Hey guys. I’m a few days away from launching on a 2 month trip to the Tibetan and Middle Eastern parts of China and thought I’d get a post out before going. I’ve been chugging away, doing my thing. I thought I would bring this experiment I started a few months ago to a conclusion. Let’s take a look at that one adsense project I’ve been nurturing the past 4 months.
As you can see, 4 months of hard work flushed down the toilet. Not all channel were added, so the account was making a bit more than the ~100 bucks a day that was listed there. It does suck because I was probably looking good to get that account up to 130-150 bucks a day by the end of this month — that’s a nice 35-50k a year. Until that deindex. As you see, the sites are earning 1/10 of what they were earning only because of Bing and Yahoo. Google graciously gave all my sites under this adsense account the Spammer VIP treatment. It took the adsense mini site model for a good ride. But, as I’ve found, that ride leads to a dead end. I wasn’t going to post any more income reports, but I figured I’d show the final result of that experiment.
If you’ve been following this site, I’ve been a huge proponent of the adsense mini model, practically since I’ve started this blog. That model is no longer valid. If you want to read my 4000 word post about why this is the case, feel free. But for those who are impatient or who want to get back to producing MFA sites, I’ll just say this: don’t bother with putting adsense on a lot of sites, you’ll lose your sites and maybe your account. Simple. For those who want to read on, you’ve been warned.
The future is changing folks and it’s time to adapt and evolve. It’s pretty clear from Google’s actions that the Adsense/Google search team is on the rampage to clean up the SERP’s. Any site that remotely looks like an MFA site is likely to get tossed out of the index and the owner’s adsense account banned.
The problem is not that the mini sites with adsense can’t make money anymore, the problem is that it’s too easy to make money if you know what you are doing. If you know how to optimize your pages, get targeted backlinks, etc your little mini site can often crush more general authority sites for single keyword rankings.
I want to be clear here: I don’t think there’s anything “wrong” with putting out shit to make money. If there’s a way to game game Google to make money, well that’s what Internet Marketers do. Good or bad, that’s the system in place. I can say my sites did offer decent content — all hand written and pretty informative content. My stuff was certainly better than a lot of the shit out there, that’s for sure. However, when I look at the cost versus benefit ratio at the moment, the cost part is outweighing the benefit part. Because of this, I say just go with the flow and produce a limited amount of high quality, helpful sites that rake in the traffic. You are far less likely to run into problems over the long run. I’m not saying don’t work the adsense mini site model. I know for most of you, this is/was the model you have been pursing. I’m basically saying I personally don’t believe it’s worth pursuing — but, hey, if you think you can make the gold using them, it’s no skin off my teeth.
Fact: the made-for-adsense model has become too popular. Grizzly has blogged extensively about this model for years, Court’s set up an entire school around this model, I’ve been talking about it for about a year, and there are a number of so called gurus who sell popular “mini site” ebooks floating around on the web. When something becomes too popular, it no longer becomes effective. And this adsense mini site model is now coming under some heavy fire from Google — so heavy that I’m throwing in the towel with mini sites.
Keep in mind I am not saying the mini site with Adsense model is not effective for making money — It’s just not stable at all. There is a big difference. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to rely on a steady income when I’ve got a couple dogs, a couple mortgages, cars, and a couple wives (just joking 
) to pay for. If your income has a big fucking chance of going BOOM at any second, that’s not the sort of passive income I want. Though, if you are say a black hatter, that’s you’re entire model. I prefer stability.
Having a few thousand internet marketers monopolize a portion of the search with zillions of MFA sites doesn’t seem to be the direction Google wants to go with its search. Google has no qualms about treating your sites like vermin if they class them as MFA.
Now I’ve been contemplating this post for about a week now. It’s kind of an irony that some of the other MMO bloggers are on the same page as I am in regards to this. In Grizzy’s latest post about Making Money with Adsense, he reveals why MFA sites are pretty much finished as a stable model. The #1 ranking blog (a blogger blog too) for the term Make Money Online was recently deleted by the blogger.com spam team – ostensibly because the blog was “spam”, which is not, but really because the blog talked about how to optimize made for adsense style sites. And then there’s me – I’ve had my last 4 months of work knocked out in an instant by Google – hundreds of sites completely deindexed last week. They were nice enough to leave my adsense account intact, nice of them, especially since I’m sure the account is flagged with a “let’s inspect all news sites added each month”. No thanks, I’ll pass.
Some of the other bloggers have gotten some sort of warning from Google, but I got the hammer and nothing else. A deindex is a severe blow – worse than getting your adsense account banned. Your traffic pretty much dies to all sites.
I want to build a business that’s not in imminent danger of being wiped out overnight. Churning out a zillion little sites with the intention of making it with adsense is NOT a stable model.
If you go the mini site model, it takes a shit load of sites before you can really pull in the cash. And this is exactly what Google doesn’t want – a shit load of MFA sites clogging up the index. To make money with this model, you need to make a lot of sites and by doing so, you end up putting yourself in danger of losing it all at any second. Sorry, that type of model doesn’t fly for me. I can make a killing with these types of sites – I have it down to pretty much a science now when it comes to making these sites make money. But, I’d rather spend my time to build something that offers some real value.
And that’s why the MFA model is dead – there is no inherent value to these sites. If you’ve got 5 or 6 posts of hastily rewritten ezine article content (and the sad fact is that 95% of all content churned out by internet marketers tends to be a rewrite of someone’s rewrite of someone’s brother’s hired writer’s rewrite who rewrote some PLR content, which just rewrote some articles from About.com), a big honking ad bar under the title, a plain (or ugly) theme, and a bar bones sidebar, you’ve got a MFA site.
You can argue till you’re blue in the face that the quality of your content is so good that your site is not a MFA site. I’ll tell you right now, the person inspecting your sites does not give a fuck about how informative your 4 page site is or the style of your writing. If your site even has a hint that it’s MFA site, your entire account and all sites on that adsense account are at risk. The sad thing is that you might have 80 sites that are pretty good, stellar even (though I’m hard pressed to believe you actually have time to create 80 fantastic sites — no one has that kind of time) but if the few sites the inspector looks at happen to fall in the “my 20 shitty sites I forgot about a couple years ago” category, ALL your sites might get the boot. The adsense/search review team don’t usually check out more than a few sites on your account — they certainly won’t look at say 100 sites, especially if they all look exactly the same…
There is a pretty big debate about what constitutes a MFA site. There are a lot of people making a living out there teaching other people to make a living with adsense. Make a site, slap on adsense, repeat with the next site. Maybe a year or three later, you’ve got yourself a bit of an income.
I don’t support this model anymore because I know it’s not sustainable. Sure, you might get away with it for a while but you are eventually going to lose your sites. As I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t think telling people this model is a house of sand is going to make me popular, both with people who have a vested interested in promoting this model and people who are hoping “make it’ with this model, but that’s the reality.
