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Forum Moderators: incrediBILL & martinibuster
joined:May 6, 2005
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Google sees no harm to the Internet in general for such sites to be in the natural results of a Google search. Google sees no harm in the general quality of the Internet by the spread of such sites. Why should I see harm in it?
Google is always right, right?
Mike
Just 86th about a dozen of the little fleas and my conscious feels really good about it :)
I watch when my numbers start tanking I break out the trusty mouse and start multi-tasking until I find the worst of them.
Happy Hunting,
Ann
Think of Google as a sultry strawberry-blonde named Ginger
On the issue of MFA's and the arguments for conservative filtering; I think of Google more as the political party or govt. adminstration of the day. They sell an idea or try to appeal to you with spin. They tell you that something is for your own good when you know otherwise. When questioned at depth and presented with contrary arguements they simply duck or ignore the question.
Has anybody developed a good system for making space in the filter?
Keep track of your filter list in an Excel sheet. Upon entering look up once other relevant information, e.g. registrant or target IP address. Then determine whether these guys are annoying, bad or really bad. ;-) When you run out of space, throw out the annoying ones first. If you still need more space, have a look at the bad ones' Alexa charts. Often, from the chart you can already see whether they are still actively advertising (in this case you see a spike in traffic). Then you may be able to release the sites in question as well.
Never release the really bad sites. They will keep on advertising. Maybe they are just pausing their campaigns and do the domain-switch thing (a common tip at the Adwords forum). I have one spammy company from the Caribbean that runs a variety of domains that are just "cycled through" for ads. ALL their sites end up in my filter, and keep on being there.
Every couple of months I physically visit the blocked sites that I do not know. Many times they have disappeared or are parked.
I find it's fairly rare to visit a blocked site and find that it no longer exists. I guess it depends the length of time one allows between visits.
In any case some of the fleas that become inactive end up being reactivated at some later stage anyway.
Most of them don't last very long to begin with, maybe a week, but they can do a lot of damage in that time, before their probation time runs out and G realizes they aren't making as much money as the non-spam. Most of them have obvious disposable URLs with long strings of variously plural or rearranged keywords and .org or .net extensions. Some of them lately are even using non-spam look-alike URLs now.
I've come to the opinion that if you are seeing an inordinately large number of these sites, popping up your site is in serious smart-pricing trouble already. Ultimately I think I've found that it is good to keep as few filtered as possible as they ultimately do contribute to the higher bidding for keywords once you surmount that bid ridge. During our all time highest PPC period we had only 2 true competitor sites filtered. I agree filtering them does positive wonders for the average PPC when your PPC/CPM is low, but when I can find no more showing up and I see PPC start to dip again, I'll remove ALL the filtered sites (except the true competitors, I keep a copy of them all handy in a text editor, to put back on a moments notice if necessary) and let things resettle for a couple days. This usually results in an instant PPC surge and very few spammers re-appear.
My own opinion is that the PPC surge puts your site out of the targeters' price range (at least temporarily) since they are generally bottom feeders, and this is long enough for Adsense to get the proper idea that the higher paying ads REALLY are more appropriate for your site afterall.
As far as rationalization when G sends those messages about only TRUE competitors belonging in the filter, I DO view Arbitrage sites as TRUE competitors of the purest form, since they are trying to STEAL MY end-user (e.g. a retailer who actually sells the product and thus makes the most profit and thus is willing to pay the most for the customer) clickthru profit and make it THEIR own profit! So in effect they are directly competing with ME for that same end-user clickthru payment. GAd should realize this point of view and take a good long look at the list of sites consistently appearing in everyones filters.