Google Cracks Down on Parking Sites

[Liquiteq]

Originally Posted by Makis77

ok lets say i dont like u,
i pay $10 and u get some thousand hits in some days.
Google close ur account and i m happy.

Lol, this came to mind. A threat made towards Shawn Hogan, DP founder.

Source:http://www.shawnhogan.com/

This is a warning and if you don’t pay attention to it you will suffer from bad turns.
All your income is through Google Adsense and if you do not cooperate with us we will stop this income source.
We would like you to pay us the total amount of USD 1000 each month.
This small amount could be considered as nothing compared to your earnings from Adsense.
If you do not pay this amount we will have to close your account by the help of special robots & spaming & ...
I am not happy to do this but I have to as there is no way out of it and I trust if you were me you would also have to do the same.
I am an inventor and I have recently innovated a new design which will be accepted by scientific societies only if I can present a model in advance; and making the model takes money. They will register my new design only after they have checked all aspects of the same.
My theory is changing the power into energy. If I succeed many big problems will be solved.
All my design specification could be viewed in the following web log:
http://magnetic-machine.blogspot.com/
The magnets will be bought in installments and the amount you pay is to be paid monthly for the same.
After the registration of my design, the entire amount which I received from you will be paid back.
If you collaborate with me, you have helped to the science.
And if not, I will have to close your Google Adsense account.
I seek your help for the sake of the Science and if you are not prepared to collaborate I will have to close your Google Adsense account

Waiting for your reply…..

[Jacksplat]

weird stuff going on these days.

[whitebark]

Originally Posted by Makis77

ok lets say i dont like u,
i pay $10 and u get some thousand hits in some days.
Google close ur account and i m happy.
This system is full of holes.
They must change the way it operates, its too risky to work with adsense.
One day u r there and the other u r banned and cant send some excuse.

Many say that the victims are the advertisers and maybe its true because they feed this chain, but we have also victims because we loose all our money and hard worked websites very easily.
The only one thats not a victim is Google.

I praise the day i ll move out from them.
Until then i m working as a slave for them.

Google bowling - and it does happen.

And as for them closing down some advertisers/websites - it has been in their terms of service for some time that such websites don't meet their criteria. It was only a matter of time before they acted.

Google has yet to spell out just what an MFA website is. Certainly one containing little content, rss feeds in place of content and sites that are mere duplicates of another, would seem to qualify.

I had two MFA's dropped from google's index about six months ago. No notice or anything, and they didn't touch my accounts. I didn't wait for them to drop more websites - I converted them to full websites or took them down all together and just parked the domain.

[patroiz]

Guess Yahoo stocks will go up in the future and google stocks will decrease in value. How much do you guys think that Google will lose in revenue because of these actions?

And also what is so wrong with MFA websites? The advertiser is getting a visitor that clicked on his advertisement, then it is up to him to convert that advertiser to buy his product. This is just ridiculous, there is to much pressure on publishers to convert a visitor to sale when it is up to the advertiser to make the advertisement and then get the visitor to click the advertisement, if he doesn't like the product then that's it. Just like TV ads, if you don't like it then you will simply not buy that product!

[whitebark]

Originally Posted by patroiz

How much do you guys think that Google will lose in revenue because of these actions?

And also what is so wrong with MFA websites?

None, it's being driven by their advertisers and publishers.

On my larger websites I go out of my way to make sure MFAs don't appear in my google ads. Remember now, the average web user has no idea how that ad is really generated - they think you the owner of the website linked to that low quality website they just went to. My websites thrive on repeat visitors, and having them leave because they think I linked to an ad filled low quality website is not how to best make money in this game.

Most MFA websites are little more than parked pages - more ads than content. Others have articles that are already published 500 times across the net.

The more people become accustomed to using the Internet, the less time they will have for low quality websites. They are far more apt to close the page or hit the back button than they are to read a page featuring more ads than content.

Who here has actually read an MFA website when coming across one?

Here is a good website for those looking to also keep MFAs and other undesirable websites from appearing in your adsense ads:
http://www.adsblacklist.com/

[RepCentral]

The biggest issue with MFA is that it may never lead to the real product.

