Adsense Advisor²⁰⁰⁷

There were rumours and discussions in the forums over the past few weeks as to what the deal is with Google axing adsense accounts. Google decided that they were going to ban MFA (made for adsense sites) and this exercise kicked off on the 1st June 2007. Most of the newbies have sent me messages asking how they will be affected and how to avoid being axed from adsense.

Google is not shutting down the Adsense program. So you can take a big sigh of relief :) However, Google is closing down MFA sites and Arbitrage sites. What is Adsense Arbitrage? Below is a definition from Wikipedia explaining online advertising arbitrage.

Online ad services like Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords allow you to purchase online advertisements which cost you an agreed upon cost per click. These are known as PPC (Pay Per Click) ads. Some ad clicks will cost advertisers $0.01 while some can cost well over $10 depending on the keywords that were associated with the ad. Yahoo and Google both have programs which allow web publishers (aka owners of websites) to place ads on their own websites to make money. Some webmasters will make a website associated with a high paying keyword(s) and place PPC ads on it. Then, they will purchase low cost ads on Yahoo and Google for their websites. The end effect is traffic arbitrage. Low cost traffic is redirected towards pages which contain high paying links. Enough money is made from clicks to cover the traffic cost and turn a profit.

This effort is meant to crack down on the millions of MFA sites that started popping up all over the net. In my previous posts I have spoken out against MFA sites and I'm glad Google are taking action. But will this really get rid of the problem? I remember when Google introduced smart pricing, MFA sites were supposed to be heavy hit but after this effor the number of MFA sites increased instead. Now Google has gone a step further and is banning them. Will this solve the problem or create another one yet to come? Let's wait and see.

Hope this post was of help to you.

I hope that legitimate publishers can now get more from this exercise by Google because those mfa sites annoy me too. | Patrick | 06.22.2007 |

How exactly will they ban arbitrage? I wonder if they will make changes to adwords as well then or to the pricing.| Heather | 06.22.2007 |

About time Google did something about those useless sites. | Anthony | 06.22.2007 |

Good question Heather, I'm also trying to figure out how they will stop the arbitrage because it's a way to leverage your business. | Ahmed | 06.22.2007 |

Google is not shutting down arbitrage, I think the point from the post is to say if your site is purely made for adsense or arbitrage then your account will be closed. | Spinner | 06.22.2007 |

I think this is a good effort by google at least honest publishers can have a real chance without those mfa guys. | Thorsten | 06.22.2007 |