Mailbag Friday 11-11-11
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
And a very happy 11-11-11 to you! It’s Friday and that means that it’s time to open up the mailbag and answer your questions. Look at me, I remembered this week! It’s an 11-11-11 day miracle!
I’m typing today’s article on my snazzy new Dell XPS 14z laptop that just came in the mail this morning. It’s pretty sweet! Looks and feels like a Macbook but twice as powerful and less expensive. I think Dell has a winner with this one.
Question 1
Comes from Bret “What is your thought on simply putting adsense sites on sub domains?”
That’s a good question, and one that I get all the time. I should probably just write an entire article on this…but the short answer is this. As far as sub-domains, I stay away from them myself. Sometimes they work great, sometimes Google ignores them, sometimes if Google finds one sub-domain it doesn’t like for some reason they will ban all the other subdomains, sometimes they won’t.
Right now, I *think* Google’s official line on subdomains is that one bad sub domain won’t get all the other sub-domains banned, but you really have to take that with a grain of salt.
And it’s sort of a moot point since you can register .info domains at Godaddy all the time for $.67 each…why not just go with .info’s instead of subdomains? They work fine for me even though they aren’t .com’s… plus you can flip a .info site if you want; it’s much harder to sell a subdomain site (if it’s possible at all).
Question 2
This one comes from Mike “How do you get traffic? What suggestions and ideas do you have for getting more traffic and income without spending more then the sites will make back? Do you use any services you might recommend for traffic?”.
Really great questions Mike. 100% of my traffic comes from search engines…I haven’t broken it down, but I’d guess 95% or more of that traffic comes from Google.
Personally I don’t use any services for traffic or for backlinking. In the past for other adsense sites (none of my current sites) I’ve used backlinking services like Linkvana and article marketing on EzineArticles and a few other major article repository websites.
Linkvana is incredibly expensive, like $150 a month, it’s limited as to the number of links you can post per site per month (or at least it was), it’s definitely a spamming system that creates no real value in Google’s eyes and can even get you banned if they realize you’re using it.
That’s the problem with many backlinking services…the links are artificial. Google’s not stupid. Those links are usually worthless, especially for building long term search engine rankings.
So I just stay away from all linking and traffic services. Not only can they get you in trouble…honestly, I’ve never really noticed any great benefit from using them. They never really generated a ton of good rankings for me.
People are amazed when I tell them that I don’t do any SEO or traffic work for any of my sites. I create hundreds of sites, so it would take me a ton of time or money to do SEO work for each one. I just create the sites and forget about them, and let Google do what Google does.
My sites are built to focus on long tail keywords, and it’s easy to get ranked for longtail keywords because most people don’t focus on them. My sites might only get 10 to 50 visitors per day with this method…but owning 300 sites, the numbers work out.
Thanks for the great questions, keep them coming! And be sure to check out tomorrows article, Google announced some changes that you’re going to want to hear about because they directly affect our type of sites…
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
