Yesterday was the best Adsense revenue day I have ever had. It felt good to beat my previous days’ high by 7 bucks. It was bittersweet as well. Many of the sites that did extraordinarily good were keyword portal spam sites. I have MSN to thank for that. I am being rewarded for work that I did 6-9 months ago. If I had continued to keep building those sites I might be figuring out which 37″ LCD-TV I’d like to purchase today.
But I know it was a fluke. I also know it is just a matter of time before keyword sites are de-indexed from MSN as well. When is the big question. Portal sites were supposedly left for dead around 6 months ago when the gurus were saying to build content sites. I followed them into their promise-land. I built content blogs. Those sites didn’t do much yesterday.
Gurus are useless. They exist only to create a trend and come visit with their hat extended.
But see I’m not a realist. I still believe in a happy place and feel like I should try to add value to the web. I like things clean. Messy is not for me. So I tried to get clean and build decent properties that people would want to visit more than once. And honestly it hasn’t gotten me very far. And I have begun to understand things a little better and frankly it sucks. Let me explain…
This blog has taught me alot in that if you put your own mark into a site, good things can happen. I have quite a few people reading this thing. Surprising to me most of all, but it tells me that if you take the time to personalize your site, people will come back. These postings are not PLR. I don’t outsource my grind via elance. Google has figured it out. They have indexed this site far and wide.
But it takes time to write the rambles. I have another site much like this one about bike racing called Tour Squad. It takes time but the search engines love it. Google especially.
Now, I have built tons of other blogs using Rapid Niche Websites (great tool) or modifying WordPress templates to suit my needs. I populate the blogs via PLR using RSS2B4 to drip a post every week or so. I re-write the bloody articles so they won’t be part of the dreaded “duplicate content” we all now fear.
It doesn’t matter. These sites go nowhere. It’s like Google knows that I am a fraud. I have no interest in these sites. The topics couldn’t interest me less. Google knows. But when I write a post here or on Tour Squad, ol’ G perks up and takes notice.
It’s a bummer because these PLR sites do not take alot of time to build. I already have the articles. I can grab a few links. The sites look good. But honestly, they are crap. Nothing more than a different kind of spam.
The reason is you can’t realistically take the 10 packs of articles each month, build a site and personalize them. You don’t have that kind of time. 100 sites a year. That is a lot of sites to work. So they become just another site to rot on the net looking for an Adsense click as the top 10 search result becomes a faded memory. But what other choice do you have?
Anyway, I have spent the last couple of weeks trying to polish a turd. I have a keyword portal spam site that gets great MSN traffic. I wrote 20 articles from scratch about the topic. I designed a completely new template to build the portal site with. I redesigned a WordPress template to look like the portal template. I also redesigned the templates used with InfoGoRound’s site builder to look the same as well. New graphics. Pictures for Adsense. The works.
So the 20 articles becomes the “home” of this site. The portal site that MSN loves doesn’t change but to the site user becomes a separate directory. The blog will be used to drive traffic to the beast. I will be very curious to find out if this cludge works because I have about 5 others I would like to rebuild like this.
So the experiment is can a former keyword portal spam slum be re-engineered and become a useful uptown web property? Can MSN and Google both come to love this site?
I’ll let you know.
6 responses so far ↓
Dan // Jul 26, 2006 at 3:51 am
I’d tried this before and sometimes it works sometimes it doesnt…dont know why.
I dont know if I understood right but if you are going to change things, you might end up with some 404 urls, so it is important to have a “good looking” custom 404 page so that the spiders can look at something and find links to your “new” website. Also real visitors could see this 404 custom page if your old URLS keep showing in the MSN results…
Splork // Jul 26, 2006 at 3:58 am
Thanks for the tip. I shouldn’t have any 404 errors. Nothing changed as far as the search engines are concerned. I wouldn’t have re-built if MSN couldn’t see what they already have indexed. So for instance if MSN saw:
h2tp://site.com/sidewalk
Then that’s what they’ll still see after the change.
