Return of Thick Adsense Sites?
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Welcome to a very cold, wet, and miserably dark Sunday here in Chicago. It’s a good day to grab a cup of coffee and a good book..in fact, that’s exactly what I’m going to do later.
Today I want to talk about something a little bit different. Namely; thick sites. I don’t mention them often because I make most of my Adsense money on what you would call “thin” sites. But I get a lot of questions about thick sites so I wanted to touch on them.
What is a thick site?
Basically a thick site is a website that has lots of unique content. Generally I put the cutoff for a thick site at one hundred pages of original, good content – usually made up of 500-1000 word (or more) articles. And not spun content, ever.
Generally thick sites are themed around a certain niche, and all the content is generally about that theme. For instance, I own an espresso machine thick site. You can learn everything you ever wanted to know about espresso machines there, from which brands offer what models, to reviews, to history, to company information for the major players, to tips on how to make the best espresso.
You get the idea.
Back in the day, thick sites used to be all the rage. You could build up a thick site with a couple thousand pages of unique content and generally make an insane amount of money with both adsense and affiliate marketing (like amazon.com commissions).
Then Google decided to label them “content farms” and penalize them in the SERPS.
Suddenly you had people that had spent thousands of dollars having quality articles written for their thick sites unable to rank in Google and recoup that huge investment. That’s pretty much when I abandoned the model and switched to the thin automatic spammy sites that I create now en masse.
Hey, gotta give Google what they want!
But something’s happened..
I still own my espresso machine website, and it continues to get around 50-60 visitors per day and earn a buck or so in Adsense revenue. But towards the end of October, traffic started to increase from 50-60 visitors a day to around a hundred.
I raised my eyebrows a little bit, but didn’t really pay a whole lot of attention to it.
But then slowly throughout November, that number started to increase. By the middle of November, I was starting to see nearly 200 visitors a day to that site. And it’s held stead or climbed a little every day since then!
Does that mean that thick sites are back? I’m almost curious to start messing with it. Maybe I’ll add a few articles and see what Google does.
There have been blimps before…
In the past, there’s been weird activity on that site. For instance, for like a week Google will rank the site again and I’ll get like 1,000 visitors to the site every day for a week, then Google will slam the site to oblivion and traffic will drop to 3 visitors a day for like a month or two.
But this feels different. It’s not a crazy spike but a gradual increase.
To be sure, I’m not going to switch the focus of my strategy from thin to thick sites because of this…but it’s certainly something to keep an eye on.
Creating hundreds of thin sites with the push of a button and making insane amounts of money is great, but I really enjoy building quality thick sites that serve a good purpose; something you can be proud of. So we’ll see! In the mean time…
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
