I wish Google would...

I get so sick of these MFA sites that come up all the time when I'm trying to Google for something.

From time to time, I think they should replace the ad block with a brief survey about the quality of the site.

So maybe one in a hundred times a site is visited, instead of seeing Adsense ads, the viewer will see a couple questions like "Does this site present useful or interesting information?" or "Does this site appear to be legitimate?"

Publishers that consistently got negative votes would be flagged for examination by Google staff and ejected from the programme if determined to be useless wastes of time. Or at least advertisers could specify a minimum rating threshold for the sites where they want their ads to appear.

Of course they'd have to implement some kind of measure to prevent ballot-box stuffing but I'm sure they can manage.

 

I agree. And what's even worse is that these sites get a ton of money for crappy content. My site has been open for 5 years, gets almost 1000UV a day and I earn literally nothing. This is because my users a educated and know what an ad is and most of the time know that the ad leads to something that costs money.

Good site != Good money

It's a sad thing..

 

However from Google's point of view: good site or bad site... same money for us

 

The problem is that most people don't know a thing about MFA sites, so if you ask them, "Does this site present useful or interesting information?" they'll rate the site as though they were rating a movie or a book. That would penalize webmasters who had legitimate sites that visitors weren't impressed with--which is already measured indirectly by Google anyway.

I don't think there's any way to get the general public to flag the kind of sites we want flagged. Not without educating them about Adsense ads, in any case. And I hate to say it, but I prize my uneducated, non-web-savvy, non-ad-blind, click-happy visitors.

 

Educated or not, I think you're just not showing them stuff that interests them - everyone wants to buy something sometime. JMO

 

MFA sites should surely be a no - no for adsense

Hope that adsense would also increase my CPC and referrals as they are very low for me as compared to others though I get sufficient number of genuine clicks everyday

 

But don't you think that would settle out in the long run? If a site was genuinely a heap of trash, like those splogs with random text snipped from other sites, then absolutely nobody would rate it positively.

On the other hand, if it was a site constructed with attention and care, and just happened not to be relevant to a particular person's search, that person would be outnumbered by the other people who did appreciate the site.

I agree that designing the questions well would be tricky. But they could do heavy human review while fine-tuning the questionnaire.

I've been using Adsense for years and I never knew that! Surely that means that almost no other site visitors would either. I think it really has to be in their face so it gets their attention before they move on to something else.