Now, I should address this question here before I get it in the comments: “how many sites is too much?” My answer is, how many real, legit sites can you actually create? I’m not talking those 5-6, page set-and-forget sites, but living sites that are updated semi regularly and don’t feature McArticles that you churn out in 10 minutes (or some poor Joe in Abustakeshumastan churns out for 5 bucks). My bet is that you’d be hard press to maintain 50-75 sites like this. Some might be able to do it, some might not. In my case, Adsense only belongs on large sites with high value now — the so called authority site, if you want to call it that. If you want me to throw a ballpark figure out there, let’s say for the average person 20 sites or less on an adsense account (i’m not counting hundreds of hubs, IB’s or whatever other shared web 2.0 you put on, those seem to be fine). Most people not trying to milk the adsense mini site model don’t have more than 20 sites anyways, so by virtue of just having a shit load of domains with adsense, you risk become flagged as one of those MFA spammers.
So, aim for value with your sites now. Wow, I might be suggesting something very un-IM here: actually try and deliver some value. Value guys, does not come from rewriting ezines, it comes from delivering something new — if not in information then the way it’s delivered. If you want to write about midget thongs, well hey, maybe check out a few circus books about midget thongs and try and become a legitamate expert about that topic — you might find you can actually write your own articles. And mini sites, as far as I’m concerned, don’t offer any sort of value to the searcher — they (usually) create another barrier between the user and what they often want (legit info, products, etc).
People who defend this model will go to great lengths telling you how their mini sites are not made for adsense. I call bullshit. If you have 20+ sites and you’ve created them fairly quickly, they are MFA, no matter what you say. Any sort of adsense site that’s churned out in a sort of factory style is not a legit site. I don’t care if that’s 100 sites a month or 10 sites a month.
I’m not Google guys and I can’t read the mind of the google employee who may decide whether to crush your sites or not. However, YOU KNOW when you’ve created a made for adsense site. To have a site stick around with adsense, you need to create some real value. Churning out a few bullshit articles that you have no idea what the fuck you are writing about or paying 3-5 bucks an article to someone else who has no fucking idea about the topic either is NOT the way to go about this business.
This is why the so called authority broad authority sites like About.com and niche authority sites get such blanket trust ranking from Google – the content is informative, reader friendly, and importantly, not written to fucking score those clicks!
I’ve made a few posts about this on my forum, but I don’t think a lot of people really understand. You tell people you’ve been deindexed and they immediately go back to their thin sites and add another one or two posts of rewritten, bullshit information on the same MFA theme and feel nice and secure.
That’s not the way to do it folks. My opinion is that instead of spending a shitload of time building of a shitload of crap, spend a shitload of time building a handful of quality sites.
Now before everyone get’s paranoid about their 20 MFA sites, if you’ve got a handful of sites MFA and you are not making some serious coin, then it’s unlikely that your account will be flagged for an inspection. I’ve heard other people talk about 100 or 200 bucks a day bringing a visual. In my case, my account had broken the 100 mark and 2 days later all sites on that account were deindexed.
I’ve talked to 5 other people who make money online and they’ve all lost their money making sites the past year too. In every instance, they had Adsense on the sites taken down! In many of the cases, these people had 50 or more unique articles on their sites and the content was informative, etc. However, all these people had dozens of sites on the same adsense account with similar style layouts (though different themes).
I’ve concluded that if you have a lot of sites with adsense and you start to pull some coin, you are probably going to get your sites removed, no matter if you’ve got a lot of content or not. If Google feels you are creating websites specifically to make money from the search and it looks like you are repeating that same formula over and over, you’ll lose your sites, no matter how much content you shove on a site.
Now since people always want to know the How’s and the Why’s, here are 10 things you can do to get your sites deindexed. Guys, I don’t work for Google and I can’t say any specific one of these can cause problems, but I do know from my own experience and the experience of friends who have been spanked by google that these are some of the elements that may have caused problems with losing sites and accounts.
1. Less than 10 pages of quality, informative, and non BS content.
It’s definetly helpful to have more than 10 pages of content (most “thin” sites don’t have 10 pages, but 1-6 pages). But…..This alone won’t save you, I had 3 page sites removed, I had 6 page sites removed. I’ve talked to more than a few people with site that had 30 unique article sites get deindexed). I’ve talked to a number of people who had 50 page sites deindexed, just because the site had a MFA style layout. If you’ve got an information rich site that’s poor on the presentation of that information (spammy ads blocking the text, ads looking like menu bars, etc), the amount of content you have might not help.
2. Same Theme on All Sites
This is a big one. If you are putting the same theme on all your websites, god helps you. This is a huge sign of a MFA clone factory going on. I can’t tell you for sure that just having the
same theme on 30 websites will get your sites removed from the index, but the people who deindex sites for a living are not stupid people. If you see someone putting the same theme on multiple sites, they certainly are not putting a lot of TLC into that site or they are trying to mass produce sites – a big no no these days with Google.
3. A MFA or SEO Theme (especially a well known ones)
There are a few themes floating around that everyone seems to use for adsense. Do NOT use these themes. Any theme by bloggers in the MMO or SEO niche, don’t use. Don’t use that Grizzly theme that’s been floating around for a couple years, don’t use any of those SEO themes produced by members of the MMO community. Don’t throw on that stupid theme that seems to be on every fucking exact keyword domain out there. These themes usually have big footprint AND it ties your sites to the whole MFA system – something you definitely don’t want to be associated with if you sites are getting inspected. You can bet even quality sites that use these themes are likely to be associated with the MFA crowd on inspection. Use unique themes for EACH site, themes that are optimized for user experience and not clicking! That means those big honking ad bars under the title — think about removing. 2-3 adds per page, remove. Bare bones layout, don’t do it! Google has and WILL remove your sites just because you have a certain theme on.
4. Rip Titles out of the Keyword Tool
Ok, we’ve all done it. But don’t do it now. You want to write keyword optimized posts about keywords and the best way to go about that is to use the exact keyword phrases only, right? Right if you want torank. Wrong if you want to get deindexed. As good as writing titles for SEO is for rankings, it’s also a good sign that your site is MFA.
Let’s see, if I’m writing about “Midget Thongs” and I write five posts with “Child Midget Thong, Childs Midget Thong, Child Midget Thongs, Midget Thong for Child, Chidren’s Midget Thong and Kids” it’s pretty fucking obvious these posts are not written with the reader in mind. Don’t do this shit – it’s a one way ticket to the deindex hell. Use real titles that your English teacher might be proud of. You can still incorporate a few choice keywords into the mix and still write a good title. But don’t make all your titles seem like a copy and paste right from the keyword tool.
5. SEO Writing
Repetitive and clunky inclusion of long tail phrases, bolding of the keywords, always including an awkward keyword in the paragraph and conclusion of the article, etc. This might work wonders for ranking, but it’s annoying for readers and you can bet it’s something you don’t want the google gods reading over when trying to decide whether they should ban your little ass from the SERPS. Write something that’s actually helpful, something that sounds natural, please.
