MFA Sites to be Banned From AdWords June 1

MFAs or sites Made For AdSense, also known as AdSense Arbitrage sites are being banned from the Google Content Network effective Juan 1, 2007. Personally I think that this is good news, but in the professionals forums you should hear the squawking.

Made for AdSense or AdSense Arbitrage sites are somewhat shady sites that play on the misspellings of popular domains and exist for one reason to entice people who really land there by accident to click an ad and generate click income for the site owner. A whole cottage industry has been developed catering to this particular strategy with huge AdWord’s spend budgets being used to actually drive traffic to an arbitrage site. Typically the site owner moves in and out of domains quickly, sometimes even using the three day domain period and then returning the domain to ICANN at no charge to work the traffic. What you should know is that this is not a legitimate business making opportunity and shaded in gray.

There are many involved in the field who would hotly contest my comments and say that this is free enterprise at its best, but I have long felt that these were not legitimate business efforts and finally Google has recognized that and is actively shutting down these account. Webmasters involved in this “industry” will now have to look for another avenue to scam people into clicking their links and inflating their profits at the expense of “real advertisers”. I say thanks Google for getting rid of this blot in the AdSense program.

New Blogger Labels

If you are using the new beta Blogger, well not beta anymore, then you know that you can add the widget that adds labels to your template with nearly one click. How very nice!

If you are using FTP and the Blogger platform, then you know just what a headache it is especially if you are using a custom designed template to add labels to your own blog template.

I tried over the weekend to do this dynamically on my blog Web-World Watch. I followed three different sets of instructions struggling to find a way that would work to dynamically create the label list. I tried adding the new mime type to the .htaccess file, adding a PHP include and several versions of scripts. At the end of several hours, I just had to simply give up. I added the “popular labels” using plain HTML manually to my template so that users can access my labels. I won’t be able to add more dynamically, but at least I have tried out several approaches that I have found on the Web.

If you find an easy work around to add labels to an FTP blog, let me know, I am all ears.

Sending Large Files

I just spent quite a bit of time trying to send a client photos for their printer. The files were large. Even zipped, the file got bounced. Even sent one at a time the files got bounced.

Enter in YouSentIt to the rescue. I was able to upload my one zip file with the 15 300 dpi photos for the printer and load it and send the client a link. How very convenient. I won’t waste time trying any other way next time.

Oh I know I forgot to say it was FREE for the Lite version. Click my post title and check it out yourself, you may want to book mark the site for when you get in a jam.