One Man’s Blog
Specialization is for Insects.
Posted on Sep 30, 2008 - 1:20am by John P. in Google Tools, Wordpress
Listen up folks, cause I’m only going to say this one time. If you are choosing your site’s theme based on how many ads you can shove in your visitor’s face, or if people come to your site and have to scroll down the page before they see anything other than Google Ads, then your site sucks. And you do too.
Here’s an example:
Someone stopped by my site and left a comment on the blog with a link to the site in this image. I marked it as spam as soon as I verified the site was MFA. I’ll continue marking MFA sites as spam until the day I die, and I hope that all of my fellow webmasters admin their comments and do likewise.
Every time someone builds a site strictly for the sake of putting Google ads on it, it makes us all collectively dumber. It actually sucks the intelligence right out of the Web. Yet Google continues to reward these “Web authors” by allowing anyone to place AdWords on their site with no quality control whatsoever.
To make matters worse, Google is actually incented to send traffic to these spammers because their ads are on the pages. It results in a mad clicking frenzy from certain visitors who are just trying to follow Google’s recommendation when they get to a site. Then they click on ads to get to other sites, and it can become a nightmare.
Bottom line: Google is wrong to allow the unfettered perpetuation of MFA sites. And if you are building them, you are wrong too. Why don’t you spend some time actually adding value to the Web by writing about something someone wants to read? Yeah, it takes a little more work, and a little more time to get ramped up. But in the end you will have built something that adds value to the world and it will ultimately generate far more income.
I use the "No Adverts for Friends" plugin by Donncha O Caoimh
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Love ya, John P., but think for a minute about what you’re saying. Do you really want Google approving content? The people who control what you see when you do a web search actually telling you what you can and cannot post? That thought truly frightens me.
I’d rather deal with a few spammy sites than give one institution that much control over the Internet.
Thanks — yours is one of my go-to blogs every morning.
Hey, thanks for the kind words Jerry.
I might have been unclear about what I would like from Google… I don’t want them approving content; I just want them to exercise some control over who they allow to use/abuse the AdWords system.
Many advertising firms review the content of the site before they allow it into the ad network. But Google allows anyone and their dog to slap AdWords on a site. With no QC whatsoever, they are in essence monitizing their own referral traffic.
What happens is, Google is incented to actually send traffic to MFA sites. On one end they show the advertisers that their ads are being viewed, and on the other end they collect money!
If you put a team in place to do some quality checks on the content and boot people out of the AdWords program who ruin the Web experience for visitors, you might see a slowdown in the proliferation of such sites.
One way or another though… I just know MFA sites suck!
John
Not to defend a hideous corporate behemoth, but it’s not like Google doesn’t have *any* constraints on its AdSense publishers. For starters, webmasters are supposed to limit their Google ads to three ad blocks per page. Those who violate this rule risk losing their affiliation.
I think this is a self-regulating problem. Those sites that overuse advertising, whether it’s Google’s or anybody else’s, will be the object of a backlash (like your own post, for example), and risk limiting their readership to those who are extremely tolerant of overloaded pages.
Makes me wonder if loading up a web page with all those ads actually works. In which case, all the indignation in the world isn’t likely to persuade anyone away from it.
Anyway, interesting thoughts there.
When you have search for actual content - that drives me up a wall! And the fact that a lot of these sites still have their darn page rank really sucks, too!
Do they really earn money from those sites? Dont think anyone would click on the ads anyway~
Actually you can earn a fair bit, have a snoop at sitepoint marketplace and garryconns site, you can see how profitable it can be
Adsense is a good money maker and arguably the bes ppc platform, so they will ALWAYS be people trying to use t to its maximum potential.
Some of these people will be good at making MFA sites and you will not be able to tell the difference. Others will not be and will result in sites as the above.
After all if you do keyword research and have adsense on your site. It is arguably a MFA site.
I know if you report MFA sites to Google, they’ll eventually ban them. Google certainly needs a better way of detecting them on their own though…
Google used to be a lot stricter when the Adsense first began but it’s not so anymore(imho). You can have a 2-3 page MFA website and still join Adsense nowadays.
I simply felt the urge to click the google add that comes right after the article. I’ve read a few of other articles on the site and this was the only one I noticed with Adsense adds.
I absolutely agree with you when it comes to MFA sites as you call them. But I think you should also monetize this site a little bit better than it is right now. Just my two cents…
You are putting your time on it, you might as well make some money doing it
Hear hear!
Totally agree with you John. Most people unfortunately have started blogging just for the money it brings in hence the creation of a niche like Make Money Online and themes for it too. Things were better when people blogged just for the love of blogging and because they had something they wanted to speak about and speak out and just share it with the world. Now blogging has become so commercialized…
I don’t click on banner ads ever! Those deals are not worth it to me and yes it destroys the page’s credibility.
Yeah you’re right… putting adds all over the place is not very interesting for your users. Also you destroy your work by making it spammy
I completely agree…I hate sites that are crawling with adsense. Fair enough, the inexperienced user will click on the ads but the regular internet user will simply skip to the next site and that’s not what you want. I’d rather have an experience PC user on my site than a noob; although everyone is welcome lol.