Whenever someone asks me to to define an MFA site I point them to about.com. Last night I was looking up [history of coins china] and came across a perfect example of some About.com MFA Spam on this page. Which also ranks for [chinese coin history] and I’m sure a whole bunch of other related phrases as well.
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Yeah, but they get away with it whereas lots of other people end up getting banned in the SERPS. why is that I wonder?
G-Man
I always thought about.com was the worst site I’ve ever had the displeasure of visiting.
I love About.com!
That website kicks ass! 500 sub-domains and almost each one has a WordPress blog as the home page.
It’s the best Article Directory on the Internet.
If you can’t beat them, join them. Sign up to “Be a guide”. Get paid, receive training and promote your self as an expert in the process.
Ain’t that the truth. About.com has been complete crap for years. The idea was sound, but the greedy execs got a hold of the idea and decided they where not making enough money of volunteer editors. Lets see what happens with the new boys on the blog here soon like work.com.
don’t forget about shopzilla / bizrate. Do a search for electronics on google, and check out adwords.
http://www.shopzilla.com/10W_-_arbkey–1__cat_id–1__keyword–electronics__prerd–1__search_box–1__sfsk–0
Sorry the end of the link has double dashes which don’t show up on the link:
10W_-_arbkey–1__cat_id–1__keyword–electronics__prerd–1__search_box–1__sfsk–0
Maybe that works w/o the link.
On my list of Top 50 worst sites
Whenever I go to About.com I immediately think of the Onion’s “What do you think?” section…with those fake photos of people.
“Become an expert about…”
What a load of crap.
I think Wikipedia succeeded in accomplishing what about.com attempted to do.
They’ve truly mastered the art of making content appear relevant for spiders, but when the searcher arrives, all the links just point to other crappy About.com pages, with more links to itself. The China coins page, for instance, points to “Links in Chinese” which talks about Bamboo and “Anger Bars”.
The only moderately useful links, therefore, are the “sponsored” links.
Sometimes I accidentally stumble onto an about.com site. As soon as I realize what I’ve done I hightail it.
Technically, though, it’s not an MFA site since it existed way before AdSense appeared on the scene
Of course, its longevity has something to do with its rankings….
The whole thing about a site being old and thus trusted needs to be tossed out the window IMO.
Of course, for spammers it works great. Buy some old domains and shazaam – you’re in business.
G-Man
That hits close to home, lol. I actually own a website with a shitload of content, good content that you don’t find anywhere else, about coins (cointalk.org). Yet, in just about every worthwhile SERP on the topic, About (which has absolutely no worthy content whatsoever on the topic) outranks my site in Google. But, I just accept it as one out of billions of examples of how Google does not provide the best search results for its customers.
Speaking of which, Mahalo’s human edited list of crochet pages includes about.com pages. (Crummy ones. But you’d need to hire someone who knows how to crochet to explain just who wretched the About.com pages are.)
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