pushed towards the list of the sites that are going to be banned by June 01.

I don't see any reason in banning them, which are performing well.

I think criteria should be performance and user experience not the Arbitrage sites as stated by the "Adsense Director, that they are not against the arbitrage and respect it as a business model".

If this flow of banning the sites continue then may be next targeted is banning sites that are getting organic traffic but not performing well for Advertisers, next sites, which don't have the organic traffic, next sites, which don't covert well and so on........

In short, criteria should be performance of the sites.

If Arbitrage is so bad then why it was promoted in the beginning?

Best Regards
KB

[Doug10]

kashifkb,

There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with arbitrage. Google itself has said so. They have also said what they DO have a problem with is poor user experience with arbitrage. If Google judges arbitrage sites are offering a good user experience, then there won't be a problem. You just need to hope that Google's opinion about what makes a "good user experience" is the same is yours. :)

[youfoundjake]

I think a good example of arbitrage is a case study being displayed by Adsense.
[adsense.blogspot.com...]

This may give some an idea what "good user experience" may involve.

[netmeg]

I have an informational event site with adsense on it. The site is strictly information except for the adsense - I'm not selling anything. This year, for the first time, I have an adwords account driving traffic towards it. The adwords so far accounts for about 5% to 7% of my traffic; the rest of it comes from organics (about 80% google). Is this considered arbitrage? I dunno. Most of my traffic comes from organic search, by far, but the adwords campaign is new (and it probably won't take off bigtime until next month) Is it MFA? Well no, the site has been up since 1999, considerably before adsense. The site definitely provides something that the user isn't going to get anywhere else (at least, not all in one place) and there's a link to it on michigan.gov, the official state site.

I have not gotten any notifications from Google, and I am trusting I won't.

It's possible that in evaluating these sites, there are a number of different things that are being weighed - percentage of unique or useful content, percentage of traffic from adwords as opposed to organics or referral traffic, number and quality of backlinks - it's probably not just one thing that's flipping the switch.

[netmeg]

I think criteria should be performance and user experience not the Arbitrage sites

Performance as decided by whom? The publisher's idea of performance could be very different from the advertiser's idea of performance, and both of those could well be different from the user's idea. I don't see how Google could judge on "performance" - it's too nebulous.

[zoltan]

Somehow offtopic but since Monday morning my overall traffic is up with 25-30%. I do not use AdWords at all. Can this be related to the closing of arbitrage accounts? Anyone noticed a similar trend?

[Hobbs]

Just a theory, and I am not talking about anyone specific, just keep it at the back of your minds.

There could a vested interest for MFA owners to spread FUD hoping the AdWords would experience a major pull out by legitimate advertisers worried that their non MFA business model would get them banned. Then Google would panic and extend or cancel the June 1st deadline.

We all know what an MFA looks like, right?

[Elsmarc]

Somehow offtopic but since Monday morning my overall traffic is up with 25-30%. I do not use AdWords at all. Can this be related to the closing of arbitrage accounts? Anyone noticed a similar trend?

Same here, and I've never used adwords either. Today has been even better than yesterday. Something weird is happening.

[edited by: Elsmarc at 8:45 pm (utc) on May 22, 2007]