All of the buzz in forums and blogs this weekend has been about a post on Jensense about Google kicking out PPC arbitragers. (PPC arbitrage is where you buy traffic, send it to a page with PPC ads, and turn a profit because you paid less than the visitors made for you by clicking PPC ads.)

There are a few different takes on this. Both content publishers and affiliate marketers seem pretty happy. Shoemoney thinks Google is just pruning out publishers that have low quality traffic.

Jensense’s original post does specifically state that she has heard from both those doing “Made for AdSense” style of sites or those doing arbitrage.” In other words, this is not just about PPC arbitrage.

There are multiple ways to do PPC arbitrage. One method involves buying traffic from second and third tier PPC networks. The traffic is so bad it usually does not convert for even e-mail address submissions, but suprise, the visitors click PPC ads. I could certainly see how arbitragers buying large volumes of this quality of traffic could be kicked out.

Without making this post obnoxiously long, here are some conclusions which, in my opinion, are likely true:

- Google is using Adword’s buyer’s conversion data to identify poor quality traffic.

- At the end of the quarter, Google is going to make more money off of this, not less.

- Google likes arbitrage, but it wants the profits for itself. There are even reports of Google billing advertisers for keywords they didn’t buy. (Its all good when it converts, but not when you are an affiliate and the keywords break the rules.)

- PPC arbitrage is perhaps the best business model for fast, immediate profits. For investing large amounts of capital and long term profits, its a big house of cards. As the Adwords quality score has proven, Google makes all the rules and Adwords is not an auction bid system.

- Publishers who are running solid content sites and doing PPC arbitrage should keep the businesses seperate. This is one of the reasons I put an end to my PPC arbitrage projects last year.