guardian.co.uk— The debate over whether the copy is there purely to fill the space between the ads has been raging in print publishing for years. Internet publishing has taken this to a new level.
Sep 27, 2007View in Crawl 4
The problem is, that the content IS useful for the advertisers, since when the article quality is low, the user is more inclined to click elsewhere, and when the only links one see are Adsense links, they will click. So the click-through ratio from those articles may be even higher that from "quality" articles. So Google do not have any real incentive to weed out those sites.
Unnecessary content is a pretty substantial problem on the Internet that needs to be addressed, and it goes beyond these MFA pieces. A common SEO practice to boost search rankings is to create "Resource Centers" on websites. These site sections are marketing tools of multiple articles populated with keywords design to add "relevant content" to the site. 9 times out of 10, these Resource Centers are not needed and merely add more clutter to the Google index. These kind of articles as well as MFA articles lead to the slow junking/shift of search results for marketing purposes rather than informative purposes.
Perhaps one day, some organization will make Google accountable for its fraudulent billing practices. Perhaps then they would have a bit of incentive to insure that advertisers dollars are better spent.
But is the problem of MFA non-content due to be self-regulating at some point? After all, if the advertisers begin to see trends in click-thrus from low-quality websites, won't they either put pressure of Google, Yahoo! et al to screen out these guys, or do their own screening?
liamvictorSep 27, 2007
Perhaps you could spin those ideas off into a separate article for your blog?
greymanSep 28, 2007
The problem is, that the content IS useful for the advertisers, since when the article quality is low, the user is more inclined to click elsewhere, and when the only links one see are Adsense links, they will click. So the click-through ratio from those articles may be even higher that from "quality" articles. So Google do not have any real incentive to weed out those sites.
Closed AccountSep 28, 2007
I'd rather we worked harder on eradicating email spam than worrying about link farms that I don't have to go anywhere near...
enjoyfailureSep 28, 2007
Unnecessary content is a pretty substantial problem on the Internet that needs to be addressed, and it goes beyond these MFA pieces. A common SEO practice to boost search rankings is to create "Resource Centers" on websites. These site sections are marketing tools of multiple articles populated with keywords design to add "relevant content" to the site. 9 times out of 10, these Resource Centers are not needed and merely add more clutter to the Google index. These kind of articles as well as MFA articles lead to the slow junking/shift of search results for marketing purposes rather than informative purposes.
emperorantonSep 28, 2007
Perhaps one day, some organization will make Google accountable for its fraudulent billing practices. Perhaps then they would have a bit of incentive to insure that advertisers dollars are better spent.
forbesbingleySep 29, 2007
But is the problem of MFA non-content due to be self-regulating at some point? After all, if the advertisers begin to see trends in click-thrus from low-quality websites, won't they either put pressure of Google, Yahoo! et al to screen out these guys, or do their own screening?