6. Use Same Hosting Account
If you guys have a lot of sites, please oh please don’t put them all on the same hosting. You might think you’re safe but it’s easy for google to deindex all your sites just based on this criteria. I suspect google’s formular for deindexing goes something like this: MFA looking site, lots of them with similar layouts, same hosting account = BAN. Even if you don’t use adsense and something like amazon, you should break up your sites into 20-30 sites per hosting account.
7. Put all sites under the same adsense account
If you’ve read this far, this should be pretty obvious to you by now — I’ve been talking about it for 3000 words. In one word, don’t have lots of sites under the same adsense account. Just…don’t. If you’ve got a lot of sites and you’re a stubborn fucker who still insists the adsense mini site model is the way to go, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. You’ll still get banned eventually, but it will take longer.
8. Too Many Ads
More is not always better guys. I’ve found that having a single ad can sometimes make more money than having more ads (this is not a set fact, it can vary depending on theme and niche of course) — and I suspect you get all the higher paying ads if you use a single ad bar instead of like 3. I like to opt for one or two ads these days. I can tell you if the ratio of ads to content is on the low end for content, your site is a MFA. In fact, as much as like the CTR of putting the ad right below the title bar, this “above the fold” approach may actually be too aggressive. It’s certainly one of the signs of a MFA. I’m not saying you can’t put that ad right below the title, but you better be careful that there is more for the user to click on (and see) than just an ad.
9. Ads Pretending to Be Menu Bars
MFA right there. If people are clicking on your ads by accident, you can bet your site’s crossing into MFA country. If people click on an ad by accident or because they think they are clicking on one of your menus and end up at an ad, they won’t likely convert for the advertiser and Google doesn’t like this. Plus, it’s bad user experience. Make a CLEAR distinction — either by adding an “advertiser” note or making some other way to distinguish menus and ad.
10. Use Adsense on Your Sites
Yup, the easiest way to get your sites deindexed is to…drums roll…use Adsense. You cut your chances down remarkably of ever getting sites deindexed just by not using adsense on your sites. All sites that have your adsense ID on easily spotted by google. Indeed, it’s a great way for them them to weed out all that crap — simply target guys who are making a certain amount of money with adsense for a visual review. Deindex, repeat. Maybe google employees get paid by the dozen (deindexed)sites? Who knows. Adsense is great guys — I’m not saying don’t use it — you certainly can make a lot of money. But for sites that are…well…thin, it’s probably not a good idea anymore.
What does this mean and where do we go?
The bottom line is that Google does NOT like people like us, people who use their own keyword tool (which was designed for ADWORDs btw) and knowledge of how their algorithm works to spit out sites that are manufactured only to draw in clicks. They don’t like the whole mini site model, period. I believe in their eyes, your small site won’t ever have the sort of value or trust that a mega authority site will.
So where do we go from here? I’ll just say this: there’s a lot of other ways to make money besides adsense. If you want to use adsense – and yes, you can make a killing with adsense – focus on those high quality, large authority style sites. Based on what I’ve seen the past month, those are really the only type of sites that Google wants adsense on, which is ironic since the smaller, spammy types sites make them more money. Those are certainly the only type of sites I’m throwing my adsense ID on ever again. The era of the small adsense site is coming to an end and if you are hoping to churn out site after site with adsense, you are going to get your sites deindexed eventually. With adsense, the option is to either go big or get banned now. If you’ve got mini sites that show potential, the answer is simple: develop them. And diversify into other income streams. There are a lot of ways to make money besides adsense mini sites guys.
What about me? Well, I’m still making good money through other sites so I’m still alive and kicking hard, but for obvious reasons, I’m not going to talk about those here. I’m going all out and diversifying into affiliate sales from now on.
I’ve always been pretty good about posting my earnings because so many people here talk bullshit about how to make money but can’t back it up. I think if you are going to offer advice or teach anyone about making money online, you need to have some sort of pedigree to back it up – otherwise, you’re just one of those moneyless noobs haunting DSP or Warrior forums. I think I’ve proved my point that I can make money online and I won’t be demonstrating that anymore publicly.
Since I’ve started this blog, I’ve seen a lot of the same people asking the same questions over and over, waiting for me or others to give them the magical information to help them make it rich online. If in a full year you haven’t made some decent money online, there are some pretty good reasons: primarily, you’re not fucking working or you’re waiting for some magical information that will give you an easy ride. You can make it big in this biz, but don’t sit around a table waiting for the scraps that whatever “guru” throws your way. Go out and learn new stuff and work hard and results will come. There are no shortcuts in this biz – the shortcuts that do exist won’t lead you to a stable income. If I have a get rich formula, I’m certainly not going to share it, because after 1000 of you use that formula, it’s not a get rich formula. This is why ANY sort of formula to make money online, by virtue of other people knowing it, becomes less and less effective. If you do the same thing based on a formula that other people know, you can bet your car that thousands of other people are too. That’s why people who “make it” usually keep their mouths shut about how they do so – they don’t want to bring down their entire income. Most of the “real” MMO bloggers stopped publicly talking about what they do and I’m now going to join the club.
Anyways, a long rambling post. Have a good one guys! I’ll be living out a backpack the next couple months, pursing my photography. I hope to have some winners to share when I get back.
Ben K
65 Comments
Hey, Ben! Thanks for sharing the thoughts following this experience. You are certainly an inspiration to us and I hope you will continue to post (hopefully more often), to share stuff from the new paths you will pursue.
Enjoy the holiday and happy photo hunting!! :p
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Ben, I’m so sorry you lost all your sites. I’m not really surprised, but that does stink. You seem to be taking things in stride and I thank you for sharing this so others can potentially avoid a similar fate.
I am curious, do you just plan to give up completely on the de-indexed sites or do you plan to repurpose them? Maybe you have enough common sites to rebuild a larger site or maybe you could turn the articles into Hubs? You probably don’t want to share - if so, I understand.
Glad that you still have an income and I am very excited for you regarding you upcoming trip! Please share your pics when you get back! Your pictures of Asia are always stunning.
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Must say its a pretty dark week for adsense and niche sites. I find it interesting that they didn’t ban the account - ie you weren’t actually in breach of their TOS for Adsense - you were just too fucking good at SEO so they took you out of the SERPS
I know you thought you had separated this blog from this particular experiment - I still wonder though - because it does seem to be that they are hitting on the tall poppies - you, Grizz
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I had something similar happen to me about a year ago. The sites lost all the rank, and later PR. They are still indexed but no significant income anymore.
It was around the time that I reached an average of 100$ a day also.
I havent used the Adsense account since. I had some good sites and I made sites in the meanwhile but I don’t dare to put the adsense code on them!
Fuck them because my sites had good content!
