Just saw over at Shoemoney about a Google Quality Score Bot that is aimed at giving MFA and Arbitrage sites a huge bitch slap. The new bot will rate a site’s content and if it find nothing but affiliate links and ads, which is the case for most MFA sites, the site will get slapped with a low quality score.
I talked to a close (anonymous) friend inside Adwords and she tells me the big changes are purely targeted at the arbitragers. This really again should come as no shock. She was super vague on specifics but did tell me that they were fingerprinting (my word) links and text on page that would indicate the page was a landing for contextual search arbitrage or cost per action arbitrage. For those in Rio Linda that means if your running a landing page and directly linking with your affiliate link or running a scraper with nothing but Yahoo/Google ads then YOU’RE IN TROUBLE!
Basically, Google is going to fingerprint MFA sites and is going to penalize them. Depending on the quality score, Google may deny them advertising on their network or charge a lot more. Google is not trying to stop arbitragers – they make too much money from them. By tying ad pricing to a quality score and forcing low scoring MFA sites to pay more, Google will be taking a bigger piece of the profit that Arbitragers make off legit sites.
Of course, Google won’t take so much that the Arbitrager can’t make money anymore. Google wants them to stay in business. While it would be great for their PR, putting Arbitragers out of business wouldn’t be a great financial move for Google.