Thanks for the heads up on that though.
Charles Heflin // Aug 17, 2006 at 9:20 am
Google is leading the trend in Latent Semantic Indexing, a nifty algorithm that closely mimics human thought.
It is not perfect yet, but it is able to determine if your heart is in the content.
keyword or keyword phrase centric web pages are easily spotted as not so relevant in the eyes of G. Good ol Y is jumping on the bandwagon too… In an effort to maintain marketshare you can bet that MSN (aka Billy Boy) is looking into LSI as well.
The moral of the story… If you are not interested in your topic, your content will stand out like a sore spammy thumb.
If you know your market then your content will include other words that are commonly associated with your core page keyword or keyphrase as will other pages in your site.
If those industry specific associations are missing then G’s fancy algo will drop you in the serps because they think that you don’t know WTF you’re talking about.
Pretty slick, eh?
All the best,
Charles
Splork // Aug 17, 2006 at 12:46 pm
Yea it’s slick alright. But making a buck is going to get even harder. I may just start cutting grass and open up a lemonade stand for extra scratch. At least those rules don’t constantly change.
But you’re right. And even CD is right, even though they ruined their premise by favoring money over the message. You have to build a site or sites, that you care about and you can put your personality into. You can’t do that with 70-100 article sites. Or at least I don’t see how you could find the time.
I see how all this works just with this blog. Google just *knows* that these ramblings are mine. It has indexed every single post. I rank high for words I didn’t even realize I was targeting. And now if I could just focus this site more I could get even more SE traffic I suppose. But if I did that G would probably get the feel I was faking it.
Thanks for reading
Blaz Banic on Internet marketing // Aug 19, 2006 at 9:51 am
This is so true!
I have so many sites and blogs I almost lost track of them. 90% are PLR and they did great with MSN a while ago and some still do, but only two of them do great in Google… you guessed it… I write my own articles and love the subject.
With one of them it’s so easy. I go to Overture, look for keywords, write a real article around that keyword and in a very short time I’m getting traffic from Google for that keyword.
But when I do the same with my PLR blogs… nothing. Not even on page 10. I rewrite my content but still nothing. Google really got smart.
MSN isn’t so “stupid” after all too. I set up some blogs (5 to be exact), each blog with unique content and targeting only one keyword. They all linked back to other blogs and were on the same topic of course. Guess what… MSN picked them up in less than 10 days and 3 were in the #1 position for their keyword and 2 were in positions #5 and #7. The traffic was great and Adsense was singing
But this beautiful story only lasted about two months. Then all of a sudden all five sites were deindexed. Gone. And I still couldn’t get them back in so I believe they’re banned. I’m not sure what exactly triggered that as I wrote my own content and it was pretty good (I did the research and know a lot about the subject anyway). Looks like the structure of the five sites in the network gave it all away as SPAM. Maybe.
The funny thing was that almost the same day they got deindexed from MSN, I started to get traffic from Google! Go figure. It wasn’t anything close to what I was getting from MSN though as in Google the sites were on the second and third page. Today even Google stopped bringing traffic there.
It was a fun experiment but I guess there’s no exchange for real, honest work. OK, enough rambling
Good posts! Have a great day!
Splork // Aug 19, 2006 at 2:10 pm
Hey Blaz. Good commment. You are experiencing exactly what is happening to me. On of my best blogs I do pretty much what you do, I go into my web stats and grab a keyword that was used to find my site, and write another article. Google spiders and indexes that baby in about 2 days. My PLR sites aren’t doing so great…unless I really add my own personality to the site. I think alot of this has to do with me not caring enough about the site to do the necessary things like collecting backlinks and continuing to write and submit articles…the search engine notices that. Seems like Google can figure out if a site has my personality or if the site is just built with stale PLR articles.
Thanks for reading.
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