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Sorry to hear about the sites. And yea, I’m glad you won’t be sharing all the tips and tricks for the mindless drones who copy it and ruin it for everyone. Like you said, time for people to figure shit out by themselves instead of being parasites.
Have fun in China.
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I agree with Lis. I think they were just trying to send a strong message to the community by going after the big names in the business to scare everyone.
I’m glad this is all coming out now-before I got too invested in the model. I don’t regret making the sites I have made, they taught me how to get sites ranking in google.
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Have you considered taking the previous best performers and changing the theme/adding more real content/removing adense/applying for reinclusion and then monetizing with aff programs?
Might be worth a shot with 1 or 2 to see what happens, never gone through that myself.
Also, I agree bigtime its only a matter of time before the majority of these shitty sites are deindexed. Thousands of sites on things like “girls snow boots” with absolute useless content. People don’t want you to describe what girls snow boots are they want prices on girls snow boots.
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I can’t say that this is surprising with all the XCrapper sites that keep popping up in the results these days. You had to know the Goog was going to clean house as soon as they could figure it out. I just hope people learn from your experience, I still see a few people in your forum talking about how their going to do it anyway…it was good while it lasted. Adapt and improvise.
I always like how people talk about having ‘quality’ content on 4 page niche sites like girls snow boots as Joe mentioned. That their article is unique, well written, blah, blah. But it doesn’t matter how well you write an article describing girls snow boots, mention a couple brands, whatever… that is not what the searcher is looking for so your ‘quality’ content is really crap to the searcher and Google. Figure out what they are really looking for and give it to them, and a lot of it, and Google won’t have a problem with you. Write a 1,000 word post describing girls snow boots - good luck to you.
Have a great trip to China Ben! And good luck with your future endeavors. It’s a shame we’ll be losing both you and Grizz from the Scene, but hopefully you’ll still crank out some posts every now and again.
I guess it gives everyone a reason to get back to work…till they find something else to distract them
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Nice to see a more thorough write up of what happened Ben. It really does make me have even less desire to really go for it with Adsense.
Much better to simply try to rank for products that people are looking for to actually buy, and there is no doubt that large sites are going to be the future for a lot more people.
But let’s not forget that small sites can still be good for affiliate offers, but as I said in the forum, the cost if the domains alone for the mini site style seems too high. I would rather put that content in to a handful of domains anyway. But even large sites are never stable.
I mentioned that a few blogger blogs of mine got deleted. Only 1 had adsense on, it had 50 plus posts and was a year old. The other were a few months old with 10 or so posts, hard to figure out. If anyone uses blogger then make sure you have a copy of the content, which I didn’t. Lesson learnt, which is how this way of making money goes, we get the bad but also the good as well, just keep working.
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admin Reply:
April 27th, 2010 at 11:43 pm
Yea Dave, Adsense is really a mixed bag now. It’s good to diversify, so I don’t discount adsense, but the many site model is out of the game. Amazon and ebay mini sits, well, there just might be something there
Losing sites is always a risk — gotta live with it. Hopefully, people change their tune and head the warning that’s been shouted out by a few of us now.
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Hi Ben, sorry to hear about the account, hope you have a good holiday though.
I’ve got an adsense account with about 30-40 sites on at the moment that’s making around $1000pm, what steps would you take to make a ban less likely? Very annoying that this is all happening now as I’m just starting to really get the hang of it
I’ll probably stop developing that account to keep it under the radar, remove adsense from all the sites that aren’t performing and boost all the others with new content, change of theme etc. Even though that might not save me hopefully it’ll increase the chances of passing a manual review.
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admin Reply:
April 27th, 2010 at 11:40 pm
Alex, it’s hard to say what google wants. It’s more than just “having a lot of content” or using different themes. The issue seems to be that google just doesn’t like people having a lot of sites under the same adsense account. Seeing someone with 30+ sites on the same account probably gives you a +5 for ban score when they evaluate your sites. If they spot several sites that even remotlely look MFA (and to be honest, it’s hard not to make a site look not made for adsense without destroying the CTR), +10 for ban. If they find a lot of sites with the same theme another +5, and so on.
At this point — if you can help it — only keep adsense on sites you can really develop. If you have 20 sites brining in the bucks…really develop them. The bottom line is those MFA style sites that are only there to make money and not provide a user experience are risky. And that really kills the standard make sites for adsense model that’s popular in these circles.
You may want to make sure your adsense stays under 50 bucks too.
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Alex Reply:
April 28th, 2010 at 2:30 am
Thanks Ben, that makes sense. Going to go through and remove any that aren’t making much - will only have about 10 sites on there when I get around to doing it. The problem is that I’m sure google keeps track of previous sites on an account so I’m not sure how much difference it’ll make should I get a manual review and the reviewer sees a history of around 30 MFA sites. It should give me a chance at least.
Next stop, amazon niche sites I think!
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admin Reply:
April 28th, 2010 at 9:25 am
I had adsense on 3-4 sites that I switched over the amazon before the deindex. They survived, so from that It seems like they wern’t tracking by “if the sites had adsense” but “what sites do currently have adsense.” I’m not saying google can’t tell if a site has ever had adsense, but in my case, it was only the current sites with adsense that got the axe.
MFA dead? Holy crap!
On March 3rd Matt Cutts announced that new algorithms were going to target linkspam. Specifically mentioned was “paid links that pass PageRank, blog spammers, guestbook spammers, etc.”
hxxp://www . mattcutts . com/blog/calling-for-link-spam-reports/
I was kinda worried when I read that and now after reading your post, egads!
Its fucking BS that some of these blackhole authority sites can make rank for “How to plug your ass with a cork” and get a pat on the head from DaddyG while little $1 corndogs like us get our nuts romperstompered. I mean really, when was the last time you went to ehow to actually figure out how to do something? Honestly, their level of quality is, “Hey, it tastes better than crap.” The whole fucking site is MFA! But since its AuthorityMFA G is willing to toss off a reach-around.
Jeez, I feel a big rant coming on. I better just cut it short and head to the toilet because this shit is getting to me. I know G isn’t my foe but he ain’t much of a friend either.
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alex13 Reply:
May 28th, 2010 at 12:55 am
Yep, ezinearticles, ehow, answers.ask.com (lol http://answers.ask.com/Science/Other/what_is_the_weather_for_tomorrow ) are definitely MadeForAds but you will never hear what such a huge sites was banned. Why my ‘like eHow’ article will be banned and their is not? It’s because eHow is very big MFA?
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Thanks for sharing. Really hate it when someone is looking successful and then gets slapped about like that, but only real men pick themselves up and go about their business without the incessant anti-Google whining so many seem addicted to.
I hope a few people actually read what you say, especially the ones who are always looking for the “secret formula” that will do it for them … there is only the one secret, and it’s a four-letter word … work. That’s the real key so many seem to miss … you have to put in the time and grind away at it, no matter what the particular model you are following.
