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Made for Yahoo Feed Sites Under Scrutiny
by Editor
In addition to the writers strike ending, the flurry of activity surrounding the potential acquisition of Yahoo also pushed another, and in this case much more relevant to our industry than the writers strike, piece of news to the outskirts. Rather than involving the upwards of $40 billion dollars that the transaction entails, this particular subset of activity involves no more than a few hundred million annually, although it did factor in to at least one significant sale in the recent future. For the less than a dozen people who earn significant income, read greater than half a million monthly, through what in some ways qualifies as search engine management's "oldest profession," news of that the last remaining. This profession of course goes by a few names, but for the sake of specificity, we will call it click to click arbitrage or, to perhaps coin a phrase, Made for Yahoo Feed sites. The latter plays off the fairly well known, at least among those who follow search to some degree, made for AdSense (MFA) sites, ones who exist and tailor their page for the sole purpose of driving clicks to Google's web publisher-focused program for sites wishing to generate revenue, AdSense. Labeling sites as ones who seek to earn click based revenue from web visitor activity brings us to a slippery slope as quite a few more legitimate sites fall into this category, for without click based revenue they would not have the capital to function. The subjective delineator in this rests on the sites intention.
While the profit motive might drive many a decision in today's world, especially with respect to web design, on the continuum of revenue focused design, on one end, we have a purely informational site with no profit motive, and on the other we have a site with pure profit motive, one that uses information or the guise of informing to legitimize its existence. In the former group sits Wikipedia, while made for Yahoo feed / AdSense sites fall into the latter. With respect to the made for Yahoo feed sites, not all MFYF are created equal. The first might look familiar but in the context that has caused the ire of Yahoo. The second type truly ranks as one of the oldest professions and manages to exist, albeit in smaller and smaller quantities, much to the chagrin of Google, but perhaps not Yahoo.
The Two Types of Made for Yahoo Feed
1. Made for Yahoo (Domain) Feed
Those who troll the net will recognize not necessarily this site but this type of site. It is a parked domain page, albeit a, for lack of a better word, manipulated implementation. Parked domain pages rarely qualify as pretty pages, and purists take issue with their very existence, the merits of each side we must save for another time. Regardless of one's particular affinity for them, they do play a significant role in the ecosystem of digital real estate, especially with respect to serving as a proxy for value. Parked domain pages such as the above might look simple but often employ sophisticated algorithms to determine which words appear on the page. Notice here keywords related to the domain name such as "First Class Travel" and "Discount First Class Airfare." Had you typed this name into your browser, the expected way to find such sites, its "content" makes sense. In this case though, you wouldn't come to this site by typing it into your browser, the way you might romance.com. You would have come to the site after seeing this ad:
Fly First Class
Find First Class Travel Options Save Money on Flying First Class!
first-class-flights-inc.com
For a variety of reasons we could call this ad and landing page in the strictest sense deceptive; even if you feel it doesn't deceive, it does run counter to the proper spirit of the domain parking page. Instead of type-in traffic this site receives all its traffic from paid search, relying on the technology of the parking service to generate keywords that visitors to this site would then click on. The quality of this traffic, when coming from Google clicks, is good, and almost double opt-in, but it hurts the business of search and especially domains to have them used in this manner. (It is worth noting though that a click on a key word such as "First Class" doesn't earn the owner of the site money, only a follow-up click on the search results page.)
2. Made for Yahoo (Search) Feed
This implementation will no doubt look familiar both in ad copy (below) and site design (above). These sites are generally true to form, in that the ads most commonly let the user know that a further listing of sites await - truth in advertising if you will. Here too, when the owner of the site purchases the traffic from Google, the quality of the traffic does not suffer on the whole. Quality is less of an issue than comfort, as the thought of paying for a higher priced term as an advertiser only to have someone use that in order to bid on a lower priced term and try to manage the gap, doesn't sit well with the majority. The beauty of Google's automated system for quality - both in relevancy of the page, and for when Google syndicated listing resided on the landing page - is that these sites appear less and less; when they do manage to appear, it's only a visual slight not an act of fraud.
Top 5 Sites for
Search Engine Optimization Agency Compare, choose, buy!
www.virtualglow.com
Made for Yahoo (Search) Feed sites are in many ways the ultimate prospecting tool; they let you know where holes in the bid landscape appear. That probably won't change people's minds about them, but the true MFYF's at least operate in a straight forward fashion, and given that they all must pull results tends to make them easy for Google and Yahoo to spot as opposed to the domain implementations where ferreting out the proper use from improper can occur only on the referring URL level. Type-ins will have no referring URL whereas search arb versions will, as a user had to click on something to get to it in the first place.
Unofficially, I believe that only the former, the domain based MFYF sites have come under fire and must cease. The larger, search based MFYF, at least the handful of entities that control 90+% of this revenue won't get a free pass so to speak, but they will have more latitude in continuing their operations, at least in the short term. Regardless of how theses sites look, a gap still exists between what someone subjectively calls a real site and what they would consider an MFYF site. It hearkens back to our initial discussion of the site's intent - to inform or monetize. You must monetize in order to afford to inform, but the question that MFYF and its derivatives face is whether they can cross the chasm of information such that subjectively they appear to offer the user what we might call legitimate information, i.e., content that users would likely consume if offered. This, again, contrasts to information that exists not for the people looking for that piece of information but those who might be judging the site, be it Google's bots or Yahoo's editors. In the end, some people will lose nice streams of revenue from this Yahoo change, but it represents still another push forward in terms of protecting the long-term interests of search.
Editor
DM Confidential
www.dmconfidential.com
e: confi@digitalmoses.com
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"...but it hurts the business of search and especially domains to have them used in this manner." And how is that true?
I'm on both sides of this question. As a consultant I manage client accounts at Google, Yahoo, and MSN. I see the fraud taking place, where domain owners or a 3rd party will click on our client's ads on MFA sites and parked domains. The last time I checked one days worth of clicks, I found about 8 clicks from parking pages. 5 of those clicks were from parking pages owned by the same person. The client tracks conversions, and they are not getting any. Does anyone beside the client really care? No. Can the client afford to stop advertising? No.
On the other side of this, we have about 600 parked domains, and about 60 sites that run adsense. We do not committ ANY kind of click fraud, yet we are making less money because standards are getting tighter. Perhaps they should, but not because we are doing anything wrong. We don't pay for traffic to our sites and we don't make them seem like they are anything other than what they are: parking pages.
I think there is a huge problem in the industry with people having incentive to commit fraud. Only when this incentive is removed with things get better and advertisers get better value for their money. This is starting to happen a little with a move to CPA (Cost Per Aqusition), but I think there is another, and perhaps better solution, and that is Flat Rate or Bid for Flat Rate advertising. You pay to have your ad displayed for a certain amount of time and don't pay for the clicks the ad gets. The publisher cannot commit fraud, and the advertiser should get good value.
Posted by: Chris Nielsen Date: February 22, 2008
URL: http://www.domainincubation.com
202299
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