As a publisher, I really don't like those MFA spammy type sites. You know the ones, a few pages of a tutorial copied and munged from good sites. The only links on the page are adsense, well blended. They are very sharp people, so they optimize it and probably use some algo tricks to get high return on SP.
As an internet user, I hate the MFAs a lot too. Spamming up the web.
What I'm wondering is how the adwords advertiser views this. As long as you get conversion, do you care what site shows your ad? From your point of view, are these MFA sites "earning" their keep? Or would you prefer to see less MFAs and having the quality sites see the bulk of the income generated from the program?
As an advertiser, you may have missed it, but there has been a bit of a brouhaha when adsense publishers found out that SP has been based on all domains in an account rather than on a domain or url basis.
While this doesn't affect the advertiser as much as the publisher, at the end of the day it is a bad algo that determines how much you pay individual advertisers for an ad. And it allows spammers to exploit the algo much easier than those who just want to build content. I'm curious how the advertisers feel about this.
Thank you.
Personally, I can't stand these pages. They don't offer visitors anything unique, and I try to block them whenever I find them.
They are also the reason, in certain industries, content match is not worthwhile. I think the site targeting feature is one attempt at addressing this problem, but since it's a different payment method, it doesn't address it fully.
MFA sites are usually targeting higher paying keywords, thus, usually low CPC keywords can work great on content, often high volume, high dollar keywords don't.
Based on my experience, since I don't use content targeting for these types of words, it does hurt legitimate publishers who's site I would not mind appearing on. However, it's not worth the time to police every site, so content is either off or on.
The way I see it is that if they are happy to set up a site to trick users, they will probably be employing techniques to create false clicks (eg a group of x people in a syndicate that all go in and click on each ads once a week, etc, etc).
At this stage we stick to Google Search sites only and don't use Content sites.
If they are highly skilled, so much the worse. What's to stop them from ripping off advertisers?
Would you even know if you got burnt?
The safest and most beneficial thing would be to disallow MFA 'publishers'.
They can't be that hard to spot. -Larry
If you are getting a positive roi from these sites as well, whats wrong with these sites giving you the business.
so on one hand it is bad for the serps, but on the other hand those sites are still sending traffic to businesses, that are making them money, so it is good for the advertiser.
briggidere
