Google VS The Blackhatters

A pre-amble to Making Money with Adsense

There is no doubt that Google has created a dominant search engine and the brains behind the funny name deserve credit. But it could be said that the blackhatters deserve a lot of credit as well. Without the blackhatters Google would never have developed into the engine that it has become.

Relevance is everything when it comes to search engines. When someone asks a question your results had better be relevant or no one will use your service. Next - you have to be able to provide the relevant information in order of "most" relevant to "least" relevant. Users will leave never to return if you keep giving them articles that mention their keyword in passing. Users want exact information and search engines have to provide it. Google is the best at doing this, hands down.

Google's strength and it's weakness is the pagerank system. By counting links pointing to a site, assessing the relevancy of the links and then the authority of the links Google is able to decide which site is the most relevant for any given keyword. In practice this system is fairly reliable when dealing with small/medium sites in niches with low to no advertising. There is little incentive to game the system in these niches. The accuracy of pagerank begins to breakdown as you get into niches that have a lot of advertising dollars to go around. If a person can make money doing something then there is immediate incentive to maximize ones earnings. In some cases this can be done by legitimate means and in some cases not. One could argue that the moment anyone does anything to maximize earnings - legitimate or otherwise - that the person has just gamed the system.

By using PR Google created a successful system for ranking pages on it's index. They also laid out the game plan for creating a successful site in the process. To get high rankings in the serp's you need backlinks. You now need to meet other factors as well but PR is still a major asset to have in order to climb the serp's. By this very fact Google created the Black-hatters.

From the moment PR was introduced Black-hatters have been manipulating it in order to make money online. Adsense income has always been a favorite target for them as it is easy to earn and at one point, early on, it was incredibly profitable.

The Golden Age of Adsense

In the beginning all you needed to rank well in Google was to have the most backlinks. A few quick thinkers realized that the quickest way to do this was to create thousands of sites and send a link from each over to your adsense site with the "consolidated student loan" ads plastered on it. These guys had the field to themselves and made a lot of money. Eventually greed and competition took over and woke Google up. Suddenly all the popular searches were ranking really crappy irrelevant sites and Google had a problem.

To fix this Google devises PR and gives more weight to older sites with higher PR.

The black-hatters changed stride and created thousands of sites to send backlinks to hundreds of other sites who's new PR ranking was then used to send hundreds of links to the adsense sites and the money kept rolling in. No problem. Google what else ya got?

Google replied - Links must be from relevant sites. No problem. The black-hatters just created thousands of spammy relevant keyword stuffed sites. The game was back on.

Google pulling out it's hair countered with relevant anchor text and only 1 vote per C-class IP. Ah ha... take that.

"Child's play" said the black-hatter revving up his comment spam generator, "I can have a thousand links by noon".

Fortunately for Google site owners came to their rescue on this one and deleted the spam and started using captchas and filter programs. Who knew people actually hated spam?

For the first time black-hatters realized they were up against more than just Google. The citizenry was catching on and getting tired of their tricks.

The path to accessing free usable links has now become narrow indeed. Some hearty souls are still fishing for them with the aid of trackback spamming software. At the moment most blogs that allow trackbacks don't have the no-follow tag on them. This will change but it's the reason there are so many scraping sites online sending trackbacks. The black-hatters are taking advantage of the trackback weakness and have resorted to snippet scraping to put Google in a bind.

Google has a problem. While the official word is that duplicate content is a no no and will be penalized the reality is that this has been hard to put into practice.

Who are the biggest scraper sites? The "news and Information services" are. How many newspapers pull the same story off of the wire services? Where does CNN and it's cohorts get their news? All the media giants have huge scrapper sites and their posts are all over the place. So is Google going to call the "New York Times" a spammer?

Nope and this is why scraper sites are so prevalent now. If the major news outlets can list story snippets linking back to the source then why can't everybody. Why isn't my small site allowed to post snippets of information the same way? The answer is you are. Google has no way of knowing if you are legitimately providing your readers with useful info or if you are just a spam site scraping content.

This practice will continue until the community comes to Googles aid again and adds the no-follow to trackbacks.

Most black-hatters have taken a different approach. The days of a free lunch with adsense is over but there is still money to be made. Enough in fact to cause them to bite the bullet and just buy links. This is Google's Achilles heel.