It goes like this:
1. People advertise their MFA site on Adwords and person believing they are going to a product clicks the ad.
2. Visited MFA site is commonly optimized for more expensive keywords. (Arbitrage) The person then clicks another link (confidence in Google is now falling).
3. The site they go to could be another MFA site. (Uh-Oh) Could be a cheaper site. They click the top link in the ads again.
4. Person is delivered to another MFA site on the original MFA site's network. (Doh!) Now the person is thoroughly confused and not sure how to get to the actual product.

This is not as outlandish as it seems.
People have complained that they could go two of three MFA site clicks deep before getting to an affiliate that could lead to a product.

One issue is that MFA site owners are more aggressive and competent than the original sellers of the product at search Adword results. The true advertisers are not savvy enough to fight for the click and loose out on their own product.

Another issue is that some MFA Adword stuff behaves like pyramid scheme. Naive MFA Adword players fund the pro Adword players by advertising on the pro's MFA site (adsense content network). The pro knows better and strictly forbids many of his campaigns from running on content networks. Only allowing for Google search based adword clicks. It's funny because the real product advertisers also restrict their ads so they can't be run on content sites as well. This leads to content sites full of naive lower tier MFA advertisers running ads on the pros MFA site and inadvertently funding them. Yikes!

I'm sure Google wants to stop this but it's a delicate balance.

[Makis77]

I wanted to point out that Google has to find an other way for Adsense and Adwords to work.

Its difficult to assume that bad users will change as Google desires and this will make many of good and bad users get banned.

So the next step is to get out from Google.

There is no way i m going to risk my money every month and have the fear that Google may ban me for weird and unexplained reason.
And its not only the money but the time i invested to change my websoites every time that Google desides something. The most recent example is adult websites,,,
I better shut them down and put paid adverts than adsense.
YPN is an other option only its not for Europe, yet

[stevesko]

I am on both sides of this...both as an advertiser and domain investor (different sites) just got this from YAHOO... Looks like they will just determine what is "low quality" and discount what the domainer is paid.

Steve

Quality-Based Pricing Launches

Key Features:
• We'll evaluate the quality of traffic from our distribution partners' sites.
• Your click charges can be discounted based on the value of that traffic.
• Discounts will automatically be applied to your account.

In an ongoing effort to raise the value of our Sponsored Search and Content Match products, we're pleased to announce the phased rollout of a new feature that we believe will help increase the value of Yahoo! Search Marketing traffic to our advertisers. This feature, called quality-based pricing, is designed to measure the value of the traffic coming from our distribution partners' websites and price clicks accordingly for our advertisers.

What is Changing?
Previously all traffic was treated the same—you were charged the same for traffic from all web sites within our network. With quality-based pricing, you may be charged less for certain clicks than you normally would pay, depending on the overall quality of the websites that are providing this traffic to you. As a result, your click charges can decrease.

How will Click Charges be Discounted?
"Quality" is calculated based on conversion rates and other measurements of the ability to deliver more interested and valuable customers to you from particular distribution partner sites. Discounts will be automatically applied to your account.

When will this Start?
This feature will roll out beginning today, and we plan to continue to expand it over time. This is just one of the things we're doing, along with future projects like domain-level blocking, to help increase the quality and value of traffic that we deliver to you.

What Do I Need to Do?
There's nothing you need to do to receive a discount—your click charges may be discounted based on the quality of traffic you receive. Keep in mind that the amount of the discounts may vary between advertisers: Some may experience a noticeable decrease in overall cost-per-click, while others may experience only a small decrease in spend.

[touchring]

Originally Posted by Jacksplat

Although I thrive on PPC sites I'll be the first to admit that a ppc site/template is an MFA site. If your conversion rate is good for them, you have nothing to worry about. At the moment were being overwhelmed with click frauders which in my oppinion include people creating crap traffic to their MFA/PPC sites in turn pissing off advertisers (who track the incoming clicks).

Anyone here who pays for adwords or other will agree that it has to stop. I'm all for cleaning up the system.

How woudlt hey measure conversion?

[stevesko]

Originally Posted by touchring

How woudlt hey measure conversion?

CTR, length of time on site after the click, what did they do after the click- did they come back to google and do a search, google analytics etc...

They also are letting advertisers see what pages their ads are on, if an advertiser looks at the site, and it looks crappy- with little content- they can just stop their ad from appearing on your page- if that is a top advertiser, your commissions will drop like a rock.

Steve

[ChrissyBoi]

Originally Posted by RepCentral

The biggest issue with MFA is that it may never lead to the real product.

