The Inside AdWords blog has bad news for some practitioners of "AdSense Arbitrage," in which site owners buy cheap AdWords ads to drive traffic to Made-for-AdSense (MFA) sites. Google says it will penalize AdWords advertisers who are determined to have "poor landing page quality." Google product manager Andrew C. explains: "Over the coming days a small number of advertisers who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages will see increases in their minimum bids. It is important to note, however, that the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by this change, as they link to quality landing pages."
AdSense Arbitrage (also known as click arbitrage) is used by some folks who are claiming large monthly paychecks from AdSense. Lately there's been a lot of bloggers wondering whether the Made-for-AdSense industry is beginning to hurt Google's broader advertising programs. The brainiacs at the Googleplex appear to be paying attention and have responded to those concerns.
JenSense points out that "many of those low quality advertisers might pull their ad campaigns completely, if the new minimum bid price for each keyword phrase does not make it profitable to continue advertising based upon the ROI of their own landing pages. And then they could start using more Yahoo or Microsoft for their ads, meaning YPN publishers could see an influx of these types of ads, and it could plague Microsoft ContentAds when it launches their publisher program."
"If this works out the way Google intends, it will be good for everyone in the AdSense ecosystem: publishers, advertisers and users," notes AdMoolah. "The only ones who will be hurt will be the MFA producers."