Click arbitrage is the practice of buying traffic from the search engines and sending it to a page with ads in order to get the user to click on ads that will produce revenue greater than the amount spent on the traffic.
Arbitrageurs do what many people in the financial industry do, they look for inefficiencies in the marketplace and exploit them to make a profit. There’s huge money to be made in this industry, but it’s not for the faint of heart since many times, it’s the volume that creates any worthwhile profit.
Google, specifically hates this as they claim it provides a poor user experience but probably also because it provides revenue to their competitors. Around February of this year, Google updated its quality score algorithm and in the process, kicked out many thin affiliate sites, arbitrageurs and other sites it didn’t like at the time (coupon sites, comparison shopping sites, and other sites that Google competes with doesn’t like).
I’ve been starting to see arbitrage sites slowly making a comeback as they figure out new ways to show up in the results, but today it looks like they’re back in a big way. Conducting a search for “flights”, you can see that 3 of the listings on the first page are for arbitrage sites that provide nothing more than more choices ads for the user to click on. Is this cottage-industry starting to boom again as Google needs to keep revenue numbers up?
On a side note, whoever is advertising for h20gearexpress.com, you may want to take a look at your metrics a bit because I don’t think you’re going to see any positive results from that ad, but please, prove me wrong.
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