Is the end of Made-for-Adsense (MFA) sites near?

Google recently announced a change in their search engine algorithm that is sure to impact owners of content farms, scraper sites, and Made-for-Adsense (MFA) sites. This week, Google waged a war against “low-quality” sites by reducing their rankings in the search engine results pages (SERP).

Says Google in their blog:

This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

We don’t know exactly how the algorithm was tweaked, but it’s being reported that the pages of plagiarists and content scrapers and “content farms” (i.e., sites with low-quality content) such as eHow, Mahalo,  eZineArticles, and Associated Content, among others, are said to be going down the Google search results.

The change is already affecting US search results and Google says the new algorithm will be rolled out in other countries soon.

Does this mean the end of Made-for-Adsense (MFA) and low-quality content sites is near?

Maybe. These sites rely on search engine traffic for Adsense income. Thus, if their search results ranking is decreased, less people will visit the site. Less visitors means less online income.

Affected sites, among others, are those that:

• copy other sites’ original content, whether through manual means or through bots;
• use RSS to scrape or automatically “steal” other sites’ content to be posted on their own sites; and
• create low-quality or low value-adding posts for the sake of  attracting search engine traffic

If you fear your site may be one of those, monitor in the coming weeks your site’s search engine traffic, number of ad clicks, and Adsense income. If they all decreased, then you’ve been hit by the new Google search algorithm.

To survive this change, make sure you abide by the fundamental rule of good site content: create content that is original and value-adding to your users.

Follow that and you won’t have to deal with the problem of Google changing its search engine algorithm every time.

Topic keywords for this post:

• mfa sites