Dear Rich,
At http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/2007/10/16/pay-per-click-party-over you mentionned that you wanted some feedback from publishers having had probems with adult content, and the encreasing difficulty for announcers to get decent price clicks with Adwords .
I am at the other side of the problem. Google told me to go with adsense :
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Google adsense in the beginning was a very good program for small publishers to make a living. But it also changed much for those creating sites, since when Google gives you some share of the pie, you want’s to feed the beast to get a bigger share. I am an African Art dealer, and first had only one site http://www.african-antiques.com/ that contained news about my pieces, fairs I participated, and auctions I was interested in.
When the Google adsense program was introduced I thought this would be an interesting complement to pay some bills.
I discovered wordtracker and since some words where not related on African Art I decided after a time to buy a new domain name to put all these keywords with High KEI, because there was to many unrelated content I wanted to make. Some of them where adult and even if the content of my page wasn’t, you try to give some content that is usefull for your readers, and get the rewarding clicks.
I created the http://www.hot-business.com/ site and was happy to see in a short laps of time thousands of visitors and a decent earning from google with 50 dollars each day, and results on top the results for most of my keywords. It seemed that I understood quite well the SEO algorythms they where using, and implementation of the “description” metatags, that in that time was the same as the Title.
One day I received an email from Google warning me that some keywords (like LESBIAN or PAmela Anderson Video) on my site where adult and that this was against the “rules of the game”, even if on these page the content was not really offending, and that adult related advertisers Adwords announcements appeared.
But the next day both my sites where completly without any ads anymore, not only the offending pages. After a few emails with the Google guys, I explained them that I would remove all the offending pages from the African Art site, but that even if I was not happy with it I would not do so for the http://www.hot-business.com/ site. I also thought it would be better to allow adult content, even if a warning could be used in some place.
After a while I noted that since I did not have to take care to keep the site “family clean” I added more adult content, but a side effect was that my website also was not indexed properly anymore, even if the amount of visitors was not so high anymore it was not so fun as before to create content for it, and I was obliged to find some new advertisers to pay a bit the bills like the bangbus productions .
I was first very angry on Google because they did not care in my eyes about the real content there visitors wanted,leaving the most relevant keywords without genuine content and even if you made a decent website with real content it could be removed from the index because it doesn’t follow the commercial policy of Google, even if they say this isn’t. This had nothing to do with the algorythms Google used, but with “moral insights”.
Last years and months I created new sites to please Google, but always hand picked my subjecs and content, so that the articles are interesting readings for humans. Quite well indexed sites like http://www.diamondsnews.com/, http://www.business-foreclosure.com/ , http://www.newsweather.info/ or http://www.filmclips.be/ , but with the new mix of news with video and blogs the results are diluting, and I don’t have the same amount of visitors as in the past and my dayly income turns around 30$, not worth so much the efforts to create more content. Also I have the feeling Google is even cheated more as previously. I know the existance of many software you can install on blogs that automate the creation of useless sites that are not recognised as such by the algorithms.
Even the so called semantic indexing doesn’t work well in my eyes. IT is very easy to cheat, since if is very easy to couple to concepts even if they are different. It is not difficult to create eg. a page combinig to concepts that have nothing to do with each other like’”diamonds” and “weather” to make the two concept relate to each other e.g. Zeppelin diamond weather .
I have the idea that there still is much work to do to enhance the results. At this moment older pages often get more weight than recent ones, but in many cases this delivers outdated information. Also the search engines have no clue how to find local information or determine what site is providing the best results.
The Web 2:0 results are often not interesting, and are once again abused by unscrupulous webmaster, to become “authority sites” without real content, and trying to add spam comments on blogs to get backlinks to spammy site.
I think I am against automation, even if with the tagging things seems to get in a better direction than before I am nostalgic. Where is the time of the Yahoo directory…? Where is the love for something else than money.
I don’t see any solutions for this in the near future.
David Norden
