it appears that fleas don't get fleas...

I notice very few fleas on my website..

Or, maybe i'm too deep into the forest to see the trees (or fleas).

And, maybe one man's flea is another man's flower.

QS wasn't the answer to the problem of tacky ads, charging a paltry fee for using the api isn't either. They only act as a deterrent for quality advertisers.

Maybe, but I'm willing to dump out the filter and give it a lash.

Dumping the filter won't make a difference - QS applies to Google's search pages and NOT content. The ads that Google have priced out of search have been moved over to content and dumped on us. If the API charges make a difference remains to be seen, but it strikes me that the charge isn't enough to stop MFA's in any measure.

Shot down 2 more! One about parenting for heavens sake and the good old 1 graphic ad in its 4th incarnation....sheesh!

Ann

Another 12 brand new fleas filtered today.

It's a real infestation!

Ann

I'm getting it too now. Top three site in the niche, well respected and good traffic.

All they can show tonight is a get rich quick ebook, a general scraper that envokes a google search and shows their own ads (reported it:)) and two other MFA's.

NONE of the ads has anything to do with the topic.

Ridiculous.

I'm only trialling adsense on a few pages at the moment to see if I can recover some of the ad quality (the reason I ejected adsense from my pages a few weeks back) but things are really just a slippery slope towards removing them again.

I emailed both adwords and adsense, but don't hold out any hope of them dealing with the problem.

David_UK - I have been following your posts with interest, and would like to ask you a question.

Do your articles have the main keyword in the URL? Eg if you're writing about a new arthritis cure, does the URL that point to your page look something like:
www.yoursite.com/new-arthritis-cure.html?

Using this techniqe, I find that I can trigger relevant ads even if there's zero content on the page.

It doesn't mean that I don't spend a valuable part of my life cleaning out dumb "Top-n" ads though.

The kind that Google likes to throw at me targets my keywords just fine, even has a nice read to get a click through to----garbage that has nothing to do with my subject.

Are you people seeing the same?

Ann

Do your articles have the main keyword in the URL? Eg if you're writing about a new arthritis cure, does the URL that point to your page look something like:
www.yoursite.com/new-arthritis-cure.html?

Using this techniqe, I find that I can trigger relevant ads even if there's zero content on the page.

Funnily enough the ads on the lower earnings pages tend to be better targeted than the main index page. The other pages on the site have traditionally been consistent earners, but the one with the best performance by far is on the index page. The page url is www.mykeyword.com, and the page contains an article on the topic that enables the bot to target OK most of the time.

However, the last couple of weeks the targeting has beent utterly dreadful. I just picked off a hair loss surgery MFA this morning, and there is no earthly reason THAT one should have shown up!

I can see why some of the scrapers and junk ones that have the correct keywords are shown, and I just pick them off without moaning. The problem at the moment is that the ads shown seem to be completely untargeted and simply random.

Ann and David,

I totally get what you guys are saying.

My camera sites are veritable flea market, and my filter list is steadily growing. I'm talking about stuff like (making this up) topcameranews.info, photowedding.info, albumsforphotos.com - they've gotten pretty sneaky lately, with ad copy which outrightly claims that you'll be able to find the best prices, or review or etc, and what the clicker will end up seeing is just a page filled with nothing but ads, or maybe there'll just be one generic article about digital photography.

Sickening!

It's too early to say, and I'd like to think that frequent house-cleaning of my filters is benefiting me, but at least from my stats, I see increasing clicks on bona fide camera stores such as pricescan, etc where before, the CTR was so low it's unbelievable.

It's possible that the proliferation of these flea ads really turn genuine, potential clickers off, so keeping my filters updated seems to be doing the trick nicely.

they've gotten pretty sneaky lately, with ad copy which outrightly claims that you'll be able to find the best prices, or review or etc, and what the clicker will end up seeing is just a page filled with nothing but ads

I've seen them even sneakier than this when the flea has actually claimed to sell or stock the product.

Updating the filter list is all well and good but what about when it gets filled up?

I have to dump it then they start over again. I WANT A GOOD ADS FILTER!

Why don't they spend a little time on that instead of just making another puny little ad?

I submit that Google wants these kind of ads and wants us to be stuck with them.

Ann

Does anyone filter out the ads for free gifts? Are they legit?

Damn, I never realized what we have to put up with.

I have to dump it then they start over again. I WANT A GOOD ADS FILTER!

Same here.

Please increase the filter list....200 is not a big enough fly swatter.

I will join the call for a bigger filter list. We need at least 500. 1000 would even be better.

If AS is worried that we will filter out too many sites then maybe a mandatory clean out every 6 months or so would alleviate this problem. More work for us however it might get it past management.

<edit> I am writing support again today about this problem. I will send the link to this thread. Maybe other members should do the same.

[edited by: Tropical_Island at 12:05 pm (utc) on Oct. 6, 2006]

Good,

I hope you get some action on it :)

Ann

>>>I have to dump it then they start over again. I WANT A GOOD ADS FILTER!<<<

Same here.
I really hope Google are listening...

I have to dump the 200 and start searching out all the bugs every 2 weeks to a month yet again. This is both ineffective and a waste of valuable time. This should be googles job. I usually find 300 or so on my 12 sites. I then have to try and guess which are the worst offenders. Thing is that is only the ones found in US UK and Canada (the three main areas.) Try looking in the other zillion countries and you find that there are absolutely hundreds more there!

What we require from Google.

1 - They have a TOS that applies to what sites can and cannot display ads. Enforce it and don't show ads on pages that do not comply. Then boot the publishers if they fail to comply given reasonable notice to do so.

2 - The filter needs to be unlimited.

