The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Well, despite my incandescent outrage at Google taking an idea this forum has been discussing for well over a year (dumping MFA's) and then using it ONLY in search I sort of think it actually might be helping - or at least the fallout might be.

If an MFA can't profit in search any longer, is content alone going to provide enough profit for them? What seems to have happened in my sector is that many of the MFA's (loads of ad blocks and about 2 sentences) have dropped out of both search AND content. OK, there are a few around, but to be honest I'm not seeing them. What I am seeing is more scrapers (zapping several per day), but I'm hoping that like the pure MFA type, squeezing them out of search might make a few of them drop out altogether.

It seems to me that in my case, despite the scrapers I still have to zap, I'm slightly better off. The Random pricing bot seems to have decided that my site works, so epc has risen quite a bit. I guess the Google employee that gets to wave the seaweed round in the Google car park and think of a random number (that's how smart pricing is decided - fact) likes my site this week. Next week the seaweed waving might come up with a different number and I'll be zapped again.

But I digress. What seems to have happened (to me at any rate) is that killing the crap in search means that the business model of arbitrage is no longer successful, so many of them bail out altogether. My site then starts showing better ads, and the seaweed bot (or whatever G calls it) decides to value the clicks higher, forcing out even more of the crap sites.

So it seems that it's possible there is a positive feedback cycle going on at the moment, and income has recovered a bit since the new QS algo. However, it may well be that my current increase has sod all to do with the Quality Seconds (or whatever G calls it) algo, and as usual is just fluctuations caused by someone, somewhere spending 10 minutes more on the toilet than usual :)

Time will tell, but it looks positive so far.

hey cranker if you advertise with google adwords as much as most people you would appreciate quality score. I have to spend all day trying to get rid of bad publishers who are spamming my site. Quality score makes sure i can save money on spam- its a good idea

In the following message thread,

[webmasterworld.com ]

AdWordsAdvisor2 just posted

Your quality score does effect [sic] your ad position on the content network as well...

And as europeforvisitors mentioned, this [quality score] is one in a series of evolutions for our ads quality model.

AWA2

hint, hint...

Expect to see a move against content network MFA advertisers sooner or later.