Copyright
© April 2, 2006 by Mike Banks Valentine
I
recently read a Christian Science Monitor article
called
"Google's Hidden Payroll" which looks
at the economic
incentive for tech-savvy third world entrepreneurs
to get
into publishing extensive web content and enter
the Google
Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) game. What
should
be obvious is that clicks on Adsense ads will be
worth far
more to site publishers in low-wage countries than
they are
to someone in high rent, high wage cities like San
Francisco,
Los Angeles, Manhattan or Chicago.
http://snipurl.com/Made_for_adsense
(CS Monitor Article)
That
article made it appear that the entire Adsense program
was a huge underground economy, when in fact that
program
made it truly viable for legitimate publishers of
niche
content to do very well for themselves for the first
time.
Those legitimate publishers had previously earned
money
through participation in affiliate programs selling
products
and services related to their site topics - but
found that
Adsense brought in far more consistent income than
affiliate
programs.
Major,
high traffic sites like About.com and even
metropolitan newspapers have adopted Adsense as
a viable
advertising vehicle on content sites. Many enthusiastic
hobbyists and other content rich sites learned that
their
expertise filled sites could earn substantial income
and give
them incentive to continue writing about their passion.
Things went south only when opportunists saw their
chance to
sell get-rich-quick-on-Adsense ebooks and software
to the
unitiated.
The
bad news is that Google Adsense and YPN programs
incent
those who know how to post web content, to put up
massive
numbers of web pages, with maximum numbers of "ad
units" per
page in hundreds of thousands of web pages in the
hope that
visitors will find those pages and click on those
Adsense or
YPN ad units and earn the site publisher money for
each
click. The Adsense and YPN teams must somehow beef
up their
site review teams to filter out the abusers. Below
is a
WebmasterWorld discussion forum on the topic:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/13071.htm
The
ad clicks earn the same money no matter what country
hosts the pages they appear on. Computer literate
and tech
savvy programmers in Delhi or even Jalamabad for
that matter,
who can afford to buy a $7.95 domain name, host
it at $9.95
monthly and get internet access for another $9.95
monthly can
be in the made for Adsense content business for
as little as
$30 monthly.
If
talented programmers in India have even a basic
understanding of search engine ranking and can dynamically
insert a bit of javascript provided by Google to
thousands of
pages of content, they can earn substantial additional
income
by third world standards. Even one third of what
a US
publisher might find attractive extra income becomes
very
attractive to an overworked and underpaid tech worker
in many
parts of the world.
Because
the clicks on those ads earn the same money for
the
New York publisher as for the New Delhi publisher,
the
potential income to the New Delhi webmaster is worth
far more
in time spent to get well ranked content pages full
of
Adsense ads seen. They also have higher incentive
for fraud -
having others click on ads which appear on their
sites or
having friends and relatives in different locations
do the
same - potentially doubling or trebling income for
a
programmer in India.
Again
from the CS Monitor story (linked above):
"Google
is actively looking for those kinds of sites,"
and
removes ads from them, explains Eric GiguЏre, author
of "Make
Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising
Program."
Google
created this scene by offering substantial incentive
to post web content, often repeated web content
and even
garbage web content in order to display contextual
ads. A
new term has even been coined for web sites put
up solely to
display contextual ads - Made for Adsense or MFA
sites. It
has been discussed in some forums that Yahoo Publisher
Network is filtering ads from appearing on sites
outside the
US.
There
is now software available to create article sites
(I
won't link to it here and contribute to their popularity),
which encourages webmasters to establish article
submission
and archiving sites. There are dozens of software
packages
available that make it easy to set up domains full
of
templated article pages that come with a database
file full
of tens of thousands of articles for about $100.
The reason?
Posting thousands of pages of articles in the hopes
of
attracting visitors who will click on Adsense or
YPN ads.
The
easy money leeches are lured out of their slime
to suck
the blood of passersby when something as useful
as Adsense
comes along. Forget that it now takes almost a year
for a
new content domain to rank well - even if that webmaster
creates a niche site full of truly worthwhile and
useful
content. Forget that most existing recognized article
sites
display terms of use that restrict use of articles
per domain
to under 50 per year. Forget that these templated
domains are
using thousands of articles against author copyright
and
article archive terms of use.
Gullible
and lazy webmasters buy templated and IDENTICAL
site
creation packages. They are lured by visions of
riches, only
to be disappointed with no traffic to their Made
For Adsense
sites full of content already posted widely across
the web.
Usually, the well established article archives,
like
EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com will post articles
first
and will rank best for that content because those
sites are
already highly ranked and well known as article
archives.
In
a wildly convoluted spin of logic, a new Adsense
blacklist
site has been launched which purports to help Adsense
site
owners filter out advertising from other Made for
Adsense
sites from their own Adsense sites, thus somehow
increasing
their own income. That is difficult to comprehend,
but some
Adsense publishers claim it helps increase the click
value of
ads if they block Adwords ads from competing Made
for Adsense
sites from appearing on their own sites.
Judging
by all the online ebooks about getting rich with
Adsense, all the templated and prepackaged sites
being sold
to webmasters to put up domains full of identical
content
with Adsense, and all the buzz in the forums about
made for
Adsense content sites - you'd think that Google
would be busy
looking for ways to limit the inevitable content
pollution.
The
made for Adsense sites are easy to spot, they usually
sport logos or hypertext links back to the software
site in
the form of "Powered by Article Monster"
or "Plug-in-Riches"
kind of links (these are not real names).
Hopefully
Google and YPN will begin filtering those and any
other membership or "Private Label Rights"
content abusive
sites to keep web content pollution levels lower
in Google
search engine results pages.
Mike
Banks Valentine blogs on Search Engine
developments from http://RealitySEO.com
and can be contacted for ethical SEO work at: http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm
He runs web content distribution site at: http://Publish101.com
