Are "made for adsense" sites ruining the search experience?

Question

Please explain.

Answer 1

I know what you're talking about. It's very frustrating. Many times I'm doing a search and it looks like I've found something good, but then it turns out that that page just has the sentence that showed up in the search and none of the rest of the content that's supposedly somewhere else online. Blog sites are especially terrible about this. I always have to check the web address first to see if it looks like something legit or if it's something I'd just waste my time on. If I do end up on any of these pages, I make extra sure not to click on the AdSense ads. What I should be doing, though, is clicking a whole bunch of times to see if I can get them shut off for click fraud, lol. *evil grin*

Answer 2

It depends on how you define "Made for Adsense"

There are sites that were created in order to run Adsense and earn from the program. Some of these sites have actual content and value; some are even excellent. If the site has actual value and has the kind of content that a user actually wants and need, and worth reading, then I don't find it wrong that they are made for adsense. I also don't see them as ruining the search experience.

Other sites such as scraper sites have absolutely no value -- and these sites I find to be the pits of the search engine. The automated gathering of links posing as content is a mere ruse to be able to run Adsense and hope the frustrated user will actually click on the ads to escape from the rubbish website. I scratch my head in amazement at how these worthless sites actually get top search engine rankings.

I have met and talked with several people running scraper sites -- and most of them say they do well with Adsense considering the lack of effort they put into creating the site. The ads are often so well blended that you don't know when the scraped content ends and the Google Adsense begins -- and this confusion elicits a lot of clicks.

But the thing is -- how does an ordinary user distinguish between a "made for Adsense" scraper site as against a "legitimate" content website? It's hard.

There's been a lot of discussions of MFA sites over at Webmasterworld. You might want to check out these threads:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/5030-2-10.htm
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/4854.htm
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/7396.htm

Answer 3

Made For AdSense or MFA sites are not ruining the search experience, since some websites are made for AdSense and wouldn't exist without AdSense and yet they are informative and are in the search results.

MFA sites who are useless get removed from search engines pretty quickly, so they don't ruin the search experience. They are only available though PPC or paid advertisement on search engines, but then these are not real search results.

Answer 4

explain?