Blocking MFA’s from Adsense is not that easy…
November 5th, 2006 by Stefan JuhlIt’s common that Adsense publishers block MFA’s with the competitive ad filter to increase their earnings. Now John Chow has written a post about how to do it, but it isn’t as easy as he makes it seem like. There are some issues to be aware of when trying to do it.
MFA lists aren’t always made to help you!
Not all MFA website lists are made for the sake of the better for webmasters. Some of the lists are made by the same people who runs MFA’s and they have a very good reason to do this. They can exclude their own MFA sites, but include all competing MFA sites in the lists and thereby increase the traffic to their own. So be careful who you trust and which lists you’re using.
In John Chow’s post he refers to AdsBlackList.com which there has been some issues with in the past. I can’t say whether or not you can trust them, and anyway if using their list increases your revenue, I guess you shouldn’t care that much.
Only 200 domains can be blocked
There’s many thousands of MFA sites which advertise on Adsense, yet the competitive ad filter only lets you block 200 domains. So a very important thing to consider, is whether you’re blocking the right ones?
The websites you’re using Adsense on might have very different topics, and probably only few of the MFA sites are being advertised. But if you’re like me and have sites with tens of thousands pages, it’s almost impossible to know which MFA sites are being advertised. And with various website topics you can’t just use the categorized MFA lists that are offered.
What are your options then?
Okay, I just go on about the issues, and what you want is just a simple solution I guess. Well, the simple solution is to use one of the public MFA lists, and just hope for the best outcome. That’s really all you can do without having to do some work by yourself.
A really good solution does exist! But it takes work… What you need to do is track every single Adsense ad being advertised on your websites and then manually sort out MFA sites. To do it you’ll need one the Adsense click-tracking scripts (which I don’t know comply with the Adsense TOS, so use on your own risk). Then you should just sort the url’s by which appear most often, and then make a list of the top 200 MFA sites affecting you - but don’t expect to actually find 200. Then block them and re-do as often as possible.
Yeah, it’s a lot of work to do this the best way, and I suggest you make a custom script and database where you can control it. And maybe even hire someone to determine which are MFA sites and which are legit.
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Posted in PPC Advertising, Monetization |
November 5th, 2006 at 7:32 pm
Hi Stefan,
You are right. I use adlogger for logging adsense clicks (it doesn’t modify the code so I guess its ok).
The MFA filter is pretty useless. There are thousands of MFA sites, I really didn’t manage to exclude them all.
My problem is that: if the site which best pays appear first this means the mfa on my site pays more the other legitimate sites??
November 5th, 2006 at 7:58 pm
Well, which ads appear first should also be based on the CTR, so it’s the ones that overall will provide you with the highest earnings.
Consider that if the ads for MFA sites are having high CTR because they’re displayed more prominently, then blocking them could maybe still mean higher earnings.
Anyway, blocking MFA sites is something that one should test for some days and see if the earnings go up or not. If they go up it’s probably worth a bit more work and if not then don’t block MFA sites.
Another thing that could help to increase the earnings is a bit of indirect “keyword stuffing”. E.g. you could put some kind of a text based ad for an semi-related affiliate link which could affect the ads being displayed.
Also consider to try the help adsense understand the content with and which should improve the targeting.
November 6th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
Hi Stefan.
Well, I REALLY don’t like MFA sites, but blocking them can be quite a mission. What I do is a combination of things:
1 - Originally, I got a list of 200 MFA sites to block from AdsBlackList.com (I think that’s where. It was about 8 months ago when I was still learning)
2 - I use Performancing Metrics and my Google Desktop plugin (which you can find at http://easymoney.geniosity.co.za/category/google-desktop-plugins/) for my Stats. This also shows the ads clicked, and, because my clicks don’t run in the hundreds or thousands I can monitor them
3 - If I have frequent clicks on certain MFA links, I then go and add them to my list, removing a site from my list that I don’t think is relevant.
Anyway, thanks for the article.
November 7th, 2006 at 5:28 pm
Thanks Stefan, I will try the indirect keyword stuffing. I will see how. A problem is that the adsensebot already knows the theme of my website.
August 14th, 2007 at 11:20 am
[…] Many web publishers, including me, are seeing their earnings from contextual PPC ads like Adsense being marginalized by PPC arbitragers. And the battle of blocking arbitrage / MFA sites seems endless. So what’s left to do? Well, if you can’t beat them, join them! […]