Google cracks down on Adsense Arbitrage and MFA sites
JenSense reports that a lot of Google Adsense users who had built sites for the sole purpose of profiting from Adsense Arbitrage, will have their accounts closed tomorrow.
“Numerous AdSense publishers have been receiving emails from Google the past couple of days stating that their use of their AdSense account is an unsuitable business model and that accounts would be disabled as of June 1st, giving publishers about two weeks notice to prepare for the loss of the AdSense accounts… and since it seems that arbitrage publishers are the ones receiving this account disabled email, to give those publisher enough time to shut down accounts or use an alternative source for their outgoing traffic”.
Adsense Arbitrage, also known as Clickflipping has been a hot earner for Internet marketers during the last 1 year or so. It involves buying cheap ads and redirecting traffic from these ads to high paying keywords.
For eg - Google Adwords has thousands of low cost keywords which are bought by these clickflippers at less than $.05/click and this cheap traffic is directed to a MFA web page targeted at a high paying keyword (’mortgage’ for eg.) which pays as high as $20/click. The idea is - even if a small percentage of people click on these high paying ads, the clickflipper turns a handsome profit.
The question is - was Google aware of this Arbitrage business? Why did Google not put an end to this before? Are they now cleaning up their act fearing a class action suit from Adwords advertisers?
Interestingly, Google settled a ‘Click fraud’ class action suit from Adwords advertisers last year reportedly paying over $90 million towards a settlement.
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