Our industry is awash in juicy news lately; most of which can be attributed to Google. They’ve implemented algorithmic updates targeting certain sites that will be of even less value now. As they change, we need to ensure we’re updating our inventory offering too. I think it’s time to alter an old saying to reflect, “Content Can Kill A King”.
All kidding aside, significant changes have been made intended to police the ever-growing levels of spammy content in the SERPs and really, it’s about time they did. When Google launched AdSense years ago, it spawned an entirely new microcosm on the web. We called them MFAs or “made for AdSense” sites. Basically, these are websites that are usually published via some automated mechanism and their sole purpose is to aggregate syndicated content through RSS feeds or bot scrapers and then monetize them through AdSense or any number of ad networks…LinkWorth not excluded. When you boil it all down, these kinds of sites offer nothing of value to users (or Advertisers) and it looks like their day in the sun has finally come to an end. And with that end comes a need for change.
Moving forward, we are going to do our best to clean up our Partner inventory by not only declining these MFA & scraper sites upon their submission to LinkWorth, but also by removing the existing ones from our community. It won’t happen overnight, but we have begun taking steps to address it and ultimately we’ll be providing a very valuable service to all of our advertisers. This change is not intended to alienate any of our loyal Partners. On the contrary, it’s our hope that our Partners will understand the situation and embrace the “new” industry standards of creating completely unique and useful content. The bottom line is, there is no longer a market for MFA/scraper/RSS sites so it doesn’t make sense for us as an organization to offer access to them. We are currently reviewing accounts with websites that would not be approved today and making decisions on a case by case basis. This added reviewing will be causing delays in some payouts. But this does not mean you will not be paid, just that we are reviewing your account.
Our Account Managers are working to ensure their campaigns are not including these type of websites so please take the necessary steps to address the new standards. We’re changing, so change with us!
23 comments ↓
We are together for better future, God Bless Us
I think that’s a prudent move on your part…
We’re changing, so change with us…
Nice Quote.. Thanks for suggesting us… We’ll keep on the good way…
That is good news, so content will tell more what the quality of sites
I agree with Tim…and it’s prudent on the part of Google as well, I don’t appreciate sites that scrape content from my sites and blogs at all and am glad to see them get a good smack from Google.
you have to do what you need to do, its important to change in order to survive
I don’t understand how reviewing the list of partner sites affects paying out income already earned.
If that site has been previously approved, but now doesn’t met your criteria, fair enough to remove it. In the past some of your approval techniques had me confused totally. I have in the past had non-existent sites accepted that were submitted in error (I have often various forms of same name) and were not even resolving.
However how does that affect all the income earned to date. After all you approved all of the links on the sites that earned the payouts.
Do not pander to the wishes of the few and upset the majority of your users. You know the ones like myself that still support and promote you despite only having one little $2.50 link payment per month. I submit my sites and you reject them already for stupid reasons.
1/ Too little content. Too often this happens. I have 100′s sites with large amounts of traffic that I will never submit that would incur this error. CMS packages tend not to have multipage structure. I even got this message on a site with 80K of articles.
2/ Our advertisers don’t want foreign Publishers. This has been on multiple sites with a majority of US traffic.
You assume that .com.au / .net.au sites from me an Australian based publisher only gets traffic from Aussies. I first went with Linkworth to monetize the large amount of NON Aussie traffic I get.
3/PR not good enough , this tends to be for Linkposts but has also occurred for sites.
Google themselves state that PR is worthless as a Traffic potential Metric. But still you persist in using it a a rejection criteria. My highest earning sites get a little traffic daily and have pr0 but a conversion factor of 50% or greater because of the Highly focused nature of the traffic. Exactly the sort of motivated users that any linkworth advertisers would love to have click their ads.
4/ Do not lump all minisites together with the MFA/ Scraper brigade. I create Highly focused and use friendly minisites that are made for users not adsense. Exactly the reason I consider linkworth advertisers would like them.
I hope this post will be published, if not I have also posted it elsewhere.
As both a publisher and advertiser I have to say thank you! For publishers of quality content this is a great opportunity to once again get paid what we deserve for the work that we do. As an advertiser sure we’ll pay a little bit more, but it’s not rolling the dice and gambling on how many quality sites we can get for our money. So once again thank you, I know it will take time and no doubt great effort on the LW teams part, but I speak for a great many in thanking you for this move.
I agree that the connection between a new more selective review process should be no reason to hold up payments.
I am not concerned about the quality of the one site I have with LW, but I am concerned that LW may use this “change” as an excuse to hold up most everyone’s payments this month.
I will definitely be taking my business elsewhere if this happens.
