Is Google ever going to do something about MFA sites? I am sick of filtering those low paying and useless ads. MFA should be against the TOS but is Google banning those accounts or do they actually enjoy getting paid for two clicks instead of only one? (I guess I know the answer).
They have already done something, namely quality score. It's now up to the webmasters to create scarcity by not displaying the maximum number of ads which allows anyone bidding just a few cents to get their ad displayed.
You can filter out Google Partners, which include these MFA sites from within the Adwords control panel. This does mean genuine sites won't display your ads but thats the way it goes.
I think its in their interests to do something about it, and I believe they are. The longer-term creadibilty of this program ill rely on MFA sites being eradicated so decent hardworking people will have the incentive to make money. I think they would, in some point in future, ban accounts that run sites solely for the purpose of making money by driving traffic through pay per click (adsense arbitrage or some other cheap PPC advertising network).
Might be too harsh to do across the board but one thing might be to not allow adsense on sites that do adwords. I'm not exactly sure how I'd feel about that since it was just something that popped into my head reading your post. It might be a solution but what negatives?
I don't think it will be sweeping changes just yet. For one, MFA sites earn good money for google just now.
That may be true but its not good for them (or publishers) long term. When advertisers see they are paying for two, maybe three times as many clicks as visitors cycle through MFA sites they will start to get turned off. But with things like quality score in place and hopefully more improvements to knockout MFA websites, Google are fighting back against these worthless arbitrage sites.
If checking with accounts, I don't like it because you can have one account with many sites, and seems logic to promote several sites and no others. And if checking with URL it would be very easy to cheat with 301 redirections, or with URL splitters like tinyurl.com
I would like to see google make people declare the domains they are placing their ads on. This will do 2 things, people with thousands of sites will have to list all of them and will not be able to say "oh they stole my ads and put them on that domain" to advoid TOS breakage 2nd people who are afraid of people stealing their ad code wont have to worry about this happening any more. Pierce
Google encourage people who use adsense to also advertise them sites through adwords, why would they disallow it? You get them free voucher emails saying congratulations on your adsense success use adwords etc etc. Even though i already use adwords...
In Advertising it is common for there to be several advetising steps before an actual sale. TV stations will run ads in TV Guide, the TV stations in turn sell advertising. Some of those advertisers sell, some pass leads on to other who sell. Should TV stations be banned from buying or selling advertising? Of cource not. Should websites be allowed to both buy and sell adverting? Google thinks not.
Like I said, I'm not sure about it, either, however, the abuse is a lot more rampant in adwords/adsense than in TV Guide.
Don't waste your time. You won't be able to filter MFA sites. There are just too many of them. The only way to get rid of those low paying ads leading to MFA sites is having an exceptional content on your own site/page in a niche that attracts some decent advertisers. That way the quality ads will push the MFA ads off the page. It is an auction after all. If you think about it, if you see MFA ads on your site, you are probably not having high enough score with AdSense system as a quality publisher and thus are getting junk dumped to your ad space.
Absolutely incorrect. Some of these MFA sites are creating ads that are VERY specifically targeted to a certain content area. It's not a matter of the site being junk (which it is) but that the ad is very well (deceptively) written so that it shows up on your site.
I read in a recent New York Times article that big advertisers were genrally happy with advertising through Adwords because the ads enabled them to bring exposure to their products. However, a few were slightly concerned about click fsraud and as a result were taking measures themselves to do something about it.