It goes like this:
1. People advertise their MFA site on Adwords and person believing they are going to a product clicks the ad.
2. Visited MFA site is commonly optimized for more expensive keywords. (Arbitrage) The person then clicks another link (confidence in Google is now falling).
3. The site they go to could be another MFA site. (Uh-Oh) Could be a cheaper site. They click the top link in the ads again.
4. Person is delivered to another MFA site on the original MFA site's network. (Doh!) Now the person is thoroughly confused and not sure how to get to the actual product.

You are speaking of TWO seperate and distinct concepts here.

MFA and Arbitrage are very different. Google *claim* they have NOT been targetting *arbitrage* sites purely for being arbitrage - Google has stated quite clearly that they believe that Arbitrage is a legitimate business model in and of itself - what they are targetting is primarily MFA (at least that is what google claim - believe that if you will!).

The heavy MFA hitters are usually just full of junky black hat methods, using scrapers, RSS feeds and scrapers, and all manner of other weird and wonderful tricks. Their sites are usually blatantly UGLY (on pupose) to *shock* the lander into clicking a link just to get the hell outta there! That is all part and parcel of their tactics.
A lot of these guys are also big Arbitrage hitters too, and these are the people that Google is *supposed* to be targetting, at least if their own comments are to have any sense made of them that is!

It would appear therefore that arbitrage in and of itself is legitimate as far as google is concerned, but without the *black hat* methods of MFA, then arbitrage is nothing more than a huge gamble - so basically google would appear to be stamping out Arbitrage via the backdoor, whilst at the same time proclaiming that it is a valid business model!

The real truth is that we have all been used and duped by Google to make it the force that it is now. The biggest crooks are in fact google themselves, and they are proving it with their own actions.

Google think nothing of *disabling* some little guys account for alleged *invalid* clicks, whilst at the same time they think NOTHING out of paying regular $100K cheques to black hit hitters whom they KNOW are flooding the web with junk. Do they care about them? Do they hell, thes eguys helped make Google the money they now have thru our pockets, and now they want to try and convince us they are good honest people?

Utter hypocrites is what they are, and nothing more. It's high time people started fighting back against Google.

What I find most interesting is that yahoo had a class action raised against them for this kind of stuff, yet Google have never had so much as two fingers raised at them?

[stevesko]

What I find most interesting is that yahoo had a class action raised against them for this kind of stuff, yet Google have never had so much as two fingers raised at them?

Google was hit first, and since then they have gotten MUCH WORST. Before, they had a dept to handle customer complaints of click fraud, now they have a whole dept designed to find ways to deny it exists.

The MFA crackdown and an email sent out stating that clicking on your own ads is against terms of service - and if we do it again we would be terminated - even thought I NEVER clicked on an ad on any of my sites- this is their feeble attempt at cracking down at the cancer that puts this business model at risk.

Steve

[ChrissyBoi]

Originally Posted by stevesko

Google was hit first, and since then they have gotten MUCH WORST.
Steve

I wasn't aware of the google one Steve, thanks for the heads up on that. Need to do some sniffing out on that one.
I heard plenty about the Yahoo one, and even got the notifications on account of having bought ads during the applicable period, but never heard a squeak about google's !


Found this interesting article ( NOT from google search, lol)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/20...ck-fraud_x.htm

[Jacksplat]

Originally Posted by stevesko

This is just one of the things we're doing, along with future projects like domain-level blocking, to help increase the quality and value of traffic that we deliver to you.

Can anyone clarify what they mean with "domain-level blocking" ?

Jack

[webd]

Originally Posted by stevesko

Examples of MFA sites include parked domains, misspellings and faux-search engines, all of which tend to have AdSense advertising on them.

There is still Adsense for Domains...
It's only OK if Google does it...

[fatter]

I would think if things get too bad all the parking companies could unite and sell keywords direct to advertisers there would have to be a good click fraud program and if the click fraud was effective advertisers would get more sales per the buck and hence a new model for us. I would think a centralized office for the sale of keywords would be the way to go, after all the parking companies meet every other day for a party in vegas, ny , seatle florida etc

Another option i have heard of is domainers going directly to endusers and charging them half what you know who charges for their key word domains and just direct the traffic to their site. IE: you own "longtermcare" you just see which are the top bidders for the keyword and contact them directly a say for half what you pay know i will send you 50 cvisitos a week/typeins the domainers who did this tell me it has helped with sales as end users see the conversion rate