I just read a post by Jennifer Slegg on her blog at JenSense that I think is pretty significant, concerning MFAs and Adsense arbitrage. According to her, many publishers have been receiving emails from Google saying their accounts will be disabled by June 1, 2007.
I think the bomb has been dropped, or maybe its a prelude to more drastic actions?
Google seems to be sending out those emails to people who run MFAs (Made for Adsense sites) and people who were advertising with Adwords by bidding on low bid keywords to get traffic to their MFA sites where they were hoping to gain higher paying clicks for their own Adsense ads and so make a profit. Those sites are usually having low quality content. According to her, Google has been sending out these emails quietly for the past few days, based on feedback from various publishers.
If you own a network of MFA sites or were using Adsense arbitraging to get some fast profit, now is the time to remove them all (and hope Google forgives you). If you own some “real” sites that are not those from the above, you might stand a better chance. Google is going hard after those who are trying to “game” the system.
It’s evident Google is doing this mainly to protect the integrity of its advertiser network, because lots of advertisers have been complaining for a long time already about their ads ending up on low quality pages, where people who click do not buy anything. If you are a publisher who has been doing things the “right” way, then you should see your Adsense clicks paying more from now on, once more advertisers return to advertise on Adwords.