Google's Doing Something About MFA Sites. Finally!

As I've written about before, I hate MFA sites! They are such huge leeches on the Internet but I certainly can't blame them for taking advantage of a legal, money-making opportunity.

Given my hatred for MFA sites, I was ecstatic to hear on Monday that Google has sent email out to MFA publishers that their accounts will be disabled starting June 1. This is great news. Although Jen from Jensense.com stated that both MFA publishers and arbitrage publishers are getting their accounts disabled, Shoemoney has a video blog post refuting the news that arbitrage publishers are getting disabled.

I don't mind arbitrage publishers (that's where you buy ads for a low price and get people to visit a site where you hope they click other ads that get you a higher payment than you paid to get the click) because it's a legitimate strategy in many traditional markets (not just online ads). Although part of MFA sites strategy is arbitrage, the fact that they have absolutely zero value (they don't even try to put up some useful content) makes me really hate them.

I can't believe it's actually taken this long for Google to do this (what happened to "Don't Be Evil"?) but at least it's finally happening. This won't completely get rid of MFA sites (since they'll just switch to Yahoo or Microsoft ads) it hopefully will put a big dent in them.....I'm getting tired of continually banning them from ProductCritic.

Google Adsense Optimization Team

Logging into ProductCritic's Adsense account today, I saw a new section called "Recent Messages" with a message from the "Optimization Team". Given that the date of the message was April 1, I almost thought that it was going to be some sort of April Fool's joke.

Looks like Google automatically reviewed ProductCritic and here's the help they are providing:

"You may be filtering ads that monetize well on your site".

When I dig deeper, it says that I am filtering ads and that if I filter less ads, I could increase my revenue. That's all well and good but unlike Google, I hate Made-For-Ads sites. I don't want visitors to ProductCritic to click on them and basically waste their time. I really don't care that it could "increase my revenue" if I didn't filter them.

If more and more sites actually filtered these Made-For-Ads sites, would they start to disappear? Probably not but we're going to do our part to make the Internet a little bit better.

Our Simple And Free Method For Submitting Sitemaps

Creating sitemaps for your site is a very important part of ensuring that the search engines can spider your site easily and know the most about its pages. You can view ProductCritic's sitemap at http://www.productcritic.com/sitemap.xml

At ProductCritic, we mostly care about Google and Yahoo! since these two sites combine for more than 80% of the search traffic to the site. If you have not done so already, you should set up your sites at both Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

Once you've set up your sites and verified that you own them (I've found that the easiest way to do this is to upload their generated html file to your site vs using a meta-tag), it's time to create and upload a sitemap.

When we first launched the main site, we tried some free sitemap generators (just do a search at Google and you'll find a ton of them). The free online one that we found was the best was XML-Sitemaps.com. Still, I found it a pain to generate it online, download the resulting files, and then upload them to our server. Also, while free, XML-Sitemaps.com only has a 500 URL limit.

So, I found a Windows application that does the job very quickly, is FREE and has a ton of advanced features if you want to use them. It's called GSiteCrawler and can be found at http://gsitecrawler.com/. The author, John Mueller, lives in Switzerland and works on the software on the side. Although he offers the software for free, I definitely believe that once you use it, you will want to make a donation to him for the time and effort he's devoted to the project.

Once you install it, just "Create A New Project" and it will walk you through a mere four screens in its New Project Wizard. Using the wizard, you have tons of options to tell it what type of files and urls to crawl on your site. You can choose file extensions of files you want crawled, images, and videos. You can also choose to upload the sitemaps directly to your ftp server once the files have been generated. See the options you have in the four screencaps that follow.




Once you have generated your sitemaps and uploaded them to your site, you need to let Google and Yahoo! know that there is a new sitemap that the search engines should use to crawl your site.

Do this on Google Webmaster Tools by choosing the "sitemap" tab and either "Add a Sitemap" link at the top right or once you've added it, just select that file (click on the box next to the sitemap name) and click on the "Resubmit Selected" button.

For Yahoo! Site Explorer, click on the "Manage" button next to the sitename and add the name of the sitemap file (usually "sitemap.xml") to the feed.

It's quite simple and you should make a point of updating your sitemap when there's new content for the search engines to crawl.

Get Full Referral URL's Despite Using Analytics

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I'm completely addicted to the stats generated by ProductCritic. Maybe it's just the fact that we gain knowledge on areas we need to tweak for the site (and we're tweaking on an almost daily basis).

