Criticism of Google and the MFA (Made for AdSense) Site
January 20, 2010
Quite an acronym MFA. Even more interesting is that Google is now aiding and abetting the killer of content quality—Demand Media. The search engine optimization crowd is running out of tricks. The adaptation is for consultants and entrepreneurs to get into the content game. Read “The Death of the Professional, Brought to You by Google” and you can decide for yourself if Google is making it easy for content factories to control search results. I did a report for a client about Demand Media, and I think there are some interesting upsides and downsides the company’s approach. I cannot reveal the details of our research in a free, marketing oriented blog, but I can highlight a passage in the Search Engine Guide article and offer several comments. For me, here’s the passage I noted:
If your content is good the visitors have less reason to click the AdSense ads. For the most part the visitor has found what they want and are satisfied. That’s not to say that only bad content gets ad clicks, it’s not, but the more lackluster the content, the AdSense ads provide a way to something more promising. And who get’s paid every time an AdSense ad is clicked? The site running the ads gets a percentage, but the lion’s share go to Google. Because Google controls 70+% of the natural search results and the ads on the side, they essentially have a vested interest in helping companies like Demand Media succeed. The more MFA content that comes up in the search results, the more Google gets paid.
The SEO crowd profited from its collective ability to spoof Google. Google has cracked the SEO problem to some degree and created a content play. The Google will chip away at this problem and then find itself faced with another problem. The reason is that folks unable to create magnetic sites and compelling content want an easy way out.
Think back to your English 101 class. How much time did most of the students spend writing their obligatory essays? How many of those were any good? I had to grade and comment on these papers when I was desperate for money in grad school. My recollection is that the crap on the Internet is about the same as the crap in those freshman essays.
Why not blame Google for that situation as well? Better yet, why not improve writing instruction so that the crap generated for outfits like Demand Media gets better. Last time I checked most people find writing difficult and time consuming. Neither a powerhouse like Google or a Web play like Demand Media can do much about this aspect of reality and the authoring process in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, January XX, 2010
A no-one-paid-me article. Because it is about writing, I will this painful fact to the House of Representatives where writing great prose is job one.
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