I am also wondering why this delay in payments. At least tell us when we will get paid. I had plans and one of the elements of my plans was the payment from, you coming in on the 10th of the month. Unfortunately that did not happen..
I have noticed some fluctuations to rankings to my sites since the algorithm change. MOSTLY positive
We’ll see if article marketing as we know it is going to die down. The backlinks are still great, but perhaps counting on the high PR article sites to help rank our content is no longer a good option :-/
In my opinion, dancing to Google’s tune is a big mistake. While MFA or other low-quality sites are easy to dismiss, the reason we have had them for so long is they serve a purpose, otherwise they would not have continued. That purpose is to connect users with advertisers on relevant topics. If Google cannot tell the difference between “good content” and spam, then that is something they should address, but the truth is that they have been making a lot of money for a long time the way things were.
Google does not want people to buy and sell links, yet they want links to have value that they alone can manipulate and profit from. Since anyone can manipulate links, should not links have gone the way of hidden text and meta-tag keyword stuffing? Why keep using something that can be manipulated and abused for so long?
My feeling is that it is NOT the spam and scrapper sites that is causing this change from Google. The real reason is that click fraud has been continuing to grow despite all of the efforts of Google to slow or stop it. The simple truth is “They Can’t!”. I say this because those that are smart about click fraud know what is needed to make it work and not get caught. There has to be many, many ways for that to happen. Use of bot nets is an obvious one, but human click farms using proxy servers is another. Why google does not just use AdWords conversion data as criteria for dropping advertisers and not just subjective “quality” ratings is beyond me.
I suggest that LinkWorth not play policeman with sites and let the market decide what does or does not have value. If advertisers do not place links, the site owner gets nothing and may seek an honest line of work at some point. I have had sites declined in the past, most were parked domain pages that were PR2 or PR3. I submitted them because I worked to gain the PR and thought that a link from a PR3 was as good as a link from a PR3 page on any other kind of site.
While I have been saying it for many years, I still say that linking as we know it can and really should go away as a source of spam and abuse. When and if that happens, it will REALLY cause change for our industry, since then what will your LINK be WORTH?
Finally, I have to disclose that after some 8 years of being a non-fraud AdSense publisher, with about 70 sites and blogs, and over 100 parked AdSense for domains, Google suspended my account last January. I appealed and was denied with NO REASON GIVEN. If this can happen to me, it can happen to ANYONE, so publishers should be ready to find new advertising networks to work with.
@ raja minisite
I agree with your comment, i like it
Not owning a MFA site, I’m not too concerned about this, but I am concerned that money earned could be held up and it sounds like it could be held up without being an MFA either, pending review. This is strange. Will we be getting alerts in case our site payment is on hold, so that we can engage with concerned people and move the process faster or even just so we know?
While you are at it, please review the advertisers. I was just offered to opps where the links pointed to absolutely crappy sites – outdated, poor info. What a waste of time. One of the advertisers has a good site with nice features but they point the links to an out of date myspace page!
It’s really cool that for once Google is trying to stop these content farms who just copy/paste your post!!
all payouts were paid by the 15th. it was never an attempt to hold money, just to review sites. apologies if you had to wait a few extra days.
well said Chris
all payouts were completed by the 15th. we kept everyone up to date on twitter
even if you have content farms or scraped sites, you were still paid by the 15th. if your sites aren’t helping us, we have to pull the plug and stick with quality sites with original content. has nothing to do with payments. What you earned is what you earned and you’ll be paid. We always pay our partners and have for 7 years. This is a delayed reply, but i’m sure you’ve been paid by now.
You’re welcome Cody! Thanks for understanding that we’re doing this to improve our service. If we’re providing crap for the advertisers who pay all of our bills, then they’ll eventually bail. Change sucks at times, but if it’s for the best, those that are legit only come out shining. Those that complain can easily alter their ways and provide quality websites and go with us.
Mmm… sounds like a good idea and this will be fair to the good blog/site owners and harsh on the copy paste websites. I’m an original content writer and it’s annoying when I get my reviews and other stuff copied and other site that copied them get their rank up with my content. I’m really looking forward to this. Thanks for providing a way to secure that only good quality sites remain. Now the same content for 20 or more site like sites will have to leave from here
Good move I hope you get it done soon, you have my complete support <3
It seems a bit hasty to get rid of original blogs, for example mine which is over 5 years old – all original content, page rank of 4, excellent traffic but suddenly ineligible because it is a blogspot blog. I have never had a complaint from an advertiser and I believe it is a better idea to let the advertiser decide for themselves. If they don’t want to advertise, that’s fine, but it takes choice away from those who do want to advertise with me.
Leave a Comment