In The Words of Alanis Morisette …

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

… isn’t it ironic.

My adwords campaign bidding on MFA related keywords was displayed on, yes you guessed it, an MFA.

I am not advertising on the content network, this was a click from one of Google’s trusted partners who are part of the search network. To me this is a garbage click of zero quality. I am going to attempt a refund request, but I am not holding my breathe. I am not sure I can even exclude this site, but I will try.

This is a essence of the click quality problem, I paid the rate for a high quality click from a search partner such as AOL but the click came from an Adsense for Domains MFA.

Here is a screen dump of the site, I’ll not give out the URL, they are not getting any traffic from me.

I discovered this using the low quality techniques I employ in my consultancy services

Tags: MFA
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Google Takes A Stand Against MFA

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008

Google has announced that it is lowering the landing page quality score for a number of differnt types of sites incuding “arbitrage sites”.

An Arbitrage site or a site with the sole intent of displaying ads can be translated into an MFA site.

Whilst MFA sites are not creating click fraud, the dubious practices used on many sites to entice a click are near the edge of the rules. I welcome the move by Google to reduce their quality score. What this means is that Google sets a handicap on the low quality sites in the keyword auction meaning MFA sites will have to pay more to get their clicks.

The announcement was made on the official Adwords blog full details of the anouncement can be seen at

Websites that may merit a low landing page quality score.

Tags: made for ads, MFA
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What is a Made For Adsense (MFA) site?

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

UPDATE: Since this post was first published in October 2007, a statement from Click Forensics suggests that 60% of traffic from MFA sites is click fraud.

Over 60 percent of traffic from parked domains and made for ad sites was click fraud

Google’s Adsense has created an environment where on-line advertising is a commodity to web site owners. Even tiny blogs can advertise multinational corporation’s products without the need for an ad sales team, or embarrassing questions on how pitiful a sites audience is.

The Adsense programme allows website owners to syndicate adverts from the adwords programme and receive a share in the ad revenue when the ads are clicked upon. The more clicks the more income for the site owner.

In recent years an alarming rise has been seen in the made for Adsense or MFA sites. These sites have zero content, rather they are made up of Adsense ads pointing to other websites. The MFA site owner will create an adwords campaign bidding on a high value keywords, an example of this could be home mortgages. If they create a compelling enough Adwords ad, the Google user will click through to see pages of Adsense ads pointing to other legitimate home mortgage sites.

The MFA sites are often cunningly designed so the Google sponsored links look like valid content links, which the user will unintentionally click on, thus generating income for the site owner.

How do these sites have a profitable model? There is a flaw (in my opinion) in the Google algorithm for ad placement which involves max cost per click x click through rate, so if the MFA has a max CPC of 0.25 and the legitimate sites are bidding on 1.00, if the MFA sites has a high click through it will appear above the 1.00 bidder, and if the Google payout is in excess of 0.25, there is the profit.

Is this click fraud? No these site work within, but near to the edge of the Adsense rules. Should these clicks be marked as invalid? In my opinion yes, the low quality of the clicks caused by the deception of the end users tarnishes Google’s business model which is already stained by the high level of click fraud coming from the content network (the network where Adsense resides).

Tags: made for adsense, MFA
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