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Before I get started on the subject at hand, I’d like to point out a new commenter on this blog, Susan M, of Google fame. I appreciate her time and insight. I’m not an A-list-party-with-googlers-all-the-time kind of blogger, but you will see that the people who regularly comment here are all very much more intelligent than me, a theory which is only backed up with your presence.
There are two quite interesting threads in GWHG right now. One has gotten a significant amount of blog airplay because Adam Lasnik made a pretty revealing comment**. [as an aside I have to volunteer that I responded** to it somewhat negatively as the banned site is no more in violation of Google quality guidelines than other very popular sites. Popularity, as we all know from going to high school, is not an indication of quality.] The one Adam is involved in was about an obvious MFA (made for adsense) site** that has been banned, the second site that hasn’t gotten any Googler play is a MFA (made for affiliates) site**, which is possibly under penalty.
I don’t have the answers for the two sites involved, but I did make a few observations while viewing them. If Google is working on cleaning up it’s index by removing sites of lower perceived value I applaud them, there is a lot of junk out there. A lot of junk that they created of course as a secondary effect of adsense. If they really want to make an indent of the junk I’d like to point out two sites that provide very little in the way of valuable content. The wiki is mostly information pulled together from other sites, and about.com is just a giant made for adsense trap taking advantage of subdomain spamming techniques. Spam doesn’t just mean using hidden text and links but also useless sites, a much more subjective assessment tha’s probably as not as easy to mechanize.
MFA (Made for Adsense)
These sites have no real purpose but to generate clicks on adsense ads. The designers put together content that will attract high paying ads (the ads you get are contextual). Part of the TOS (terms of service) of Adsense is that you are not allowed to encourage clicks or even draw undue attention to the ads. The revenue model for being a successful adsense publisher is that you need people clicking on those ads, you don’t get paid by them viewing your site. The best way to get the ads clicked is to design the site to be less fulfilling than the ads. In order to make any money on adsense you need to design the site to be good enough to generate some traffic, but be bad enough so that the viewer doesn’t get what they came for and will go looking further, hopefully through the ad. If you write the worlds most definitive article on digital cameras, answering all the users possible questions perfectly, they won’t click your digital camera ads, why would they?. If you write a vague article mentioning digital cameras enough to get some search traffic, but crappy enough that they won’t get any real answers, they are more than likely to click your ad looking for satisfaction. It’s an unfortunate fact about contextual ad publishing, the best sites as far as content don’t do well, the garbage ones do.
MFA (made for affiliates)
The model for building an affiliate site is different than getting paid for clicks. You only get paid when someone follows your affiliate link and then purchases an item. Contrary to adsense you encourage people to click the ads or follow the links. Unlike adsense you don’t get paid just for them clicking the ad, they need to purchase something, you need to close the sale to get the pay out. In affiliate driven sites, the job of the content is to inspire you the visitor to go somewhere else and purchase an item. Poor affiliate sites that are not successful may generate traffic, may generate clicks, but don’t close on the sale. The best affiliate sites give the consumer enough information to make an educated purchase decision. Affiliate marketing pretty much encourages good writing and research. The poor ones usually just copy content and republish it, those types of operations require millions of page views to be at all successful. Writing the same digital camera information site monetized by affiliate sales would require your visitors from search engines be VERY satisfied with the information they received, so satisfied in fact that they are willing to go and buy the item.
The motivation for publishing both types of sites of course is renumeration, but the methods needed to be successful in either one inspire entirely different content creation styles. I back Google up in their quest to clean up the worst MFA (adsense) sites as long as they get rid of the worst but very popular crap as well. I’d also hope they continue their assault on copied or scraped affiliate sites, we don’t need another site in the world publishing Amazon’s write up for some SEO Books
. On the other hand, if I am looking for some lawn care products I hope I find a site like that one, which provides a 3rd party point of view on many related products. It’s information I cannot find on Amazon’s site.
(Like the adsense and affiliate link drops? Ironic isn’t it?)
** Sorry for the nofollow, but I don’t link to places that have a policy of not linking out. Add me to the what we are reading blogroll (or any google domain for that matter) and I’ll be sure to remove all of the nofollows. 
pfingo wonders