Enjoy the trip and come back refreshed and ready to continue fighting the good fight.
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Hello,
Been following your blog for a bit now….
I see that you have posted a bit about Info Barrel in the past.
My partner and I spent the last 5+ months writing a 6 book course, that can be found at infobarrelsuccess.com….
We have posted a WSO about it, on WarriorForum.com.
I’d love to give you a free review copy….
Would you be willing to contribute a review?
Thanks for your consideration!
Howie
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Sorry, Dude, rather rude of me not to say so….
Have a great trip. Sounds like it will be great.
Spin a prayer wheel for me. And get me a cool pointy hat too!
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Nice thoughts about adsense and making money online. Thanks for the 7 reminders you’ve shared to abstain from deindex hell.
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Hey Ben,
Like we talked about last week, that completely sucks. The issue though is user and advertiser satisfaction. In the broad scope of things, if you had a 5 page adsense site about laminate kaboodles for bathroom but the pages were shitty PLR material, there were no links to other pages (other than adsense) on the page, no video (if anything was available), no external links, your site hasn’t been updated for weeks or months, the title of your website and page(s) are “laminate kaboodles for the bathroom” and the external links are self served, then I imagine you would/could be deemed content spam. It rough but it is just the way it goes.
The problem with niche sites are they can be manipulated so easily because there is usually little to no competition for the keyword.
What I don’t understand is why people don’t just suck it up, build a website in a broader market, and then silo the niches to create more staying power and bolster up the website on the whole.
Wait a minute. I do know why….because that would mean a lot more work and waiting for the money to start rolling in.
There is no doubt that if you decide to go on a fast track, chances are good you will get bumped.
The reality is that most black hats know this and have invested in tools that automate the process and take away a bit of the pain. For regular marketers though, losing a few months of work is hard to rebound from.
At any rate, have a great time in China and I will see you on the other side.
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admin Reply:
April 29th, 2010 at 9:02 am
Thanks Leo. Not the end of the world at all for sure. I’m just shifting my strategy from now on so it works out.
Those big sites are the way to go. I can see why people are more hesitant to build them — you actually have to do some real work and…gasp…write something that’s actually origination.
Cheers
Ben
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Well said.
I’ve been saying the same for a while and have in fact created a whole site dedicated to creating “quality” sites.
The truth is that Google have made no secret of what they value - good sites that are have interesting and valuable content. Yet I see so many people putting so much effort into really poor quality sites that lack and interest at all.
I think people just need to look over their site and answer honestly - is it actually saying anything useful? It’s not just adsense, but affiliate sites and comparison clones and all the rest.
Of course it was only a matter of time before someone woke up and worked out what’s going on!
Is that time now? Maybe, maybe not - I saw an almost identical post to the above several years ago yet many people have still done OK from the whole “made for adsense” thing. One persons experience is just not enough to go on - but that said I do agree that the search engines are only going to get better and better at picking out “value”.
But that’s why I have always championed the “build up a decent site” model and have written extensively about how to do that and detailed my own successes.
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Good for Google. But as much as Internet Marketers clog the index, making it hard to find legit information on say finding a cure for cancer or real solutions for acne, I hate google more.
Now they just have to cut the crapbank products out of google adwords. I never routed for people like you and Grizz to make money. I routed for you to stick it to Google. If your actions make Google less corrupt then it’s fine with me if you lose money.
Information on Wikipedia and About.com is not cutting edge info. We absolutely need Google to show us the cutting edge sites and we need that path to be clear of Internet Marketers. And hopefully, Google will do that and not get caught in Making Money Online.
You’ll notice Bing is advertised as being good for shopping and not good for finding information. It sucks
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I would like to know why Google doesn’t deindex thin content mega-scrapper sites like thefind.com or nextag.com?
Well, the answer is easy, they’re funded by venture capital firms who know people at Google. They get a free pass on any project they fund while the little guys like us who do the exact same thing get the deindex stick.
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Everyone here including Ben is just speculating about what to do and what not to do.
Getting banned because you had same theme on all sites? I call bull! So many plain ugly standard Wordpress white/blue sites would be deindexed if that is the case.
Your tip in #7 is giving out too much misinformation. You are trying to get people banned because they will try your method of getting multiple AdSense account.
Your tip #10 is just plain stupid. You are being watched with or without Google Webmasters, Analytics, Adsense, etc.
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And to think, I started to put a lot of effort in this because I wanted a more stable source of income than my stock market trading. Sheesh!
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Good stuff. I only have a few sites with adsense and they are all safe for right now, but that is because I have never subscribed to the IM status quo. Each of them gets one new post a month written by me, and I am damn good!
I agree with pretty much all of what you said here man.
And that is why I stayed away from the mini-site model with adsense. I just HATE relying on a large corp to pay me.
I have mini sites… bunches of them…, but they sell my personal ebooks, nothing to do with anyone else. I like it that way.
AL
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admin Reply:
April 29th, 2010 at 9:00 am
Good to see you’ve been safe in this cleanup that’s going on. Getting that paycheck from one big corporation does make one nevous, especially when that said company has a reputation for not paying lol (i’ve heard enough stories about people getting banned before a large payout).
I don’t think the model is really dead — i’m sure a lot of people will still go for it, regardless of what anyone says, but we both know that it’s not a long term income.
Good hearing from you man — look forward to your next video post.
Ben
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Great info here Ben, & I appreciate you sharing the ups and downs of your experiments. I don’t blame you for deciding to keep a lower profile in the future though. I’m not really worried about my sites, but I have taken Adsense off a few of the smaller ones, until I get more content on there.
Have a great trip - I’m looking forward to seeing more photos : )
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Sorry to hear about loosing your sites, and yes, thanks for the tips - they are really useful to change the course of action if you are not already hit by being too deep into the Adsense Mini Sites Model.
I have never been much into building a bunch of mini sites for Adsense, but I can tell that the only Blogger Minima-Based Adsense blog I had, lost ranking for the main keyword (something that looks like -70 penalty) just about the time when the deindexing started. I guess big G is changing the algo alongside with cleaning up everything else.
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Holy shit storm batman, I bury myself in work for a few months and come back to find G has raped and pillaged the village. Just joking, damn Ben that totally sucks!!!!
I have much to say but may just make a post in the forum when I get time. Just been so busy. I swear I’m like the guy that gets thrown into one of those wind tubes with money flying around and have 60 seconds to fill your pockets.
Anyway, don’t trash that content it from your MFA’s it still has a ton of value. Recycle!
I have eluded in previous post that there is a way to build MFA’s that Google Loves. I have 2 of them, actually their not mine but my 16yr old and 19yr old sons each have one. They work just like mini/micro sites and are just as sniper like. You lose a little ranking ability initially (only because of domain name matching) and a little CTR but you gain huge in authority a little later. They are also designed to drop adsense later anyway.
I will get in more detail later but I think you already know what I’m talking about with those sites.