Besides the server logs (which I don't check all the time), we use Google Analytics as our main source of information about visits to the site. Analytics provides a large amount of data and first time users of this tool can easily find themselves overwhelmed.

Although I look at almost all areas of Analytics from time to time, I mainly focus my daily stats fix on two areas. The first is Visitor Segment Performance/Referring Source. I want to know where visitors to ProductCritic are coming from. It's been quite useful as we've immediately been able to determine when someone links to ProductCritic and where that link exists.


The second area that I use in Analytics is Search Engine Marketing/CPC vs Organic Conversion. Although we currently don't use Adwords, this section is still extremely useful for us as it provides us with the ability to see what keywords people are using to find ProductCritic via searches (hence "Organic Convesion"). Since we get a majority of our traffic from search engines, the information here gives us some indication about whether we should concentrate more effort on aggregating reviews for digital cameras, camcorders, or cell phones.

So, what does all this have to do with getting full referral URL's? Well, that's one thing that Google Analytics does NOT do well. For example, last week, we noticed a sharp spike of referrals from the forums at dpreview.com. Although Analytics showed us the referrals, we couldn't tell EXACTLY where they came from (only that they came from forums.dpreview.com). We could check the server logs, but if you don't have access to them, there's an easier way.....sign on and use HitTail.com. It's an awesome free service and although most people use it primarily for keyword suggestions, the tool gives you every referral URL in full detail. Since it also does this for searches, you can click on the links that HitTail.com gives you to exactly reproduce the searches that people use (including ones from localized versions of Google).

Note that we're not affiliated in any way with HitTail.com....it's just a great FREE tool that everyone who's serious about tweaking their site for optimal revenue should use.

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Kill Bad Ads From Your Site And Increase Your Revenue

I can't stand all those Made For Ads (MFA) sites that are all over the internet. You know the ones I mean. They are sites that have nothing on them but more ads. These sites are absolutely content free and add nothing to the Internet community. They are the cockroaches...wait, leeches is better, of the Internet. I don't even want to link to one of them here because I can't stand giving them any more attention then they deserve.

Don't you hate it when you look at your Adsense stats and see clicks that pay you less than 10 cents? Sometimes, you'll get clicks that pay you 1 cent! I've learned that many of these clicks come from ads that are actually MFA sites. You only get a certain number of people clicking on an ad in a certain day and you definitely don't want that click wasted on an ad that pays 1 cent!

So, what can you do about them? First, you need to find them. Maybe there's an easier method to do this but I do this manually. I reload my page (at ProductCritic) and view the Adsense ads that are displayed. While some of them are quite obviously real sites (not MFA) like sonystyle.com and nytimes.com, you will also see some sites that you may be suspicious of. I open up a separate browser tab and type that link into the address box (NEVER click on your own ads) to double-check that my suspicions are correct.

For ProductCritic, because it is a review aggregator site for digital cameras, camcorders, and cell phones, I seem to get lots of ads that look very relevant to the content but are actually MFA. An example of one of these sites (check it out if you want but don't click on an ad), is digital-slr.info. Sounds relevant to cameras, right? Nope, it's a horrible, waste-of-time, Made For Ads site. The people who run these sites buy up a ton of domain names, stick on a template (most of them look identical) and then just load the page with ads. Once one of your visitors reaches that site, what's the most natural way for them to exit it....click an ad! After all, there's nothing else to do on those sites.

My sense is that these MFA sites pay low prices per click for long tail keywords, hope to get some visitors to their sites (which they set up for next to nothing) and then get paid a lot more for ads on their site. This is called "Adsense Arbitrage" and I'd write a post about it but there's plenty of good posts already like this one.

Now that you've found one of these sites showing ads on your site, what do you do? Login to your Adsense account, and click the tab entitled "Adsense Setup". Then click on the link marked "Competitive Ad Filter". Enter the url of the site (you don't need the "http://" or the "www.") into the Content Filter box provided. For the above example, I'd add in "digital-slr.info" and then click "Save Changes". Now in about 12-24 hours, ads for this site will no longer be displayed on your site.

One additional step that everyone should take is to help out the community. Head on over to AdsBlackList.com and set up and account. Submit the URL of the MFA site that you just found and after approval of 4 other readers (who confirm that it is indeed a MFA site), it will be added to their blacklist. Blacklists from AdsBlackList can be automatically generated for you to add to your Adsense Content Filter.

