“Adsense Sites Are Dead” - Oh What Rubbish!

Do you remember those emails which did the rounds which said “Adsense Websites Are Dead!”?

Think what you want, but my reaction was and still is “Oh What Rubbish!”

What those so called experts were trying to say is that the days of automated keyword generated sites is over!

The search engines are treading that slow path to artificial intelligence and one day they’ll be able to recognize a good site from a bad one.

But that day is still a long way off, and the search engines still rely on a multi-layered strategy (which includes humans) to keep their search index free of junk sites.

Google is currently blazing the trail and their primary strategy is to digitize as many library reference books as they can, not to save these texts for posterity or to make information readily available to everybody.

No, their goal is quite simple - they want a huge database of information that we all accept as “good information” to use as a control for testing all their future search algorithms. By analyzing all this data they can determine what kinds of words appear ‘naturally’ (and how they are used) on a typical page from thousands of different topics.

As new technology creates faster and more capable computers, so Google can create ever more complex website ranking algorithms.

My personal belief is that the closer you build a website to the structure and layout of a good reference book, the better your chances of being well ranked in Google.

What does this mean?

1. There’s a phrase doing the rounds called ‘VEO’ which stands for Visitor Enhanced Optimization. The theory of VEO is that you should build websites with your visitor in mind, not the search engines.I say take it a step further…We have become conditioned to accept the layout and structure of library reference books as “official” or “the truth”, so match the structure of your website to that of any reference book, for example a site on houseplants would include:
    - intro
    - typical growth cycle
    - light
    - temperature
    - humidity
    - watering
    - feeding
    - potting (repotting)
    - pruning
    - training
    - propagation
    - disease
    - houseplant growing database

   Include all this and you can’t help but get bookmarks and links from other sites - it just happens, you couldn’t stop it if you tried… The secret is to get them slowly at first and then more rapidly as your site gets more and more traffic.

2. Stop optimizing pages for only one keyword phrase - Google has started to compare webpage layout to a typical page in a library book. They like to see keyword phrases and related synonyms used “naturally”.

   For example:House plants, indoor garden, indoor plants, pot plants, potted plants, indoor gardeners, plants suitable for growing indoors, palms, orchids, bromeliads and cactus could all be included on a page that introduces the topic of house plants.I don’t think on page SEO as we know it is ever going to die altogether, it just means you need to include more terms to make a keyword optimized page appear “normal”.

So where does this leave all of us who buy ready made “Adsense” sites?

Firstly you need to make some changes to the layout of your pages - websites with near identical layouts will be filtered. Not deleted or banned, just filtered…

Your changes don’t have to be drastic (bear in mind that just rewriting a few phrases in the articles may not enough):

• Change the visual layout (I like to use the same visual layout on all sites in a themed portal, so I make the layout unique).Human reviewers are more likely to can your website based on having a near identical look to other wbsites than for having near identical articles…
• Use different titles for each article - this changes the text on the main menu on every page.
• Change the paragraph and sentence structure of the PLR articles.The first paragraph is the one that will most likely trigger a human reviewer’s memory of another similar article.
• Change the Keyword density.
• Include related keywords and synonyms.
• Include new unique content.

You’ll read a lot about “Authority Sites” over the next few months, there’s no great mystery to this, any website can grow into an authority site.

My interpretation of an authority site is one which gets linked to because of its quality content (which could be unique or copious or preferably a mixture of both).

If you want an example, I will cite my favorite one - about.com - Which is a mega portal that is broken up into themed sub-domains. Each sub-domain is broken down into sub-folders which contain webpages on different relevant and related topics (this is a great way of getting all your main keywords into the URL’s of your webpages).

My interpretation of a portal is a site which links to various sites on different topics. In my case, all the sites linked to are my own…

When creating portals, I used to think you could bung all your websites under one roof (the portal), but now I think you have to create themed portals.

For example, you could create a “Gardening” portal which could cover stuff like:

• lawns (sub-domain)
  • lawn mowers (sub-folder)
  • lawn watering systems (sub-folder)
• houseplants (sub-domain)
• herb gardens (sub-domain)
• landscaping (sub-domain)
  • landscape decoration (sub-folder)
  • landscape lighting (sub-folder)

Building your portal like this will give it depth and get you on your way to building an authority site.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking search engine optimization is dead!

Things like offsite SEO are still very much alive, and activities such as getting back links is still important, especially for direct traffic.

You have to look at link building with two points in mind:

1. When your site is new you will get most of your traffic from links you place on other websites, be they article links or strategic reciprocal links. Reciprocal linking has gone full circle back to where the search engines virtually ignore them and so link pages are becoming more valuable as resources pointing to other good websites. So much so that I wouldn’t be surprised if the more advanced search engines like Google took note of who you link to (even through a reciprocal link) and reward you on the amount of traffic you send to that website assuming the website was of a similar or related theme. Why do I say this - because Google is after improved user satisfaction - any website which Google sends visitors to which maintains or improves their reputation in the mind of the visitor, is going to get a pat on the back from Google. In other words, stop linking on the basis of PR or other SEO factors and start linking to websites which are of comparable or better quality than your website. Don’t link only to high traffic websites (it’s unnatural), link to good websites (just make sure you have high traffic sites in the mix).Another point worth considering is to make sure you use different link text (including your domain name on its own).

   Just use your common sense with this - you’re in it to make money, probably through Adsense so find the balance between good earnings and good linking…

2. As your site grows in popularity so more people will start bookmarking and linking to your site. This increase in diverse one way links will start your steady climb in the search engine rankings (not just your main page but all of the pages in your website).

The beauty of websites which climb the rankings in this manner is they are virtually impervious to search engine algorithm changes. Which means less radical swings in earnings

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