I've seen AdSense arbitrage come and go. Now, most arbitrageurs are gone. So, why does Google still give Wisegeek a free ride? Wisegeek quit doing PPC about a year ago, but they still consistently rank high in organic. Even though their articles are O.K., they are extremely short and layout is Classic Arbitrage: big ad unit in upper-left and a link unit at top. It's so obvious that the point of Wisegeek is to pull in AdSense clicks, not provide a "quality user experience." What gives? Why does Google love them so much?
I guess they need (Google) to prove that it is using arbitrage. Looks good to me but as you said they do use arbitrage and the owner is one of the masters of the adsense stuffs, right? JulieV
True, true... I also think that Google takes an interest in certain companies. Wisegeek is based in Berkeley, CA (i.e., cool). Also, WG reveals who they are - they don't try to be anonymous. Oh Google...whatever!
I don't undertand the problem with Wisegeek? Each article I saw had around 500 words (which is about right) and they have a PageRank of 6. ?
i agree with the other posters... i think wise geek is exactly the type of site that google likes... they appear to have thousands pages of unique content and according to yahoo site explorer, they have over 100,000 "inlinks" i just did a search for their domain on spyfu, and the last time they advertised was in 2006, so they dont seem to have been involved in any arbitrage for three years.
The kind of adsense ads shows that wisegeek is a premium publishers, so forget all about the rules you live under: premium publishers have different rules.
Google will only consider it "bad" if they were using Adwords to drive traffic to their site. If they rank well for some keywords (or combination of keywords), then it's all OK (as long as they comply with the Adsense rules).