About.com Nothing but MFA Spam
October 25th, 2006 by Michael Gray in Grayhat SEO, SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
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.
Sphere It
October 25th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
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
October 25th, 2006 at 10:55 pm
I always thought about.com was the worst site I’ve ever had the displeasure of visiting.
October 25th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
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.
October 25th, 2006 at 11:04 pm
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.
October 25th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
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
October 25th, 2006 at 11:10 pm
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.
October 26th, 2006 at 4:12 am
On my list of Top 50 worst sites
October 26th, 2006 at 9:41 am
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.
October 26th, 2006 at 9:59 am
I think Wikipedia succeeded in accomplishing what about.com attempted to do.
October 26th, 2006 at 10:59 am
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.
October 26th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
Sometimes I accidentally stumble onto an about.com site. As soon as I realize what I’ve done I hightail it.
October 27th, 2006 at 9:21 am
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….
November 2nd, 2006 at 12:52 am
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
November 6th, 2006 at 11:04 am
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.
August 15th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
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.)