As long as Google relies on backlinks to rank PR they can be manipulated by people willing to simply pay high PR sites for a link. The recent crackdown on paid links has not stopped this practice - it has simply pushed it underground. Visit the Link sales page on Digital Point and you can see what a booming business this is. The people who were buying the ads and reviews with textlinkads and PPP were black-hatters buying your PR. Google's latest slap was to put a stop to that - they weren't trying to take away a source of income from people - they just wanted you to use the no-follow tag. By using the no-follow you would eliminate the black-hats and be left with buyers who really want to place an ad on your site or have you review them. We will see how many legitimate buyers there really are - I'm guessing not so many.

Another thing the black-hat community has done is set up and join Blog networks. These are set up by purchasing expired domains that still have PR. You can join these networks and gain access to hundreds of real blogs with existing PR and post your own content on them. This allows you to send highly optimized anchor text links to your main sites. Gaming the system - you bet.

Google has not met this problem yet and faces a challenge in trying to eliminate it. They can't do away with pagerank as they need a way to rank relevancy. Pagerank depends on links and links can be bought without a trail. They can't insist that all links be no-followed or their system will fail - they need do follow links in order to rank pages.

How Google will handle this is anyones guess but I suspect that the days of site wide links are numbered. Google uses Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to determine just how relevant content links embedded in articles are and now place the most weight on these links. This doesn't negate paid links it just causes people to do more work for them. From Google's point of view site wide links that do-follow can be paid links although blogrolls usually aren't. It's doubtful that penalties will be handed out for these type of links but it's assured that they won't have much weight in the future and will probably be eliminated. If you want to send PR to a friend it's best to do it in a relevant article - relevant to both sites that is.

This brings us up to date as far as the Goggle/Black-hatter tug of war goes but I just want to touch on the effect this history has had on Adsense.

There may still be people who are making outrageous sums of money with it but no where near as many people or as much money as two years ago. Most serious Adsense sites can still make a good dollar but you need a small army of them to approach large earnings. In my case I have been able to cut down on the number of blogs needed by creating blogs that are multi-niche relevant and can target more keywords from the same blog.

The good news is that there are a lot less serious players in the game now. Sure you see the ads all over the net but in reality only a very small amount of sites really know what they are doing and actively pursue Adsense. Most of you just slapped it somewhere on your site and wonder why it doesn't make you more than a few cents a day - if that.

Those that have pursued Adsense have learned to use Google's rules to their advantage. Give Google exactly what they want and they respond by giving you high listings in the search results. The decrease in competition has meant that there are less people vying for the high paying keywords and what's more it's a fairer fight as everybody has to play by the same rules. To rank well you can't just have the most relevant high PR links. You also have to have the most relevant content and not just on one page but your whole site has to show relevancy. LSI has allowed people who can provide relevant useful content to out rank the people who have deep pockets and buy links. There are a lot of low PR sites dominating popular keyword listings - something that didn't happen in the past. You still need links but not as many if your content rocks. Just look at wikipedia.

I have written this post to highlight the fact that Adsense is wide open to those who want to pursue it. It is more accessible to everyone now than it has been in the past. The black-hatters don't dominate the scene anymore primarily due to the work involved, the cost and the fact that they have found other easier methods to make money - primarily in the social network arena.

In my next post I will outline the basic system for earning revenue with Adsense. I want to say up front that there is work involved. You won't be getting rich quick and there are a few ethical hurdles you may have to get over. In my last post I mentioned that I finally had a $200 day but you shouldn't expect this. It has taken me a good year of learning and the best part of another year to implement my system to get to this stage. It has been work. In reality I should only be making half the amount but I got lucky with one keyword. I have yet to find a second one of this calibre. You should expect to create a site that can generate about $10 a day. Once done you work on another and again and again. No tricks (well maybe a few) - just repetition. I will also show you how to create a multi-niche site.

It has taken me two years to make a decent income with this. For me it has been worth the work. I can't promise you anything but if you can stick to something and aren't afraid of a little work then you should be able to accomplish similar results. The best thing about Adsense is that eventually there is little work to do and the money just keeps coming in.

I love it.

Cheers,