Made for Adsense (MFA) Sites Contribute to Web Content Pollution
I recently read a Christian Science Monitor article called
“Google’s Hidden Payroll” which looks at the economic
incentive for tech-savvy third world entrepreneurs to get
into publishing extensive web content and enter the Google
Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) game. What should
be obvious is that clicks on Adsense ads will be worth far
more to site publishers in low-wage countries than they are
to someone in high rent, high wage cities like San Francisco,
Los Angeles, Manhattan or Chicago.
[http://snipurl.com/Made_for_adsense] (CS Monitor Article)
That article made it appear that the entire Adsense program
was a huge underground economy, when in fact that program
made it truly viable for legitimate publishers of niche
content to do very well for themselves for the first time.
Those legitimate publishers had previously earned money
through participation in affiliate programs selling products
and services related to their site topics – but found that
Adsense brought in far more consistent income than affiliate
programs.
Major, high traffic sites like About.com and even
metropolitan newspapers have adopted Adsense as a viable
advertising vehicle on content sites. Many enthusiastic
hobbyists and other content rich sites learned that their
expertise filled sites could earn substantial income and give
them incentive to continue writing about their passion.
Things went south only when opportunists saw their chance to
sell get-rich-quick-on-Adsense ebooks and software to the
unitiated.
The bad news is that Google Adsense and YPN programs incent
those who know how to post web content, to put up massive
numbers of web pages, with maximum numbers of “ad units” per
page in hundreds of thousands of web pages in the hope that
visitors will find those pages and click on those Adsense or
YPN ad units and earn the site publisher money for each
click. The Adsense and YPN teams must somehow beef up their
site review teams to filter out the abusers. Below is a
WebmasterWorld discussion forum on the topic:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/13071.htm
The ad clicks earn the same money no matter what country
hosts the pages they appear on. Computer literate and tech
savvy programmers in Delhi or even Jalamabad for that matter,
who can afford to buy a $7.95 domain name, host it at $9.95
monthly and get internet access for another $9.95 monthly can
be in the made for Adsense content business for as little as
$30 monthly.
If talented programmers in India have even a basic
understanding of search engine ranking and can dynamically
insert a bit of javascript provided by Google to thousands of
pages of content, they can earn substantial additional income
by third world standards. Even one third of what a US
publisher might find attractive extra income becomes very
attractive to an overworked and underpaid tech worker in many
parts of the world.
Because the clicks on those ads earn the same money for the
New York publisher as for the New Delhi publisher, the
potential income to the New Delhi webmaster is worth far more
in time spent to get well ranked content pages full of
Adsense ads seen. They also have higher incentive for fraud -
having others click on ads which appear on their sites or
having friends and relatives in different locations do the
same – potentially doubling or trebling income for a
programmer in India.
Again from the CS Monitor story:
“Google is actively looking for those kinds of sites,” and
removes ads from them, explains Eric Giguère, author of “Make
Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program.”
Google created this scene by offering substantial incentive
to post web content, often repeated web content and even
garbage web content in order to display contextual ads. A
new term has even been coined for web sites put up solely to
display contextual ads – Made for Adsense or MFA sites. It
has been discussed in some forums that Yahoo Publisher
Network is filtering ads from appearing on sites outside the
US.
There are now software programs available to create article sites (I
won’t link to them here and contribute to their popularity),
which encourages webmasters to establish article submission
and archiving sites. There are dozens of software packages
available that make it easy to set up domains full of
templated article pages that come with a database file full
of tens of thousands of articles for about $100. The reason?
Posting thousands of pages of articles in the hopes of
attracting visitors who will click on Adsense or YPN ads.
The easy money leeches are lured out of their slime to suck
the blood of passersby when something as useful as Adsense
comes along. Forget that it now takes almost a year for a
new content domain to rank well – even if that webmaster
creates a niche site full of truly worthwhile and useful
content. Forget that most existing recognized article sites
display terms of use that restrict use of articles per domain
to under 50 per year. Forget that these templated domains are
using thousands of articles against author copyright and
article archive terms of use.
Gullible and lazy webmasters buy templated and IDENTICAL site
creation packages. They are lured by visions of riches, only
to be disappointed with no traffic to their Made For Adsense
sites full of content already posted widely across the web.
Usually, the well established article archives, like
EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com will post articles first
and will rank best for that content because those sites are
already highly ranked and well known as article archives.
In a wildly convoluted spin of logic, a new Adsense blacklist
site has been launched which purports to help Adsense site
owners filter out advertising from other Made for Adsense
sites from their own Adsense sites, thus somehow increasing
their own income. That is difficult to comprehend, but some
Adsense publishers claim it helps increase the click value of
ads if they block Adwords ads from competing Made for Adsense
sites from appearing on their own sites.
Judging by all the online ebooks about getting rich with
Adsense, all the templated and prepackaged sites being sold
to webmasters to put up domains full of identical content
with Adsense, and all the buzz in the forums about made for
Adsense content sites – you’d think that Google would be busy
looking for ways to limit the inevitable content pollution.
The made for Adsense sites are easy to spot, they usually
sport logos or hypertext links back to the software site in
the form of “Powered by Article Monster” or “Plug-in-Riches”
kind of links (these are not real names).
Hopefully Google and YPN will begin filtering those and any
other membership or “Private Label Rights” content abusive
sites to keep web content pollution levels lower in Google
search engine results pages.
Mike Valentine – Mike Banks Valentine is a Search Engine Optimization Specialist emphasizing the use of ethical techniques. He has operated a small business ecommerce tutorial at WebSite101 …
http://ezinearticles.com/?Made-for-Adsense-(MFA)-Sites-Contribute-to-Web-Content-Pollution&id=173466
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