I do still have all my old sniper MFA’s and they are doing fine still. Maybe they havnt’ got around to me yet. btw All of my MFA’ have one ad block bar and thats all. There are links left and right but they look scary to click because they…………………..don’t think so G
I have found myself buying a lot of traffic lately, both for research and $ clicks. Buying traffic gives you a fabulous look at the under belly of the beast. Most don’t realize it but Adwords is by far (there isn’t a close 2nd) the best SEO tool in the world. That is adwords and a few Spy tools.
The opportunities out there are still amazing. The interesting thing about internet marketing is the most crowded places are where there appears to be a fast passive buck.
People need to see through that bullshit and be willing to get dirty and quit fucking around there is big money to be made.
Has anyone considered selling your own product?
Has anyone considered running a site that dropships?
Has anyone considered saying fuck you AMAZON I’m going to buy the inventory myself and increase my profits by 60%?
Seriously Folks, I see droves of people licking the last drops of sweat off the Gurus nut sak looking for that magic bullet while the BIG SWINGEN DICKS ARE MOVING PRODUCT RIGHT UNDER THEIR NOSES —-AND MAKING BANK!!!!!
yes it pisses me off to see the sheeple do that shit!!
Im’ out!! I just don’t have the patience
BK
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Oh and enjoy the trip, it sounds awsome
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Warning - Don’t click on Bk’s link above for his name - its a spam trap. See the bottom comments in Griz’ post if you don’t believe me. What an asshole Bk you are. This is exactly the type of problem we have like him. You need to be exterminated from the internet. You are a total jerk dude. Go fuck yourself…
Don’t whatever you do go to his site - hurr-durr.com is the shit site ..don’t click on it or go there..does funny things to your computer - you can’t shut down your browser..
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I agree with DJ. You should take that asswipe’s BK comment down. Hope he gets cancer.
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In some ways, the mini sites were multi-level marketing companies, and the “rich jerk” style MMO sites were the slimiest MLMs. They sold crap to people who would then turn around and try to sell the same crap to another newbie. Ben’s site, Grizz’s site and others like them add value, but the vast majority do not. Google is forcing Internet Marketers to develop better business models now, and frankly, that’s for the best. Multi-level marketing might make a few people rich, but the vast majority of the participants lose money and add no value to the world. Innovation has always been the key to creating a good company. Links will still be important but hopefully this is a move toward rewarding good content as well. I’ll still rely on people like Grizz and Ben for advice and hopefully Google will still reward them for producing good content.
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Hey Ben,
Nice to read up on what happened to you. Like you said, people are afraid to work on good, creative, unique material.
People need to quit fucking around with re-writing articles and use their brains. Anyways, looks like you have learned a lot throughout this process and are going to be stronger as a result of this experience.
Want to make money from your site? Read this article.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/how-to-make-money-from-your-blog/
Have a good time in China man, you deserve it!
Drew
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I appreciate what you feel you can tell us. I hope you still are getting enough after the g-slap to finance your trip.
Couple of miscellaneous things:
Loading speed: Google’s own Doublclick is often very slow.
Make sure you have metatags
meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”
meta name=”googlebot” content=”noarchive”
so that your pages are NOT archived in Google. If you have to dump a site (URL) and get another, the Google cache of your old pages will interfere with your new ones if you don’t have those metatags in your old pages.
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now thats just sad. i just got around to trying the microniche thing and making 1 or 2 dollars a day now. really wanna kick myself in the nut now. but thanks for making this known though. at least im sitting on the fence now about making more sites. informative post bro
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Here’s the other side of the story from the black hat side of things (and this guy claims to have made 15,000 in a month from doing it, yowza!) :-O
Linkity link (to black hat world, not for the faint of heart white-hatters)
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/adsense/42980-how-i-make-15k-month-adsense.html
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Kerry Reply:
May 4th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
Good post, but not really sure what exactly made it “black hat”.
Ben,
sorry to hear about what happened. I don’t blame you for buttoning up on the blog. I am a new comer and am looking forward to becoming a part of this little community. With that, enough of the blogs and forums, I am off to work!!!
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Sorry to hear about what happened to your sites , it is a big blow to get those all de indexed and thank you for sharing these useful informaiton
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Kinda curious about your point 7.
You say don’t put all your sites under one adsense account? So it is ok to break just about the biggest rule adsense has, ie you can’t have multiple account?? Can you explain what you mean?
Had a friend who opened 2 extra accounts, as his main one was earning 100 bucks or more a day and wanted to spread the load by using these for new sites he was building. He used different adresses, banks and stuff and 4 weeks later all three accounts got banned, so would be interested hearing what exaclty you mean by your comment
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admin Reply:
May 6th, 2010 at 5:34 am
You are not allowed to open more than one adsense account per personal or business entity. But, if you are willing to create a legitate business (i.e. incorporate), you can legally create another adsense account. But you need to set up a LLC which is in essence creating a new business, new taxation, etc. It`s a big step for some, but it`s what you have to do. For obvious reasons, this is not a well known fact.
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Rich Anderson Reply:
May 6th, 2010 at 3:07 pm
So you are saying you should setup multiple businesses just to be able to open extra adsense accounts???? And how many domains do you think is safe to put under one account?
Also isn’t this a bit of a drastic measure? I mean the cost of setting up the businesses, legal paperwork, yearly taxes etc.
And even then, if you should forget to login to your adsense accounts through seperate ip’s they will still catch you, its how my friend got caught.
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admin Reply:
May 8th, 2010 at 2:53 am
Rich, for me this is a business. If you are just playing for some spare change, don’t bother setting up a business account. If you are serious about it, then it’s worth thinking about. Seperate IP’s are a good idea, but if you have legal biz entities, then you are probably safe even from the same IP — these are completely different entities as far as adsense is concerned. Though diff IP’s is still a very good idea. I’m not really going to say any more about how to do this as Google doesn’t really want people to start jumping on with multiple accounts for sure. But it’s possible — if you are willing to do the work.
woo, you just went some places i visited last year. the photos is much more beautiful to me.
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I wholehearted agree with you Ben about MFA sites. I’ve built hundreds and watched them drop to oblivion. I remember the first time I started using AdSense, within a few days I was making almost $100/day. That was a year ago. No matter how many sites I create, the payout still seems to be less than $200/mo for my total AdSense account (with 150 sites!). I obviously didn’t figure out soon enough about Google controlling the purse strings.
I’ll be really interested in your comments about WPMage. If you are really focusing on value added sites, I don’t see that WPMage with duplicate articles that are passed through english to another language and back again to create unique content will pass muster. Although the thought of creating 10,000 backdated pages of keyword specific eBay/Amazon pages on an old domain is thrilling.
I’m one of those guys that should have given up a long time ago but I love the IM business, have a 12 to 16 work ethic but just haven’t put the dots together yet. BUT, I’ve sure learned a LOT. One of the most important lessons: don’t follow the pack.