How's my success been so far? Well, since I started doing this, I've had zero clicks that have been low paying (e.g. 10 cents or less). Every day, I watch new ones pop up on ProductCritic and need to add them to my content filter on Adsense. It takes some diligence but I believe it is well worth it. First, you get benefits because you are increasing the quality of the contextual advertising on your site and you are not "wasting" your site's ad clicks. Second, the visitors of your site don't get transferred to one of these MFA sites and when they actually click on an ad, they are more likely to find what they are really after.

Too bad Adsense Content Filter only allows 200 URL's. I'm sure I'll find more than 200 MFA's to block from advertising on ProductCritic. Try it out yourself and let me know how it works for you!

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7 Steps To Promote ProductCritic

We launched ProductCritic earlier this month. When you launch a site, you should have no illusions about how long it might take for the site to be "successful". It's completely understandable to create a site just to make money but if that's all you are in it for, then you will probably be disappointed.

If you're going to apply so much of your energy and time into a site (and you will, if you want people to visit it), then ensure that you have what it takes to be in it for the long run. If it's a blog, update regularly, be creative, and spend time with it. For ProductCritic, believe it or not, our main reason for creating it was NOT merely to make some $$'s. Before buying a consumer electronic (like a Digital Camera), I do tons of research to make myself comfortable that I'm spending money on something that I'm going to be happy with. I got tired of keeping track of all the different reviews and not really remembering what different reviewers said about the products. I got even more tired with my friends and family asking me, "what should I buy?" That's how ProductCritic was born.

Now, of course, after launching the site, I do want it to become a site that other people also find useful. So, here's a list of all the things I've done so far to promote the site:

1. Submit to Search Engines - Instead of submitting to every engine I can find, I submitted to Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Right now, about 80% of the visits from search engines come from Google. Doing this correctly is the subject of all the SEO blogs and I agree it's one of the most important things you can do well to promote your site.
2. Started ProductCriticBlog (this blog) - you'll notice that there's no ads on this blog. At this point, the blog's purpose is not to earn money, it is to help promote the main site (ProductCritic).
3. MyBlogLog - A cool social networking site for bloggers. It just got purchased by Yahoo.
4. del.icio.us - I went to add the link to ProductCritic here but, to my surprise, it had already been added by other people who had somehow stumbled on it within days of the site launch.
5. StumbleUpon - Speaking of stumbling upon it, I added ProductCritic here so that once in awhile, someone could just run into the site while actually "browsing" the web.
6. DMOZ - The Open Directory Project - it just reopened for submitting URL's but although I've submitted, ProductCritic is still not yet listed in it yet.
7. SpicyPage - This is a pretty new site that allows people to submit their site and people can vote on it and comment on it.

Finally, I can't stress this enough...make your site useful! It's more important than where you place your ads or what size the ads are. Your visitors are spending a bit of their precious time on your site. Make sure that they get a good return for their investment in time. As long as you are genuine and you try your best to produce high quality content, the site promotion will take care of itself as people tell their contacts about your site.

I'm still pretty new to this, leave a comment for promotion techniques that you've found work for you.

Actively Pointing People At Google Referrals

Chaos Laboratory has a post up about how and why Google wants site publishers to actively promote the Google Referral ads. While it is against Google's Terms of Service (TOS) to promote the clicking of Adsense ads on the site (or to even draw attention to them with images or a "click here" pointer, this is completely different for Google Referrals.

Although I can see how this would help the click-throughs of Google Referral ads on your site, I can't help but think that doing this and the other suggestion by Google of "devoting a write-up on the usefulness of the product" goes completely against the reason one should create a site or a blog. People want to read your thoughts and content...not play the game of trying to avoid the ads on your site or not knowing what are actually ads.

This isn't the reason why I decided to remove Google Referrals from my site so if you use Google Referrals, you might find some useful info in the Chaos Laboratory post.

Google Referrals - I've Decided Against Them

In our constant attempt at optimizing the ads on ProductCritic, I tried Google Referrals for a few days. Google Referrals are those ads you see that give you advice to "download Firefox for better browsing" or "download the Google Pack". When a visitor to your site clicks on that ad and actually downloads and installs the application, you get a referral fee.

After having the ads on ProductCritic for a few days (they were located on the left column under the Amazon ad), I decided to pull them. Although, in the three days that they were up, ProductCritic did not get any referral fees from them, that's not why I took them down. The main reason I took them down is that I thought they just made the left column look too crowded and took too much away from the overall clean feel of the site.

This is an important lesson. Don't just put ads all over your blog or your site at all costs as too many ads can distract from the main reason people are visiting your site....for the content! It's not worth it to distract people from your content just so you can make a few extra bucks.