It’s official – Google will be kicking the AdSense spammers off the network.
What AdSense spam is are those sites which you arrive on via either organic search or PPC results (usually the former) and you find nothing but RSS feeds or chopped up articles on a very basic template. The sites rarely have any contact information. To be blunt, they are of no value at all except to their owner who brings in traffic at one price and sells it off at another price.
June 1st. That is the date Google Adsense will be deleting arbitrage publisher accounts. For some it was a sweet run, the literally tens of thousands made from MFA sites… and for others it was even sweeter. Supposedly the email says the accounts are related to an “Unsuitable Business Model” and they have two weeks till their accounts are disabled. Thankfully, all amounts due will be paid to the publishers.
This is one step towards cleaning up the pollution on the internet.
The arbitrageurs will look for other revenue sources but hopefully Google will chase them out of AdWords and out of the organic SERPs as well.
There is enough pollution on earth that we don’t need to turn the virtual world into a giant rubbish bin. Google by allowing people to include these Made For AdSense sites in their network was really making the internet a worse place – far, far away from the “Don’t be Evil” company motto.
For serious advertisers, dumping MFA means going back onto the content network will become more palatable. Bringing serious advertisers back onto the content network is why Google made this move. Little altruism here. For my own clients, advertising on Google’s content network was a complete washout (literally almost no clickthru while we were running 20% clickthru (not a typo) on the search network.
For those who are interested in this sort of thing, we have found the search partners to provide enough conversions (amid more junky traffic) that it is well worth keeping search partners (and not just Google alone).
Alec Kinnear
Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.
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