Good, they need to ignore the issue
Doesn’t matter what they do, I can create an arbitrage site that is really no different than a normal site, just with more and better placed ads. It will make slightly less than a pure arbi site, but I’ll still make 100% profit. How are they going to ban that?

You’re right, but still doing something to reduce, recently i’ve heard from many arbitragers that they are getting $1-$1.5 per click and then after a week or two it goes back to $0.05-0.$15. Of course the savvy arbitragers know what to do and are no affected by this, but Google is still doing something about it, perhaps only with the small earners..

Allen.H

Good post shoemoney, I do agree, this is a great subject. But being Google I would damn well do the same thing.

Google has created its own monster with Adsense and now it seems that monster has come back to bite them in the ass.

The thing is, the quality score bot etc will probably effect legit customers the most. They will have to place a minimum bid on their keywords. Then people who are serious will either get around that or just bid on other keywords.

If G was really serious about getting rid of arbitrage they would just put something very explicit in their terms of service, and then enforce it manually. With accounts rolling you would get a pretty quick reaction. However, I can’t see how that would help them financially. So if they did that the stockholders should stage a coop…

It does seem like it would have been a good spot for MSN or Yahoo! to step up. Yahoo! less so as they are becoming a more favorite target for arbitrage as well, at least with US traffic. MSN with their advertising mechanism still limited in scope, could probably get away with point fingers.

I used to have a much more idyllic view of google, but it has become clear to me that the only real thing that matters to them is money. So they will downplay and shake an angry fist on one side of their mouth, while accepting a nice check for the same thing on the other side. You are spot on that they won’t really do anything about it because it makes up too much of their revenue. So they just make these changes for publicity, knowing the “bad” guys will continue to work around anything they do, and continue making them money.

Good post… I wish I could digg it

They will rot in hell before they start throwing buckets of water at arbitrage. And let me tell you this my friends, hurray for me!!

IMHO the whole point is quality. Slightly better is what every end-user wants. No popups, SOME content and RELEVANT ads. If people purchases something from an affiliate link is because they ARE seaching for that, and if they click on ads is because they believe in the text, but MFA sites like 10-bestsites.com should be banned.

Don’t kid yourself Goog loves arbi, it means that people are spending money on Adwords and they are making money on Adsense clicks too. Its classic double dipping.

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