MFA Sites to be Banned From AdWords June 1

MFAs or sites Made For AdSense, also known as AdSense Arbitrage sites are being banned from the Google Content Network effective Juan 1, 2007. Personally I think that this is good news, but in the professionals forums you should hear the squawking.

Made for AdSense or AdSense Arbitrage sites are somewhat shady sites that play on the misspellings of popular domains and exist for one reason to entice people who really land there by accident to click an ad and generate click income for the site owner. A whole cottage industry has been developed catering to this particular strategy with huge AdWord’s spend budgets being used to actually drive traffic to an arbitrage site. Typically the site owner moves in and out of domains quickly, sometimes even using the three day domain period and then returning the domain to ICANN at no charge to work the traffic. What you should know is that this is not a legitimate business making opportunity and shaded in gray.

There are many involved in the field who would hotly contest my comments and say that this is free enterprise at its best, but I have long felt that these were not legitimate business efforts and finally Google has recognized that and is actively shutting down these account. Webmasters involved in this “industry” will now have to look for another avenue to scam people into clicking their links and inflating their profits at the expense of “real advertisers”. I say thanks Google for getting rid of this blot in the AdSense program.