About two and a half years ago I got curious about Google adsense. I wondered if I could actually make any money building web sites and throwing up adsense ads. I’ve been building web sites since around 1996 but my first few adsense sites were complete and utter failures.
Still, I watched Google’s advertising income and footprint increase exponentially so I knew that some people had to be making money because advertisers kept paying Google and Google kept showing ads; so I went back to the drawing board.
The problem with my first adsense sites were that they just weren’t converting enough site visitors. Not to toot my own horn (toot?) but my content was too good, and my site layout and graphics were too appealing. People didn’t want to click the ads and leave, they wanted to stick around and read what I had written about.
It was pretty clear what I had to do. Streamline the design, dummy down the content. Make the adsense ads the most appealing part of the site. Draw the visitors eye right to the ad. After experimenting, I came up with a handful of designs that pulled incredibly well. They consisted of very little graphics, text color that was a lighter color of grey (harder to read and in sharp contrast to the big bold blue links in the adsense ads). In a word; crappy.
Wallah! As if by magic, I suddenly had a blueprint to print money with adsense. Then it was just a matter of outsourcing content creation and automating the process of setting up those sites, doing some basic SEO link building (also fairly easily automated or outsourced), and waiting for the ad revenue to flow in. And flow in it did…
Am I selling a course on how to make money with adsense? No…not hardly! (why would anyone reveal the successful design templates that they’re using? Then everyone would use them and they’d lose their effectiveness.)
The point is, I figured out how the system worked and tweaked it to my own purposes. And I wasn’t alone. You see, this wasn’t rocket science, and a lot of other people figured it out too.
Cheap and easy to build crappy sites with little to no graphics + crappy content + seo link building = large piles of money.
As more and more people began to churn out these sites, more and more people began to churn out these sites! Word gets around in the Internet Marketing community pretty quickly. “Guru’s” emerge and sell courses teaching how to do it.
…And the quality of Google’s index began to sink into the mud.
Google began 2011 by announcing that they’re going to focus on cleaning up their index by clearing out the spam. By spam, they’re referring to “Content Farms”.
Many people think they’re talking about companies like Demand Media with their eHow site, but I don’t think that’s what they’re talking about at all. I think they’re talking about all those MFA (Made for Adsense) sites that have cluttered up the SERPS for the last few years.
You know the type of sites I’m talking about. Some people call them micro niche sites (think XFactor green templated sites), some people call them “thin sites”. Whatever you call them; they’re all pretty much the same. You basically throw up a web site with a few pages of content, usually using an exact match domain name.
Next you do a little SEO backlink work; article marketing, social bookmarking, blog commenting, then you sit back and watch the visitors role in as the site slowly creeps up in the rankings; all the while you earn decent money through adsense.
The business plan for these sites is simple: if you can build one small web site that brings in $1 in adsense revenue per day, then all you have to do is build a thousand more sites and you’re making $1,000 a day. Of course, in order to scale up to that level, you have to automate most of the process, but it’s not particularly hard.
Hence you get thousands upon thousands of low quality micro-niche thin sites cluttering up Google’s index.
Google is algorithm driven. As SEO professionals, over time we’ve slowly figured out that algorithm. Sure we don’t know exactly how it works; or for that matter even mostly how it works. But through trial and error we can figure out enough of what works and what doesn’t; at least enough to game the system in our favor just a little…
Remember, you don’t have to have the best SEO, you just have to do a little better then the other sites (many of which don’t do a single thing!). It’s like the old joke about outrunning a bear; you don’t have to run faster than the bear, you just have to run faster than the guy next to you!
As I said earlier, I’ve made a lot of money over the years from building minisites and monetizing them with adsense.
I like to think that my sites are a little better quality then the rest because these days I don’t use cookie cutter templates – I add some slightly nicer graphics, and I now only use mid-range quality articles (not completely spun trash) – and a lot of them – categorized intelligently in a way that adds value to the reader, (siloed in a special way that Google just eats up) etc.
But if Google cracks down on sites of this nature, then my sites could easily get painted with the same brush and all that free adsense money would disappear!
As someone who’s made a couple hundred thousand dollars over the last couple of years on these types of sites, I can tell you that I’m not in the least bit worried, and here’s why…
Google does have a spam problem. It’s getting to the point where you almost can’t get ahead of the game without resorting to blackhat SEO techniques. Those of us who work in SEO have seen an increase in crappy results at the top of the rankings for some time now…the problem Google has is that the general public is starting to notice now too.
Some people argue that Google won’t do anything to endanger these types of sites because they make so much money on them.
How? Well when someone goes to my crappy (er, useful informational) poker table info web site (for instance), they click on my adsense ads. Google then charges their advertiser for the clickthrough, splits the money with me, and pockets the rest.
Google could just as easily show the actual poker table manufacturers site in their organic SERP instead of my crappy (er, useful informational) site, but if they did, they wouldn’t be able to charge that advertising fee.
That’s how the argument goes, but people who believe that logic are wrong.
Google has always shown that they’ll do things against their immediate financial interests in order to maintain the integrity of the index, at least marginally. How many times over the years have they made an algo change that resulted in MFA sites dropping off the face of the earth? Lots.
But the MFA sites creep back…and that’s why I’m not worried.
Google is an algorithm powered search engine. They can change that algorithm as much as they like, but it’s still an algorithm and I can still run tests and indirectly figure out how it works, change my sites a little (or just make new ones) and continue to crank in thousands and thousands of dollars in ad revenue.
Google can de-index every web site you own. How hard is it to just order a new dedicated server (or even a VPS) from a different web host on a new IP address and start over again with some simple tweaks? And there’s no way Google could even know it was you. Banned Adsense account? Start a new Limited Liability Company, it costs a couple hundred bucks in the right states, and again, Google couldn’t know who you are.
Personally, I’d love to see Google clean up the index and get rid of those one page MFA sites with questionable spun content and tons of spam blog comment backlinks. I’d love to see the autoblogs knocked out too.
I make jokes, but my sites are better quality (which is one of the reasons I’ve made so much money with them over the long term) and getting rid of those truly this sites would make things easier for me. Getting rid of those crummy sites will directly benefit me in the long run.
And in the end, it’s just a side business anyway….
Regardless, it will definitely be interesting to see what Google does. But you can be sure of one thing; whatever it is, it will be in Google’s own best interest.
January 26, 2011
SEO News