mainceaft
Senior Member
- Apr 10, 2013
- 881
- 184
This is the first time in a very long time that I’ve used Google Ads. I created a local campaign for a friend of mine.
I targeted one city, so the audience was narrowed with a specific interest category, etc.
And oh boy, within the first couple of minutes, my site was hammered by visits from these spammy sites coming from the campaign (spam / MFA / arbitrage / fake content farms).
I only got visits from a single real website; the rest were spam. I paused the campaign and started blacklisting every single one of them.
But that was not enough. The next day, when I resumed, I got the same percentage of spammy visits from newer domains. I banned them too, paused and resumed again—same issue. These spammy websites kept coming.
It’s very obvious to me that the traffic from these sources is all junk, mostly PRN pop-up ads, etc. If one of their domains is blocked, their traffic decreases, so they redirect their traffic sources to newer domains, etc.
Until now, I’ve banned around 100 domains from my entire account, and I’m still counting. To be honest, the traffic quality has improved a little—about 20% now comes from real websites—and I’m still trying to increase it.
And these MF sites and Google have made me lose $20 so far on these clicks.
But honestly, WTF, Google? What is their monitoring team doing, when in the past they banned many legitimate AdSense accounts for minor mistakes?
I targeted one city, so the audience was narrowed with a specific interest category, etc.
And oh boy, within the first couple of minutes, my site was hammered by visits from these spammy sites coming from the campaign (spam / MFA / arbitrage / fake content farms).
I only got visits from a single real website; the rest were spam. I paused the campaign and started blacklisting every single one of them.
But that was not enough. The next day, when I resumed, I got the same percentage of spammy visits from newer domains. I banned them too, paused and resumed again—same issue. These spammy websites kept coming.
It’s very obvious to me that the traffic from these sources is all junk, mostly PRN pop-up ads, etc. If one of their domains is blocked, their traffic decreases, so they redirect their traffic sources to newer domains, etc.
Until now, I’ve banned around 100 domains from my entire account, and I’m still counting. To be honest, the traffic quality has improved a little—about 20% now comes from real websites—and I’m still trying to increase it.
And these MF sites and Google have made me lose $20 so far on these clicks.
But honestly, WTF, Google? What is their monitoring team doing, when in the past they banned many legitimate AdSense accounts for minor mistakes?