4 - The filter needs the ability to block ALL ads by a publisher.

5 - The filter needs the ability to block by keywords IE best4 best10 topsites etc.

Finally, we need a facility to manage the filter list. Specifically a facility that tells us if a site in the filter is still online, and if Google still serve ads to it.

But overall, if they would actually force sites to comply with the TOS they already have, then 2 onwards are unnecessary. ALL of these flea sites do not comply with several of the terms they signed up to - I don't see the problem with ceasing showing ads for non-compliance, or better still terminating their accounts.

Perhaps one way of understanding why Google is dragging its feet in this issue is to put ourselves in their shoes ... they've probably done the numbers and have concluded that allowing the fleas to operate actually contribute to the bottomline without harming the long-term viability of Adsense.

Or perhaps, the click-throughs to flea sites actually serves to bloster up the apparent success (from a financial and business metrics POV) of the PPC business division in management reports.

Imagine how it'd look like in the managements reports --- volume of clicks have increased by 10% this quarter compared to the previous one.

they've probably done the numbers and have concluded that allowing the fleas to operate actually contribute to the bottomline without harming the long-term viability of Adsense.

Well, clearly they need a better calculator then!

Whilst buying some adwords, these sites exist for one purpose, and one purpose alone. To take MORE out of the system than they cointribute. IE make a profit at the expense of google, and it's geniune advertisers. If they conclude that these scammers are worth it then they are clearly nuts, or they are using a knackered calculator with half the keys missing some google employee picked up at a yard sale!

Or perhaps, the click-throughs to flea sites actually serves to bloster up the apparent success (from a financial and business metrics POV) of the PPC business division in management reports. Imagine how it'd look like in the managements reports --- volume of clicks have increased by 10% this quarter compared to the previous one.

I doubt this very much. To base the profitability on click volume increasing would be entirely foolish. They have to look at profitability of clicks - that's what the market will look for, and people DO read between the lines of balance sheets.

If anyone can tell me how having more "advertisers" that pay a few cents in and take a few dollars out is a better business decision than having genuine advertisers that want to get customers via adwords I'd be very happy.

One of my well performing pages (which had been relatively free from fleas) was consistently earning extremely well every day. Recently I found that it has crashed and was earning a fraction of it's usual earnings. Upon investigation I found that ctr hadn't changed much yet the average price earned per click fell because quality advertisers had been replaced by fleas.

[edited by: Scurramunga at 12:14 am (utc) on Oct. 8, 2006]

One of the problems I ran into for one of my sites (back when I was blocking junk ads that is) was that there wasn't a bunch of quality advertisers to fill the void. If there aren't that many players (advertisers) in a particular niche, blocking isn't going to somehow create more of them.

[edited by: Play_Bach at 1:17 am (utc) on Oct. 8, 2006]

Iam having same problem with my site for 10 days,after get 15 click 15 cents i checked the ads at my site.All my regular advertisers was lost and 8 of 10 ads in my addlinks has sites like top5bestsites besttop8sites.If my site is a bout football all my adlink unit ads says blafootball,footballbla,footballwidget and nothing related to that keywords when you click them.I first thought may be there is something at this time of the year so advertisers stopped for a while but after this thread i see its not.

All that stupid sites is like a little search engine which pays 1cent 1 click,if G allow them to advertise, i think one day this sites will be %90 of the internet and no one will create a content site.

If there aren't that many players (advertisers) in a particular niche, blocking isn't going to somehow create more of them.

The problem is that there are other quality advertisers as they still appear on other pages. I simply removed the add from the poorly performing page.

Does anyone have an insight into Google's mind? Why do they prefer to allow flea ads to replace quality ads on a site?

Because the limited ad budget by quality advertisers get used up quickly by relevant sites which get much more traffic than ours? Because the quality advertisers requested Google to not display ads on our domain?

Bearing in mind that Google no longer know how adsense works, that's a difficult question to answer! Adsense is several years old now, and still in version 1. The leaks have been patched many times, and each time they patch it something else happenens and they put another patch on. Many people think it's time they ceased developing the current incarnation and started from scratch with version 2.

But to try and answer the question, adsense tries to maximise income. The idea on ad placement is that the ad that bids most per click isn't necessarily going to generate more income on the grounds that it may only get a rare click. An ad that pays less but gets better ctr might be the overall best bet for maximised income. That's the theory in any case.

What happens in practice is that MFA's might get better ctr due to the ad copy being dead sexy. I can tell you that on my site the genuine ads that pay well have ad copy that is dull as ditchwater. The one thing MFA's can teach people is how to write attractive, clickable ad copy! because the MFA's get better ctr, they get to be placed more often than they genuinely deserve. Especially as how ads have historically performed on your site seems to make no odds to the algorithm - they judge an ad on overall performance on a variety of websites. My site is at number 2 on Google for my main keyword, yet I have to suffer the ads that do well on the fleas I'm trying to keep off my site! Good paying ads regularly get bumped off for the benefit of non-paying best8, top4 and other junk. How sane is that!

Blocking an ad may give you another MFA, or it may give you a real ad. One of theories behind the long term effect of effective blocking is that by raising the overall epc, then a lot of the really cheap and scummy MFA's aren't placed at all - therefore blocking the professional MFA's that do appear is a bit easier, and more likely to result in good ads replacing the bloked junk ones.

However, targeting seems to have gone haywire lately. I guess one of the recent patches (sorry - upgrades) has cased more problems than it's solved.

sorry couldnt edit my post was trying to say 'if my site is about basketball'

I guess one of the recent patches (sorry - upgrades) has cased more problems than it's solved.

By my observations, Geotargeting has also gone haywire