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Comment by sabat | Hacker News Reader

* I didn't want to go the 'mfa' route for obvious reasons*

Sorry, but what's "the 'mfa' route"? Couldn't find anything on this.

'Made For Adsense', sites that add no value other than to get google traffic in order to sell the clicks back to google.

Google is heavily cracking down on these nowadays, so it's less of a problem than it used to be, but the sheer number of RSS feed regurgitators made searching for something very hard for a while (end of 2008).

MFA is a predatory strategy, it just takes without giving back.

Remember all those wikipedia clones with 6 adense ads per page? That's MFA, but there are lots of other examples.

Do you have evidence that Google is cracking down on those? Because I frequently get both Wikipedia clones and various Usenet "archives" ranking very high in my search results.

Since they are always the same sites, they should be be easy to remove from the index.

I've seen a whole pile of them simply drop off the radar, I'm sure there are still plenty left but there seems to be a concerted effort by google to control this.

The first real crackdown was somewhere in 2007, since then the situation definitely has improved.

And, unfortunately, MFA sites will bring in more money if they solve fewer problems. e.g., you want your content to be good enough that it brings in traffic, but not so good that it solves problems (leaving visitors not needing to click your ads).

The concept of "ideas" and inspiration has proved effective for me on a couple of sites. The ideas and inspiration help people get a vision of what they could do, but they'll still need to click ads to execute that (e.g., give them ideas for bathroom tiling, but leave them to click on to tiler's website to get quotes).

I believe it would be 'made for adsense'

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