Thought I'd copy my blog post about filtering MFA sites to here and maybe shamelessly get a Digg or two I Increased My eCPM by over 25% by Filtering MFA Sites Ads Black List has finally launched their new website and system to combat “Made for AdSenseâ€, or MFA for short. I thought this was a good time for me to write about my personal experience with the competitive ads filter to block sites that are “Made for AdSenseâ€. The competitive ads filter is a tool AdSense publishers can use to filter out advertisements which they do not want displayed on their websites, for example ads from a competitor, or in this case MFA sites. What is “Made for AdSenseâ€? A MFA is a website with no content other than well placed AdSense with the sole purpose to make visitors click on ads. Using AdWords these sites place low bids on every keyword they can think of and draws visitors to different versions of their websites using very “inviting†advertisements. Using questionable methods such as keyword stuffing thousands of MFA sites also gain a lot of traffic from search engines and are known to ruin search results. Detecting a MFA is very easy. A typical domain name for a MFA website could be “8-best-sitesâ€. If you see an advertisement that looks suspicious check it out (not by clicking your own ads, grab the URL). If you find the landing page to have more Google ads than content it’s a MFA. Advertisements are usually formed along these lines: Best 8 [topic here] websites We have the 8 best [topic here] websites! 8-best-sites.com An ad such as this is sure to attract the eyes and clicks of your visitors and the MFA site will pay you next to nothing for it. Depending on your page rank and the type of traffic you are sending you will receive one or two cents. The whole idea behind MFA is to attract cheap traffic using AdWords and obtain the highest CTR (Click Through Rate) possible to turn a profit, and it works. The Damage Being Done The ones at risk of getting hurt by MFA sites are honest publishers, advertisers and also people using search engines. Due to their high performance and great abundance MFA advertisements have a tendency of literally taking over the inventory on some websites. I have personally experienced this. If your website is serving a lot of MFA ads you risk losing new visitors who quickly leave your site as they click on attractive ads that pay you next to nothing. MFA ads can also give your site a bad reputation among your regulars. Returning visitors learn that the advertisements on your site seem to be nothing but junk. From an advertisers perspective, a lot of clicks coming through via MFA websites could be called “bad trafficâ€. The majority of people who surf the web have got no idea what AdSense is and are not aware that they are clicking on advertisements, especially if the ads are blended well. Advertisers risk receiving untargeted traffic as people are tricked into clicking ads and something that hurts advertisers will also hurt publishers in the end. I think that the conversion ratio on MFA sites is a reason behind advertising dollars being moved from the AdSense content network to the search network, and most publishers finds the search network to be a waste of time. When you are using a search engine there is nothing more frustrating than when you appear to find exactly what you are looking for, but it turns out to be junk, a webpage full of ads. The people who operate MFA sites knows what they are doing. Many MFA sites or networks are well optimized for search engines and can rank extremely well on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Filtering MFA Using the competitive ad filter to filter out MFA is easy but it can take some time. Ads Black List provides great tools and tips but you must also do some work manually, by simply keeping a close eye on what advertisements are being displayed on your sites and check anything that looks suspicious. Again, do not click your own ads, type the address into your browser. A current problem and great limitation with the ad filter is that it will only take 200 URLs. You can only filter out 200 MFA websites and there are thousands out there, so if you own a lot of different websites the filter leaves a lot to wish for. I hope that Google will improve this soon. How It Worked For Me I started filtering MFA in the end of July after reading about others who had successfully increased their revenue by substantial amounts. The first thing I did was get a list of the 200 most common MFA sites from the old version of Ads Black List. I started by using the list, maxing out the filter with 200 sites. I then browsed my own sites checking as many ads as I could. I also asked community users to keep an eye out for “8-best-sitesâ€-type addresses. When I found a MFA advertisement I replaced one of the sites in the 200 list that I figured was very unlikely to show on any of my websites. I spent a little bit of time doing this every day for about two weeks. During this time I noticed a great difference in the ads that were displayed on my sites and I saw my total eCPM increase by over 25% Will It Work For You? It is impossible to know whether filtering MFA sites will help increase your earnings until you have tried it. Depending on your website and content filtering MFA can hurt your earnings too, for example if you are having problems with inventory fill it might be preferable to serve MFA ads compared to non-paying public service ads. MFA ads are good at filling inventory since they register for so many keywords. Any noticable difference will also be greater the more you are earning with AdSense. A small publisher with very few clicks per day would be unlikely to notice any positive or negative effect. My advice is to try it for a couple of weeks. You need to try it for some time before you can see any positive or negative effect. A lot of people look at their AdSense stats on a daily basis. They scream with joy on a good day and immediately announce the death of AdSense on a bad day. You need to see the difference over time, just like you do with your website traffic. Checking your AdSense stats daily is only good for detecting possible click fraud/sabotage. Good luck with the filtering!
when i tried it last time my revenue went down. Now 6 month later i blocked only 5 of them and the revenue when up But sure its good to get the bad ads off the market your visitors would like your site better
I think removing a few of them each time is a good idea. With that approach your earning will not drop immediately since you give chance to adsense to fine tune itself to the changes.
what do you think about this one : www.ebreastcancerribbon.info Its first time I noticed someone using adwords to advertise parked domain Its just amazing how many different variations they have made for 7topsites, 8best sites...
I did the filter thing a while ago but after reading this thread I though I would check out my main site and I was shocked to find 4 of my adsense ads were for these sites! Thanks for the heads up. rep to you
What do you do when you have 200 pages? Is there any other way to filter them out instead one by one?