Ad non Sense. Net

I’ve been feeling a groundswell of animosity toward websites with Adsense. I’ve seen directories starting to make the decision to list a site or not based on how obnoxious the Adsense ads are. I’ve seen Wikipedia editors, the ones who even bother to look at a site listed at the bottom of an article, remove a link to a site because it had Adsense ads on it. A few years ago, it was the affiliate site that was the www version of a trailer park, now it’s the MFA site.

MFA (Made for Adsense) sites tend to be low quality, light on the content and heavy on the Adsense. In the worst cases, the content is scraped. Scraped content is assembled with software that scours the web, and will either blatantly steal content from other sources or put together search engine result pages as if it were genuine content. One step up from scraped content is the article sites. There are many websites that offer collections of articles that webmasters are free to use, which usually are given because they contain a link to the author’s own website. The intent of giving those articles is that they’d be placed on a relevant website, and people who read the article and liked it would click to the author’s home page. What the MFA sites are doing is instead of taking individual articles to offer to people visiting their sites, they’ll take the entire collection of articles. Thus, we get thousands upon thousands of versions of these articles posted which decreases the value to everyone involved. Peter T Davis » Adsense: The Trailer Parks of the Web