It happened to you. You have searched for something on Google and there are many promising results. You click the link, but when you get to the site all you see are a few ads and nothing closer to what you are looking for. So you go back to the search results and try again, it happens many times until you finally find a page with decent content ... or frustration comes in and you throw it all together.
Why did this happen? How is it possible now that Google can provide you with the results you want? A large part of the answer is the growing number of AdSense (MFA) sites on the web today. MFA sites are designed with the sole purpose of making you click on the Google AdSense ad.
Define Designed for AdSense
The site is designed for AdSense if its purpose is to get users to click on AdSense ads. Its owners do not intend that users will read your content or participate in the community. All they want is to click on the ad. The site is NOT designed for AdSense if its main purpose is to provide unique content and the site owner decides to keep their content free by displaying ads, AdSense or otherwise. This has been happening for years - television, newspapers, and magazines all earning money through advertising. The difference is that ads MAKE content for the show or episode. The same applies to the web. If you have a news site or forum, placing ads on your site does not necessarily make it an AdSense site.
Why Do People Make MFA Sites?
The thing about MFA sites is that they work. Most people do not know what Google AdSense is and do not understand that Google and the site owner are making money when they click on an ad. By placing these ads in targeted areas (Google gives you examples of places that result in high clicks), it is inevitable that a certain percentage of visitors will click on the ads - either intentionally or unintentionally.
Site owners make anywhere from five cents to a few dollars per click (revenue is divided between them and Google) depending on the category. Great story isn't it? If you convert 5% of users into clicks and make 10 cents per click, you make only 50 cents for every 100 visitors to your site. Well, if you make a thousand MFA sites and each one gets two hundred visitors a day, you make $ 1,000 cool / day.
Smart MFA site owners design sites with advertisers' keywords that pay more than 20 cents or 30 regular cents. They create “content” sites about lawyers and car companies that buy AdWords ads for a few dollars per click. Repeat that figure for five dollars per click instead of 10 cents and your jaw will drop.
How do they get their traffic? In addition to using the usual white hat SEO techniques (such as unique content and link building), many of these sites are shameless and take advantage of keywords and cloaking - tactics that are considered irrational and contrary to Google's terms of service. Many also find their clicks in the wrong direction - by clicking on the ads themselves or by hiring bots to click automatically. This is called click-through fraud and is contrary to Google's Terms of Service.
Who Is Harmed?
Some may argue that no one gets hurt by “tricking” people into clicking. They are not charged anything. No, but there is an advertiser. Some businesses invest their hard-earned money in Google AdWords to attract targeted visitors to their site. Instead they end up paying for clicks by mistake. You (the searcher) also get hurt by getting lower results. Think of the Internet where these sites did not exist. You may actually have a chance to get what you want on the first try. That can save you time which I am sure you will enjoy.
Should Google do something about it?
Everyone's thinking is "Google can stop it if it tries." In fact, it probably isn't. Regardless of the talent they hire, there are actually hundreds of thousands of people trying to find work nearby. As Seth Jayson recently mentioned in his article on the same topic entitled How Google Kills the Internet “I think if you put a few hundred Google Smarty Pantses - fat on stock options and delicious food on the Big Goo campus - against many. thousands of clever tricks on the Internet, war will always be on the hungry side. ”
Google has a program to reduce click-through fraud and constantly improve their algorithm to extract their results for sites that use cloaking, keyword pushing, and other black hat SEO techniques. Unfortunately, it is almost not enough.
The big (and most shocking) question is whether Google wants to do something about it or not. In the meantime, they should make a ton of money on MFA sites. Until Google begins to see the negative impact from MFA sites there is really no reason for them to rush to do anything about it. Say Yahoo! Suddenly a way to identify and block MFA sites and provide better search results as a result, Google may be threatened with possible (or actual) loss of search percentage. But until that happened I did not expect Google to do more than it is now.
There is no doubt that MFA sites have blocked the web with thousands of useless pages. The best way to reduce the number of sites created by AdSense is to do something about it yourself. When you advertise on Google AdWords, do not allow Google to display your ads on its content network (AdSense sites). As an internet user, you can educate others about MFA sites and encourage them not to click on the ads. It may not seem like much, but all of those clicks are inclusive - just ask the person who owns the site for AdSense.
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