Caydel’s SEO Blog

A friend of mine recently let me into an early beta of MFABlocker, a new service he is developing.

The Problem of Low Paying Clicks

Any webmaster or publisher who employs Adsense or any other form of PPC advertisements in order to monetize his sites has no doubt been frustrated from time to time with the miniscule revenues some clicks often generate.

The problem lies in the fact that much of the inventory advertising in Adsense is composed of MFA (Made For Ads) pages, which are often nothing more than pages full of ads. The people who run these sites will often bid very low on a large number of keywords in the hopes that people who click to their pages will click on higher paying ads. This is the concept of ad arbitrage.

While many consider this a legitimate form of business, there is no doubt that the practice warrants lower advertising revenues for the average webmaster.

MFABlocker - the Solution

Enter MFABlocker - a great tool to fight low paying clicks!

MFABlocker takes a list of your sites along with an Adsense publisher ID in order to determine which advertisers are showing ads on your sites. They then follow these ads, and analyze the resulting pages in order to determine whether they share any of the characteristics of MFA pages. If they do, they are added to a blacklist which you can then add into the Adsense competitive ad filter.

The Results?

So how well does it work? In the past week that I have been using this tool, I have seen my Adsense revenues jump by 25-30%. This is a welcome jump, although I admit that it may just be regular flux considering I have only been using it for a week. But there’s something, at any rate.

The Future

MFABlocker is still in early beta, but it is already showing some promise. The interface is quite rudimentary, and there is no help section yet. However, the service is developing rapidly. In the two weeks or so that I have been in the beta, I have been seeing major feature updates daily.

Keep an eye on this - it will be a great service!

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I just came across this over at Jason Bartholme’s blog - he built his own clickbot out of a Lego Mindstorms kit.

It gave me a good laugh, anyways…

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Perhaps you’ve already seen it, but Michael Gray (Graywolf) about ‘MFA’-style pages he found while clicking around in his GMail.

I checked in my own account, found the pages in question, and found that there was more to this than Graywolf mentioned. At the top of the page, they have a 4X3 or 3X4 ‘Sponsored Links’ section containing Adsense ads, fairly well targetted to the subject you clicked on.

Below the Adsense-type ads, they have a list of 4-7 ‘Related Pages’ which point to news articles relating to the topic you clicked on. The ad copy is the headline of a news story, with the text containing the first sentence or so of the story itself.

Of course, these ‘Related Pages’ are also ads. For instance:

Layton hopes to mobilize Cdns against ATM fees; says banks don’t …
Canada.com - 8 hours ago
TORONTO (CP) - New Democrat leader Jack Layton is launching a ..

has a URL pointing to: (broken into 3 lines to solve formatting issues)

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/pageclick?client=ca-gmail&type=1&
redir_url=http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html
%3Fid%3Dd7e600a2-5817-48cf-a902-015cb247c737%26k%3D49477

What program do these news companies use to get these ads? Is this a custom offering by Google where news sources can automatically attach keywords to their stories to trigger links in the ‘Related Pages Section’? How are these paid? Or has this been in existence for a long time already, and I just don’t know about it?

I wouldn’t mind learning more about this. For regularily updated news-type sites, this could be a great way to get relevant, interested readers, better than even ‘normal’ Adwords advertising. Please, comment if you have seen these before!

and Barry Schwartz are reporting today that there is yet another Toolbar PR update.

When the Jan. 9 update hit, it only appeared to affect older, established sites. Most of my sites 18 months or older had some changes last time around, but none of my newer pages had any changes. This blog, for instance, which is nearly a year old remained at a solid PR0.

This latest update appears to affecting more sites. *All* of my older, established sites dropped PR by a point while new pages, such as this blog, finally got their first Toolbar PR value.

The fact that the PR dropped on the older pages, which have only been growing over time, leads me to wonder if perhaps the displayed PR values have been normalized differently this time around. For example, does a new PR3 signify a higher ranking than a PR5 may have a year ago?

Many of my pages which were previously PR5 are now PR3-PR4, despite major increases in relevant links from a variety of *trusted* sources. I find it hard to believe that these pages could have *lost* value over time in the eyes of Google. I am not so confident to believe that it is totally impossible that my pages could ahve gone down in quality over time, yet the fact that this trend appears across *all* my pages seems to indicate that something has changed.

Have you noticed anything different? What kinds of gains / losses have you seen this time around.

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A study was released yesterday indicating that the vast majority of Canadian teens are unaware of the dangers and privacy issues of the internet. The study, performed in partnership between Microsoft Canada and Ipsos-Reid, surveyed a large number of teens of ages ranging from 10-14 years on a number of privacy-related topics.

The results are staggering. 70% of the teens questioned indicated that they believed that the information they put online and sent to friends would be private. Of this 70%, it was found that 37% of females and 22% of males had emailed a picture of themselves to somebody else on the internet.

Other statistics pulled from the survey:

• 33 per cent of children age 10 to 14 spend 6-10 hours a week online while 26 per cent spend more than 10 hours a week online.
• 25 per cent of children would feel safe getting together with a person they have only met online and talked to for a long time online.
• 17 per cent of children say they have used the Internet in the middle of the night.
• 11 per cent have been asked by a stranger for personal information while online such as their full name, home address and phone number.
• One in 10 youth do not know all of the people on their friends/messaging list.
• Two in five 10 year olds always participate in instant messaging when online.
• 26 per cent of children age 10 to 14 have seen hateful messages.
• 96 per cent of parents have spoken with their children about dangers to be aware of online.

What do you think? How could parents do a better job to keep their children out of harms way on the ‘net?

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I just got this through the e-mail, and had to share it with the rest of you:

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In the last few days, I have been using HitTail to make capture my search referrals. HitTail supposedly analyzes your queries with the intent of isolating which searches lead to your blog which you could easily rank for with well-written articles.

The reason HitTail works is this: picture your blogs index page. There are five or 6 or more entries on each page of the index. This mishmash of content is indexed by the search engines, leading to queries coming in which may use words taken from multiple seperate posts.

If searches are coming in based on multiple posts’ content, chances are the keywords used are related to the theme of your blog, and so would make easy targets to rank for. HitTail isolates which incoming searches would be easy to rank for.

So, when the posts which were together on the index page eventually drift off, you can maintain your ranking for that term by creating an article using that keyphrase.

So far, HitTail has only made one suggestion for me - ‘rails ajax radio’. With luck, and a couple days more traffic, HitTail will hopefully provide a few more suggestions I can work with. If you are a blogger, give it a try!

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