About.com Nothing but MFA Spam

October 25th, 2006 by Michael Gray in Grayhat SEO, SEO


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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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15 Responses to “About.com Nothing but MFA Spam”

  1. Geoffrey Faivre-Malloy Says:

    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

  2. surly Says:

    I always thought about.com was the worst site I’ve ever had the displeasure of visiting.

  3. Hawaii SEO Says:

    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.

  4. Jeremy Luebke Says:

    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.

  5. robert Says:

    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

  6. robert Says:

    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.

  7. Francois Says:

    On my list of Top 50 worst sites

  8. tony rocks Says:

    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.

  9. SeoRookie Says:

    I think Wikipedia succeeded in accomplishing what about.com attempted to do.

  10. Ryan Says:

    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.

  11. xensen Says:

    Sometimes I accidentally stumble onto an about.com site. As soon as I realize what I’ve done I hightail it.

  12. Eric Giguere Says:

    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….

  13. Geoffrey Faivre-Malloy Says:

    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

  14. Peter Says:

    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.

  15. lucia Says:

    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.)