Brian
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In my opinion the reason they’re banning all the mFA sites is because they’re concerned about losing advertisers and they’re actually making a big push right now to increase advertisers. They have too many publishers and not enough advertisers. So if they ban publishers that are on the lower half of quality, really increase th ebang for the buck the advertisers are getting, make a big promotional push (I recently received a “$100 adwords credit” that everyone always is sent every once in awhile), and make sure that at the very least the initial experience for advertisers is so good they want to keep coming back even if there are a few stages when things don’t go well, google will ultimately make more money despite the fact that they wil be losing money from banning all of those that give them the large revenue stream. Recently I had a site banned and I had just started experimenting with the adsense. Well it wasn’t exactly banned, but it was a free blogger blog that had just started to become really popular and my income just started to increase dramatically and it had been “removed pending review” or whatever where you can hit “restore” blog. Unfortunately review after review and my site doesnt seem like it’s coming back. Unfortunately I put the adsense in the 22 bad spots, the above the title menu bar looking thing and the below the post title without wrapping the words around. interestingly enough the deay I realized that I should remove it, I got the infamouse “restore your blog?” note. I had like 200 pages of content, I had many of them that did not use the keyword in title at all, my blog had been around for 3 years, but unfortunately none of that seemed to matter. Google has already struck down the homo hammer of death via the ban bomb. Crap.
Anyways, plan for the future I gguess is a complete metamorphisis.
Super high quality content on page, use linkbait on every page. Forget about keyword targeting in my posts and only look at keywords AFTER and see if they match my posts. Then I will take all posts that happen to be srelevent enough to keywords and build backlinks to them. Hopfully building backlinks with related anchor text still works, maybe I need more “click here” and “url” and “this’ and “that” anchor texts.
I guess linkbait, listbuilding an affiliate marketing is back. My intention was always to get to that point, but with a lower quality adsense stage that still is in my opinion good quality but not good enough. I guess I still could have that stage and use adbrite or something but man, I hate the inconssistency of promoting an affiliate program, especially if the program goes bad or becomes outdated. More work required. Also, I’m considering being on the adwords side of things since google obviously is trying to increase the advertisers and decrease the publishers.
I’ve had a lot of bad luck. It seems lik everytime I plan something, a complete 180 is needed. I guess I just have to out quality everyone first, then out social them and become an authority through the backdoor via gaming social networks. There’s too many of them not to be able to find one of them, and through that following establish links and search engine presance must be secondary now. Man I guess I’ll have to be stuck in the rat race for longer now. I don’t know what I should do I already used adsense in a site that I’ve worked hard on, but there happens to be some lower quality posts mixed in. Is it too late to remove adsense in every post now if I want a chance at seo dominnce? Google doesn’t like deleted content, but I guess the content may provide information but now it seems like that’s not good enough anymore. bah!
Unfortunately I began migrating the content which is a mixture of super high quality and low quality.
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Ben,
Awesome post–seriously this is the best one I have read in 2 months since I started getting into to this!
I am stuck and I am double guessing everything I do, which is driving me crazy, but what you said has made a huge impact on me:
“”"”You can make it big in this biz, but don’t sit around a table waiting for the scraps that whatever “guru” throws your way. Go out and learn new stuff and work hard and results will come. There are no shortcuts in this biz – the shortcuts that do exist won’t lead you to a stable income.”"”"”
You are totally 100% right-I need to try this and most likely fail before I succeed! I probably took your post differently than what it was intended for, but thank you!
I feel a little bad that you lost those sites, but your strength will not let me feel sorry for you. Now you are going to better and more productive probably more so than you already are–I really appreciated this post.
-Kelly
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Looking at G’s new Keyword tool (beta) at
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
has anyone figured out how to get “exact” like we did with the old version?
If you want actual CPC, you have to select to show that from the “Views” dropdown menu.
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I found “exact” at bottom of left sidebar.
I did a side-by-side comparison (old tool vs new) for one keyphrase. Results are different, to say the least.
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The new Adwords tool (beta) times out. Looks like you now have to set up an Adwords account. Another way now for G to see what you are doing. “Do no evil”, my ass.
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I had something similar happen to me about a year ago. The sites lost all the rank, and later PR. They are still indexed but no significant income anymore.
It was around the time that I reached an average of 100$ a day also.
I havent used the Adsense account since. I had some good sites and I made sites in the meanwhile but I don’t dare to put the adsense code on them!
Fuck them because my sites had good content!
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Nice post, and you are correct in most you said.
Fact is the top ten pages of google is just full of crap.
Go yourself and pick any key-word then do a search. You end up on sites that have no clue what they talk about. If I search for a product, then I want to find a few sites where I can make my choise from to pick a supplier and then buy my product.
With all these crap so called little content sites me as a person looking for information on a product, it is useless for me to find a product in google. Now I end up on a site even if the content is usefull, I still must now go find the product.
For people searching out there it is completely frustrating not to find what they look for. Even if they click on most google ads, they just end up on another crap site.
All of you guys, go take an hour and see for yourself if you trully find what you look for.
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Josh Reply:
June 7th, 2010 at 11:01 am
I have no trouble finding what I’m looking for in google.
The last two products I looked for on google were
churchwarden pipes and Wolfmother’s debut album on vinyl. Go to google, type in churchwarden pipe-the only page on the first page that doesn’t have products in wikipedia. Now type in Wolfmother vinyl-you can find the record in the shopping results, in 2nd, 5th, 6th, and 7th positions.
Like I said, these are just the last two things I looked for and are pretty damn random. What types of things are you having trouble finding on google?
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You said,
“…If in a full year you haven’t made some decent money online, there are some pretty good reasons…”
AND
“…You can make it big in this biz, but don’t sit around a table waiting for the scraps that whatever “guru” throws your way…”
Okay, my question is, then, if I’m not getting the “scraps from the gurus”, and you are advocating that folks NOT tell anyone how they MMO…
then WHERE the hell are we supposed to, as you said,
“Go out and learn new stuff and work hard and results will come.”???
Finding this information (how to MMO) has been the hardest part of all of this! Please point us in a direction.
Thank you for sharing, tho! I found this post invaluable! I’m in the process of modifying the few Adsense sites I’ve got out there now and your advice is spot on. Thanks!
~cj
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After I suffered both SEO affiliate site ban from google and then adwords account ban, I try to make my business models as google-independent as possible.
google webmaster tools, analytics help these bastards watch your business and decide if you live or die in the SE.
getting site deindexed kills ALL the monetization opportunities (except maybe paid traffic) and many people live off these small incomes - that’s what google usually does. So I personally hate these bastards and I also told that any IM model that heavily relies on google traffic is doomed in any way. You can never know what shit to expect from G so scaling this Xfactor model is a dead end in my opinion as well.
I think that XFactor himself killed his adsense business by selling his ebook and sharing this model. It should die eventually, and seems it happens now.
