What are AdWords and AdSense?

Years ago Google became a “kind monolith” (remember 2001 A Space Odyssey?) overshadowing and enhancing all life on the planet. Some might phrase that “manipulating all life on the planet”. In any case, Google adopted a recent invention called Pay Per Click or PPC advertising. It was a way for advertisers to get instant leads and sales with search engines because you could pay for advertisements. These paid or “sponsored results” would appear above the fold and in directly in the hottest places on the page. They became very effective at making sales because surfers would type a phrase into Google or Yahoo, and the first thing they would see was a paid ad in a light blue background area or prominently in the sidebar.

Marketing firms rushed to spend money to buy PPC advertisements from a company called Overture for Yahoo ads or from a division of Google known as Google AdWords. It was such a good idea and so effective at providing excellent ROI return on investment for advertisers, that it actually became the #1 source of revenue to propel Google into the Fortune 500. Yahoo eventually purchased Overture but by then it was too late for them as Google took 85% of the market share for search. Google split their PPC business into 2 halves… the side where you could buy advertising became Google AdWords. The side where you could use your own websites to display Google advertisements became Google Adsense. Literally hundreds of thousands of advertisers flocked to Google AdWords, and tens of thousands of webmasters flocked to Google AdSense to sell real estate on their websites for AdSense “impressions”.

What is Made For Adsense?

A Made For Adsense website (known by SEO pundits as an “MFA site“) is a website designed to lure searchers to their site using “link bait” or artificially manipulated ranking in order to deliver Google AdSense impressions or page views where the ads are present. A classic MFA site will provide almost no helpful information to a searcher and it’s only function is to deliver pageview or impression hits for Google paid search advertisers. MFA sites will typically use up to 2/3 of a webpage to display Google advertisements.

MFA sites are SPAM. They are garbage that floods cyberspace and detracts from a search engines usefullness.When Google started pushing AdSense, they actually became the #1 spammer in the world themselves and it took a couple years for them to develop a way to prevent MFA sites from tainting the user experience surfers wanted. There were many MFA spammers that made 6 figure incomes with template driven RSS fed MFA sites in the beginning. They were sold by the thousands on eBay. Now I must admit Google is fair to excellent at keeping MFA sites off the first page in the SERPS. Occasionally one will slip into the Top 10 Google rankings for a short while. I provided an example in this post where an MFA site is actually ranking #1 on Google for a coveted and lucrative phrase.

How do you identify an MFA site?

An MFA site generally has these characteristics:

• provides zero useful information to searchers
• usually has PageRank 0
• much of the screen is taken up by Google Advertisements and up to 2/3 of the screen might be just Google Ads.
• if the site makes it to Google Page One, it probably won’t be there for long. It may have manipulated the Google Algorithm to get there in the first place and they almost always get caught over time.