Adsense Portal Sites 2k6 – What Really Happened?

Remember when everyone was building “portal” sites for quick and easy Adsense income? Contextual advertising was the “in” thing with newbie and experienced internet marketers alike. This was before John Reese made  the term “virtual real estate” popular and you had folks like Armand Morin charging $2000 for a “make money with Adsense” seminar series and Ken Giddens with a $500+/mo. private membership site focused mainly on the Adsense gold rush.

So what happened? And why do I give a shit?

Well… it’s really an easy explanation but indulge me if I take a bit to get there…

Well, I don’t really care whether other people are still making money with contextual ads. The Adsense hey day came and went and I’ll venture to guess that most people got smacked, slammed and violated for two simple reasons:

• Little to no linking
• Duplicate content

Oh yeah, and smart pricing and commercial intent / conversion really hurt a lot of keywords. Oh and they used crappy keyword spaces. And a lot of other things that don’t help my story here. So let’s focus on these two.

These days MOST people know that even if they are going to try and build en-masse they need to have links. The naive will try and do it with just social sites like squidoo and hubpages and the like. Don’t get me wrong, this does have a positive effect but since the “social slap” the days of just blasting bookmarking sites and posting a few lenses and wet paint walls are past us.

The internet marketing market is like a mini-economy. There are cycles. There are ups and downs and things come in and out of favor. Before Adsense the “big” thing everyone taught was affiliate marketing physical products. Infoproducts were certainly a substantial niche but crack open your best selling IM ebook at the time and it was more about Commission Junction than it was about Clickbank.

So at this point we’ve been through physical product affiliate marketing, adsense, niche information products (Underacheivers), Adsense+Clickbank, ecommerce, and now continuity programs and CPA marketing. These are all really evergreen topics that come in and out of favor depending on the next batch of newbies that cycle through the IM world every 6 months or so.

Want to become a guru? Pick one of these and put together a half way decent product that describes how to make money with one of these techniques and sprinkle in some concrete strategies for doing it like Article marketings, PPC, or organic SEO with environmentally friendly backlinks that don’t deplete the ozone layer.  That’s what I did with Long Tail Cash and you had ‘old school’ gurus like Michael Campbell and Phil Wiley saying it was one of (if not THE) best affiliate marketing courses out there.

By the way… I am updating Long Tail Cash and if you have version 1 you’ll automatically receive an upgrade to the super ninja don’t leave home without it LTC version 2. Ok, enough blatant promo on my own blog… back to the show.

Here’s where all this rambling begins to make sense. Promise.

Dan Thies just released the 2009 version of SEO FastStart. There are lots of really good SEO courses out there but Dan’s wins the lean and mean “best of” search engine optimization ebook out there.

And in fine Aaron Wall fashion SEO Fast Start is both a floor wax and a dessert topping. There’s a blog with additional content linked to relevant sections of the book. Oh, did I mention that Dan’s SEO course is free? Check it out. After you read the rest of this of course.

So I am browsing through the 2009 edition and my mind is really at the beach. Why I am not already at the Outer Banks already is beyond me but that’s another story and I’ll be fixing that problem in a day or so. Anyway I am flipping through the PDF and a little comment on page 96 about duplicate content hits me. I remember that somewhere I have a draft of an article and I don’t think I ever did anything with it… hell, I don’t think I told anyone about it. Well, maybe a few people. But not you — and that’s just not fair.

So here’s the stunning insight… duplicate content is bad. There I said it. Oh, I bet I don’t mean it the way you think I do. Seriously.

Here’s the thing – reprinting an article on 100 different websites is not really an issue. That form of duplicate content is fine. We continue to build sites using article distribution service content and feeds and as long as your internal linking is solid and you spend some effort on backlinks the world is a happy place.

No… the duplicate content that I am talking about is within the same site. Dum dum dum. Which brings me back to Adsense portals.

Your typical Adsense portal back in the day just after TrafficEqualizer was a 150-1000 page website with either article or scraped content (or both). The site was a “ball of yarn” – every page linked to every other page usually. Some of the programs out there were a little more sophisticated and they used a “loose ball of yarn” and had a page only link to a handful- maybe half – of the other pages randomly.

So the typical portal site had Adsense on every page and 100 or so links either in a sidebar or a footer. On every page. Oh, and the “content” at best was some PLR article of 500 words or less (at best).

And here’s the story… sites like this sucked for a lot of reasons but the one almost never talked about and still repeated to this day is duplicate content. Let’s look at some math. This won’t hurt a bit. Promise.

On average portal sites target long tail keyword terms. Let’s say the average term is 3 words. So a link list of 100 links is 600 words. Plus the header and footer terms (if any). Now you have the “unique” special content for the page. That’s 500 words. So this page generated wonder has 1100 words or so of which 600 are duplicated on every other page on the damn site.

Now I don’t care what fancy shingling algorithms Google may or may not have. What PhD level latent semantic dodecahedron site analysis they do. This is a size 21 footprint.

And here’s the funny thing – it’s happening again.

Your average internet marketing doesn’t build or generate HTML/PHP websites anymore. They use WordPress. But same same. As the tides of the IM sands shift there’s a glut of WordPress site building courses out there showing you how to make money with CPA/affiliate blogs. Now this is fine for what it is but let’s get one thing straight – it’s hardly new.

These are Adsense “content” sites just dressed up for 2009 and beyond. Plain and simple. Hell, I am the farthest thing from a guru and even I was telling people to swap out Adsense blocks and test affiliate programs/banners eons ago. Oh, and if you’re going to do this and build a VRE/minisite empire, use OpenX ads to serve the offers. You’ll thank yourself later.

So the Niche Portal Builders and Directory Generators and yada yada page generators have been replaced with WordPress plugins like Caffeinated Content.

But ye who doesn’t learn from the past is destined to repeat it… and on most of these sites the template used sucks putty balls.

Besides not being optimized for conversion (blogs with cold traffic usually SUCK conversion-wise without working the layout template) these sites are falling into the old sidebar trap again.

What do you see on a blog post? A video or some other snippet of content in the main area and a sidebar with “recent posts” and a blog roll, etc. Lots of these sites are showing the titles of the last 20 blog posts. That 100+ words duplicated on every page. Plus the blog roll and the header/footer nav.

It’s the same problem all over again. On-site duplicate content.

Now, is this always a problem? No. And it’s easy to fix – just don’t do it. Use sitemaps and crawl pages and more proper pyramid layouts and you’ll be fine. If you want to go ninja use image maps like Andy Jenkins and the ecommerce folks use on their store navigation to keep the dup content down.

Ok, so that’s it. Part of the problem with “internet marketing” is that the half life of the people in this little game is shorter than a tse tse fly. There is little/no collective memory EXCEPT for direct marketing which has been around since the dawn of time anyway.

If you’re building lots of minisites these days in an attempt to make a few bucks a month from each one all the more power to you. If it’s working, keep it up and start to think about scaling it up more. That means hire people to do the grunt work for you. If you’re struggling to get your pages to stick in the engines look at your linking – or your lack there of. And if big G keeps telling you that there is a lot of “similar results” or you just can’t get the majority of your pages indexed despite doing a double flip ping in the pike position… look at your header, sidebar, and footer and get most of the shit off the template.

‘Nuff said.

p.s. Andy Jenkins did a bitchin’ video on on-page duplicate content for the first Stompernet launch. I have a link somewhere but need to dig it out from the bookmarks. Oh, and you really should grab a (free) copy of Dan Thies’ SEO Fast Start.