Don't cry foul! Be smarter with Google's Adsense Smart Pricing.

You can't blame Google for wanting to do right by their merchants, and try to get them the best qualified traffic possible. Google's attempt to deal with the arbitrage issue has caused some problems for their legit publishers as well.

I'm talking about Adsense Smart Pricing, which was Google's original answer to dealing with arbitrage junk-clicks. It's definitely having an effect in favor of the merchants, but guess what … it's got a wicked backlash to it that is hurting those White Hat Publishers as well. Opps!

The problem is that there are poor quality advertisers/merchants out there as well. And if your site happens to run in the same keyword set that those poor quality advertisers do, then you've got problems my friend.

What happens is the the consumer comes to your site, clicks the Google ad and lands on the crappy advertisers landing page … the consumer then bails on that crappy site immediately.

What's that mean for you? Means Google is going to punish you for sending that advertiser what they percieve as bad traffic, when you were not at fault at all. Oops! 

So, there is something you can do combat the evils of the bad advertiser syndrome.

Log into your AdSense account and then wander on over to the Adsense Setup area … look for the Competitive Ad Filter and click on to it. In the box of URLs to block, paste in a copy of this list of Bad Advertisers to be Blocked.

Do this and you'll made a big dent in the amount consumers fleeing from your Google links. Life will be good again!

There's a lot of chatter around the Net right now about the letters that Google is sending out to some of their AdSense publishers. The keywords here is "some" are getting them, while others are not.

I personally don't practice artbitrage, although I get it, clearly I can't speak from experience. What I'd rather do is point you in the direction of a few quality postings on the topic and let you get yourself educated.

Post to read are:
http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/05/19/adsense-arbitrage-just-the-facts/
http://www.jensense.com/archives/2007/05/google_adsense_16.html

That's it. You won't learn what arbitrage is, but if you're practicing it … get straight on what's going on.