Are MFA's really this prevalent?

[farmboy]

Over on the Google Search board there is a thread - [webmasterworld.com...] - about Google indexing AdSense ads.

After reading this, I copied the text of an AdSense ad being shown on my site, added quotation marks before and after the text then searched for it on Google.

Wow! The search returned 10 pages of results. I went through the list and at least 90% of the sites showing that ad were MFA sites.

Is this an anomaly or do MFA pages really constitute a huge majority of the "content" network? Are those publishers who don't publish MFA sites really just a very small slice of the pie? Should we all consider a strategy shift? :)

FarmBoy

[Metaphorically]

Think about a long tail distribution (though this case isn't necessarily a Zipf distribution it could be something like it). If you rank publishers by traffic or revenue then you'd probably see something with a small group of very high values and a very long tail.

What I'm saying is that even if the majority of publishers are MFAs that doesn't mean that enough traffic goes to any given MFA for that one to be profitable. It certainly is painful to look at though. And who knows, maybe one or two of those sites at the head of the distribution are MFAs. But if my guess is near correct then that should be a small enough set that Google would be aware of them...

[Skeptic]

I suppose that every site (with Adsense on it) can be called an "MFA" site.

But they all vary in quality. Some sites have value, others are just plain junk.

[Atomic]

I suppose that every site (with Adsense on it) can be called an "MFA" site.

I'd find it hard to call a site built before AdSense existed an MFA.

[iwannano1]

If you sold text ad, google will punish you. This is just bad thing, this encourages domain parking and MFA. Google is new Microsoft.

Also, most honest webmaster have / has content rich site, they are removing click are for content oriented site and providing click area to MFA / domain parking / premium publisher.

Please provide us css and font formatting option as click are is changed. This will help us to optimize ad.

This is just double standard .. what happened to do no evil mantra? Look like shareholders gonna ruin party for rest of all :(

[Tropical Island]

My ads are showing up in search on travel related sites - not MFA's - so this is not just restricted to them.

Very odd how they are being picked up. Out of all the hundreds of sites our ads show up on there are only 9 in the serps.