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?

[newsecular]

There are arbritage sites and then there are arbritage sites.
There are MFA sites and then there are MFA sites.

The fine definition of the fine line, the shades of greys in the grey area is what this is all about.

There is a huge difference between a site that is admittedly thin yet in compliance, and sites that are blatant no-value 100% MFA.

I can inform that all of my sites have at least "some" valid content, admittedly thin on some but still. Also at least one good out link on every site.

There was a comment above on us knowing that we built sand castles. We'll this has been going on for years now, one would assume that years of silent acceptance of the practices would at least warrant a warning before a cold cut off - not?

After going over my sites now I belive 75% of what I do might be called arbritage or MFA, I will cut that off in an effort.

The remaining 25% is still a few k per month, mostly from organic traffic, some free links, some paid links. Sites going back to 1999.
Will work to be allowed to keep that.
This 25% is probably very similar to what everyone else here (non-arbritage and non-MFA webmasters) on the forum is working on.

[frox]

A question to the unlucky ones that gor this email: where you doing Arbitrage or scrapers?

I mean, your traffic was bought with Adwords or coming from SERPs?

The two are quite different markets, and I am curious to what is google aiming at.

[freedata]

I too got the email.
My sites are all original content. I have even seen sites that are simply clones of mine with content lifted from my sites. Topics range from Business to IT. Using AS since 2004.

I imagine the reason for this is 50% of our traffic is coming from Adwords. The rest is from SERPS, bookmarks, links. Have many outbound links to affiliate networks. Not sure if Google will listen to our requests but asked them to re-do the review and suggest us how to "add value" to AdSense program.

[newsecular]

In my case I am buying cheap targeted clicks on AdSense, Google and content network, some of this has grown very fast in the last 6 months.

I have developed techniques to locate and explore areas where cheap clicks are possible (some language and country specific combinations stuff etc). I have built some new sites to optimally match this traffic, with thin content - but still some valid content and at least one outbound good link - "thin but fair" I would say. My intention is to improve these sites over time.

I do many things on dozens of sites so it's hard to say what precisely has triggered this, but I assume the above is it.

[DamonHD]

Hi newsecular,

I really value your transparency on this issue.

If G wants to kill arb then that's a reasonable policy.

But it would be nice to see if you can salvage the relationship and AS account for different business models later.

Rgds

Damon

[Erku]

This is great news for good publishers and for advertisers.

I am glad Google is finally doing something about it. All MFA sites should be disabled.

[newsecular]

Hi Damon,
I also much appreciate the others that have come forward, it helps me understand what this might be about and how to possibly resolve it.
The more who come forward the better chance we have of working this out with AdSense I would believe.

Freedata - please if you can do let us know what response you get from the AdSense team, it will be of great help. I will wait until Monday to contact them.

I am being as transparent as I am allowed to in the TOS in an effort to
resolve this somehow. Even at the risk of giving away “secret sauce” :) , I do not have much alternative now do I?
I/we now have 12 days, 17 hours and 50 minutes to save years worth of work.
It seems to me from the other webmasters here that I am not alone in feeling that the AdSense
team is a bit tough on this “The June 1. Crackdown”.

To anyone else getting the email:
Don’t panic. Share what you know here in an effort to work it out. At least during the next 12 days one should keep ones head cool and try to work this out by sharing info.

[Tropical Island]

That way you would have to submit a site - prior to being accepted into adsense. The code would be specific for that site - and non transferable.

Again this issue comes up. It is long overdue and is a reasonable solution to many of the problems we read about here.

I am looking forward to deleting (with a back up copy :-)) my 200 blocked urls. Hopefully this is the dawn of a new age.

[glitterball]

Hopefully this is the dawn of a new age.

Amen to that. Not only is this great news for quality publishers, it is also great news for the web.

[trannack]

I think that if all those banned are prepared to share their experiences in here - it could be beneficial in a number of ways.

They are all aware of why they were banned - no one in here has yet cried out that it was unjust - merely stated the fact.

Perhaps if you all share what you were doing - what you plan to do etc, you could perhaps educate a whole load of newbies from falling foul of the mfa/arbitrage game.

I guess you will all have learnt from your mistakes - albeit - you've possible had a good ride for a few years. Time to start afresh with a new business model.

So guys - what's the game plan?