Art Of Money

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A familiar refrain, but I promise this isn’t my website…although I was compelled to share it.

Here’s my latest take on the death of AdSense or the death of Google, take your pick.

In the past couple weeks I’ve had two websites booted from the index for violating Google’s famed webmaster guidelines. Now I’m not a black hatter or anything like that, the only thing I did that Google didn’t like is that I made pages purely for search engine rankings.

It’s not like they were auto generated crap, each article did add some interesting or valuable content to the topic…I wrote every article from scratch, but yes they were pure SEO, keyword density measured content.

Anyways, I’m not getting into a bitch session here. Google is God, they make the rules and they don’t have to be fair.

There’s a saying that I like that goes something like:

“The golden rule is that who ever has the gold, makes the rules”

True.

Let’s take this problem of mine and turn it around and look at it from Google’s point of view.

They created this AdSense monster that is making them a pile of money, but the side effect is that it is ruining there search engine results pages. So they hire a spam cop with a team of who knows how many human reviewers who go and bounce sites from the index for not providing “real value” [and from my observations this definition is getting more and more aggressive - to the point that almost any site that is purely an affiliate site or AdSense site is a target - no matter what the content].

But wait a minute…where does a vast majority of Google’s revenue come from?

The problem for Google, as I see it is that what’s good for the web and for their search engine, is not going to be good for their bottom line. As they get more aggressive in cleaning spam there is more and more collateral damage [which is what happened to my sites I believe] and they will start to take out more and more of their revenue.

Is that why so many Google insiders are selling their stock?

Then the snowball effect. If the word ever gets out that just having AdSense on your site is a negative ranking factor or makes you vulnerable to being deleted from the index, then webmasters will, en masse, begin to look for alternatives.

This mini rant was inspired by a free e-book that I picked up this morning called…you guessed it: the death of AdSense.

The author blames the death of AdSense as a way for webmasters to make money on the ability of AdWords publishers to set a bid amount of, say $5 for a click from a SERP and $.05 for the same keyword from an website like that kind that I used to make [a content site]. I’m sure that is a factor too, but I think my example is a larger contributor.

I enjoyed the book so I thought I’d like to share it. More and more people seem to be jumping off of the AdSense bandwagon and are beginning to see that making money on the web should be modeled on traditional business structures that have worked for thousands of years.

You know, things like: products, services and customers….I know it seems like crazy talk when you’re in an AdSense induced buzz…but trust me, the hangover is a killer.

Jon Symons
Making all the Internet business mistakes, so you don’t have to.