Forum Moderators: martinibuster
During this exercise I was amazed by the number of MFAS sites that are popping up which means they are using AdWords arbitrage to get visitors to pages with NO CONTENT just ads. Also surprising is the number of them that are now using Yahoo / Overture ads.
These are mostly "directories" with a list of subheadings.
One blatant example was a site that was using AdSense ads and nothing else. Each subheading just went to another page with AS and no copy, no content, nothing...
I reported it to AdSense Abuse but again I'm surprised there are so many.
Am I crazy for blocking these sites or reporting them for that matter?
That question pre-supposes that, if you didn't block these sites, you'd be sane. Is that a valid premise? :-)
The only thing that concerns me about you doing this is that it may not be the most valuable use of your time, and you are doing a job that Google should be able to automate. Surely they can detect when pages are solely adsense ads?
That question pre-supposes that, if you didn't block these sites, you'd be sane. Is that a valid premise? :-)
At my age that's a question I've learned never to ask myself. I might not like the answer. :-)
The only problem is Google talks out of both sides of their neck about MFAs as on one hand you're not permitted to make them yet on the other if you make a bazillion of them on seperate domains they call it the "domain park" program and it's perfectly legititmate.
[google.com...]
I'm thinking it's time that if you can't fight 'em, join 'em, and start Scrapers, Inc. and simply out scrape the scrapers and become the best scraper of them all.
OOPS! that would be a search engine, it's been done...
Never mind.
What do you think?
Am I crazy for blocking these sites or reporting them for that matter?
The first thing I'd say is that I've always found the adsense tool to be innacurate. It's often shown sites that I've already blocked, and often doesn't show ads that I can physically see on the page despite correct geotargetting! I certainly wouldn't block any advert on the basis of the tool. I always see what ads are actually showing and block what I can see. I do use the tool to get the URL to block (if it's showing).
My advice is don't bother to report them - even if the site is WAY out of the TOS, Google simply won't do anything. I've tried reporting such a site several times as both publisher, and advertiser and it's still there.
My other bit of advice is to block the MFA ads you see. MFA sites do not pay higher than real advertisers - they are there only as a result of Google's insane logic of putting advertisers on banners as a result of ctr based on how an ad works on other sites, and removing real ads to place them.
Blocking sites can cause your stats (maybe even your earnings) to dip temporarily. But in my personal experience, blocking these MFA sites means that the real advertisers selling goods and services that Google has decided to drop in favour of high CTR spammers pay more. You might find that you get less clicks, but the clicks you do get earn you more money, and in the long term effect of removing junk ads is that smartpricing gives a higher value your site.
I consider any advertisers on my site who have prominent adsense ads on their landing pages as my competitors. I try to filter them out and adapt my own site to cover the same topics (and carry the same presumably high-paying ads) that they are trying to target.
Don't try to filter out genuine advertisers - leave that to Google to decide. After all, you don't *know* that your competitors ads pay you more than the ones you see.
I only block MFA sites, and any targetting that is absolutely totally misplaced - E.G. acne cream on a site aimed at middle aged family men. You can go too far with blocking sites and end up reducing your income, so use the tool sparingly. I don't block competitors ads personally - just MFA and ebay.
My CTR had already been pretty high, but they were tapering off and I was receiving fewer clicks after a while.
The same originating URL appeared on several different pages of my content site, so I blocked it at the domain level.
Since then, my CTR has increased significantly. In my case blocking turned out to be a good move.
If the "other" ad takes the user back to the same crappy "all Adsense links and nothing else" site, you might lose site stickiness if they're lead on wild, unrelevant searches, making them more prone to continue elsewhere.
There are so many that Google must know about them. They are permitted, no matter what Google officially says.
Yes. We have some rarely viewed niche pages that often have more clicks than page views. Whilst this can sometimes be a click dump, I think it's more likely visitors returning to an information rich page (unless someone more technically competent than me has a better explanation).
Obviously Google likes the money from MFAs, but I have another theory why they allow/encourage them. Google SERPs are much better at filtering our MFAs than other search engines. Some searches at Yahoo, MSN yield almost all MFAs. By allowing MFAs Google helps ensure their search engine is better than the competition.