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wow! Im glad I found this blog. Im about to venture to adsense
and autoblog. Ben, thank you for sharing your experience to us.
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Thanks for sharing such a detailed information from your experiences. There are really few people out there who share from there experiences truly. I have become a fan of you. Please keep posting…
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More and more you are seeing the same thing. I have 2 more sites I am going to finish and then go back and take off all the adsense, leave in the affiliate links and build all sites up, then eventually add back adsense. This is great important information. Thanks Ben. I’d like to hear John’s take on this from Xfactor, who created the adsense mastercourse. I sent him an email, wonder what’s up with his sites?
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admin Reply:
August 4th, 2010 at 11:21 am
Lisa, said person has vested interest in teaching people to spit out crap sites — his entire training program is based on people making micro sites. So, I doubt he’s going to give you any real information about what’s going on — he’s simply shooting himself in the foot if he tells people not to make mini sites (and sign up for his course).
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Tom Reply:
September 25th, 2010 at 3:26 pm
I spoke with John a few days ago and he told me to stop playing around with small sites as things have changed.
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So do you think this mass de-indexing still would’ve happened if you had never used Adsense on your sites?
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admin Reply:
August 17th, 2010 at 6:32 pm
defineltly, 100% not. I had sites that were exactly the same that DIDN’T have adsense on. Untouched and ranking fine still…
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Hey Ben
I’m not sure I understand. Does this post apply to all your Infobarrel and Hubpages articles as well? Would it be wise to not even try with those?
Or when you say ‘mini sites’, are you talking about your own websites?
Thanks
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admin Reply:
August 17th, 2010 at 6:34 pm
no, authority sites in the style of infobarrel and hubpages and ezinearticles are fine — google likes those type of sites even though most of them are complete MFA. Mini sites are those little sites with handful of pages (usually 1-5 pages) with little else but content and an in-your-face ad box (or 4) to click on.
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Victor Reply:
August 18th, 2010 at 6:45 am
Okay, thanks for you reply.
Great value that you’re giving away here on this website.
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One point u made that if there is same theme for 30 sites, google would likely ban sites.
Disgree. Because each of many Wordpress themes are used by thousand of peopele & don’t believe they would be banned. Blogger also have same theme used by tons of people.
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Oh, so YOU’RE Ben. I keep hearing about Ben and Grizz, Splork et al. Glad to see I’m on top of things.
I’ve never read Grizz’s blog except the last post - it was too mammoth in size. I read one of those “guru” books you obliquely mentioned and so far things seemed to work, but have stopped with that model thanks to the ruckus of this post.
Sorry to hear about it - and thanks for bothering to post this. Hopefully your trip to Tibet went well and other MMO efforts are really picking up.
(Doubtless!)
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Hi
So sorry to hear what happened to you. You are right it is best not to host all your sites in one place and only put max 30 sites with one hosting company. So should we stay away fron adsense? I have only one site that has adsense and am thinking of taking it off, not making me much anyway.
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admin Reply:
October 18th, 2010 at 11:20 am
Adsense is great. It’s just not a good idea to throw it on a zillion sites — ala the mass site model. It’s better to have 10 big sites than hundreds of small sites. Google wants quality and it’s hard to deliver that when you have a ton of small sites.
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Very interesting, good thing I read this before I started making a bunch more mini-sites. One of my sites just got completely bombed (I had a first page ranking for a top keyword). Fortunately some of my sites are high quality, I put a ton of work into them even building a community of 200+ members, and Google hasn’t de-indexed any of my quality websites, in fact they keep trusting it more and more. So basically my approach now is to treat each new post on my authority sites as a “mini site”.
Thanks for the illuminating look into your experience, my goal is to hit 100 per day soon.
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Great post, will be doing more and more work on authority sites now it seems.
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Ben come back to your blog!! It looks like all the major gurus have abandoned their blog. We’re all dying to know what amazing IM stuff you’re doing now!
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So I think I may be the luckiest sob out here. I bought a script from a dude years ago…. made his mailing list as a result and he sent out a new script that he said was bringing in auto adsense… just a few dollars a site every month (not day!). I took a chance at $250 after debating over doing the micro-niche thing or this because it was completely automated. I’ve since built 38 sites with it and in just over 4 months, I’m almost at $600. He was right in most cases… just a few dollars a month, but 2 sites in particular went huge for me.
So anyway, I’m reading this and thanking my lucky stars that I didn’t take a chance of the micro-niche thing. It was only because I was being lazy and didn’t want to article write… completely automated and unique with maybe a couple hundred sites using this idea only. So yes.. there are still the “shortcuts” out there. I was super lucky to find one and the author said he’s since quit selling the script because it is working so well for himself too (I think he’s sorry he let it go to anyone now).
Reading this, I’m going to nix the idea of building hundreds of these sites now… shoot for $1000 a month and then work on just changing the template of each one so they never get “looked” at… and then focus adsense earnings on real sites.
But damn… I am sorry to hear about your bad luck. Like everyone here I’m sure, I felt an “ugh” in my stomach as I read your story. It’s the fear of everyone using AdSense I guess. It definitely gives us all something to really think about when site building so thanks for sharing.
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shit, same thing happened to me 2 days ago. from $XXX per day to $X.
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I have no respect for google because they have no respect for affiliates, I suggest you find something that works and game google for all their worth!
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This is a very large post and you’re the best blogger ever
!
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So anyway, I’m reading this and thanking my lucky stars that I didn’t take a chance of the micro-niche thing. It was only because I was being lazy and didn’t want to article write… completely automated and unique with maybe a couple hundred sites using this idea only. So yes.. there are still the “shortcuts” out there. I was super lucky to find one and the author said he’s since quit selling the script because it is working so well for himself too (I think he’s sorry he let it go to anyone now).
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Your right….I was making 300-400 a day using ppc to a great site…that………….was very niche specific…(one topic) 10 other pages of ltk that was working better than magic….until it was time to get paid. If your site has great content, but isn’t fresh???????(why i was banned) your adsense account can and more than likely will get banned when you start making serious money….having 10 pages or 30 pages of fluff…might not be worth it or is it…you still have infolinks, chitika, clickbank, cj, and other affiliate programs that you can add to your site, but be careful of a. your expections…b. your site value,,,what’s the point of it being on web…c. your time..our age…(the information age) is our time to venture into space…just make sure your ride isn’t junk…because eventually it will break down…
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So ctr theme is not use anymore…
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admin Reply:
August 25th, 2011 at 2:46 am
God no…
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That was seriously the most direct information i’ve ever read about google adsense.
I’m new to the blogging world and I started my site because I had a passion forthe subjects i want to write about. I didn’t even know Adsense existed until someone mentioned I should put google ads on my site to monetize it.
I would be thrilled to make even a few hundred dollars a month from my site. is there a special formula for people like me that just want to have good content and enough $ from the site just to keep things going.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
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