We knew it was going to happen warning to all

[Symon]

By Scott Boyd

Google has been recently informing loads of Adsense publishers that their accounts are being disabled because "their business model is not a good fit for Adsense".

Shocker!

Let's have a think about this. You are making $5k / $10k / $20k / $50k / $100k a MONTH by spamming the company that is paying you. Collectively, you and the other people like you are taking 10's of millions (probably more) of advertiser spend from businesses because you spam Google and prevent them from achieving good organic results without pro SEO help (forcing them into Adwords). You are also probably the person that moans regularly about how much money Google is making.

Yet you seem surprised, and in cases, disgruntled that this situation has popped up.

Newsflash - everyone else saw this coming a mile off and it's long overdue.

Credit where credit is due though - I do have a lot of respect for some MFA producers - they do it well and I suspect that most not only have great SEO knowledge but a few of the greats are pretty damn good businessmen as well.

But seriously - this was always going to happen and most people know that. Just like the good life of 5 years ago where you could grab number 1 rankings in Google overnight are gone, this honeymoon period for a lot of people is coming to an end.

I think it's a good thing. Not that I have any "ethical" objection to web spam which seems to be the main argument against it (within the SEO community) - it's more that a lot of legit businesses have ended up having to fork out much more money on PPC spend just to keep up and I think this is a little unfair on them, especially small businesses.



It was always a short term strategy and the savvy webmaster should have known this and prepared as such - even if they didn't see that particular business model lasting, then they should (and I believe most will have) seen that it needs to be integrated into a longer term strategy.

But why did Google take so long to act? MFA sites are as old as Adsense and lots of people were shouting for Google to make this move as long as I can remember.

Perhaps it is only just starting to hurt Google's bottom line - maybe the general perception of Adsense has become so low that Google needed to make the move now? Or maybe they just loved the huge influx of spam data to allow to prepare for the next level of the search engine wars?

Who knows, but I'm glad this move has come. I don't expect it will have a serious negative impact on many people (after all, most of the people involved have made a serious amount of cash from it) and will begin to have a positive affect on other businesses (lowered PPC costs).

Where next for the full time spammers? Maybe they will go legit or maybe we'll see some of this cash being invested in serious online ventures? Probably most will retire or find another way of monetising web spam, but I would prefer to see them invest in longer term ventures - I think it's better for the web and better for the SEO industry that way.

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[admin (no pm's please)]

It is about time "MFA" sites are a vile thing, I could go on at lengths about the evils of them.

Note that MFA is a poor acronym though, as if you want to get picky MYFF is MFA in the sense that we use the contextual abilities of google to create advertising that is relevant to users and pays for the forums.

MFA as a term of abuse in aim at sites that subvert search results to take people to sites simply plastered with adverts, e.g. you don't search and find where you want to go, you search and find adverts instead
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