First post here.. but have been reading for a long time. The info on this forum has been very useful. I have been using Adsense on a couple of my websites which contain a smallish number of articles. Perhaps 50 or so pages of content on a variety of niche topics that are of interest to me. Things that are actually my hobbies - things I actually do and can write about knowledgeably. The websites look pretty dull, mostly just the writing and a few relevant pictures - I am hopeless at graphics. Everything is written by me, and I only get around to spending a few hours doing updates and new articles every 6 weeks or so. Over the course of the last year I've build up the adsense earnings from an initial $60 per month. I am now getting about $450 per month. Not the "big time" but significant. I always tell people that the single most important element in earning money from the adsense program is good quality unique content. Everything else is secondary. I tell them not to waste time messing about with get rich quick schemes... just sit down and write. Anything which sounds remotely sneaky is not going to work in the long run, unless you are very very good at it, and the world already has too many people trying to be very good at it. I often search around on google to see what sites link to me, and I am always dismayed to run across a slew of MFA website that seem to have scraped a paragraph or two of text from my websites, and featured it alongside a link to my website, and of course, all their adsense. The link to my website is probably worthless - all these pages are PR0 and are of no value to the internet. However, they are duplicating small amount of my content. Not whole articles, just a paragraph here and a paragraph there. Does this duplicate content effect my standing in google? Most of my traffic comes from Google. Is there anything I can do to stop these site pinching content from my site? I've worked hard to build up some adsense earnings in the small amount of time I have available and find the behavior of these thieves infuriating. I hear that the new smart pricing system might start to effect these sort of sites. Some odd things have been happening to my earnings over the last few months. I've not added much content in the last 6 months, but, in the middle of august I saw an overnight increase of 20%-30% in page impressions and earnings, and this has maintained itself ever since, with earnings increasing by perhaps 10% a month. I am certainly not adding 10% content per month! Is this a short lived phenomenon, and earnings should fall off as the market adjusts itself to googles algorithm updates? Whilst I am doing this searching I see my site listed in literally hundreds of copies of the same directory on different sites? What on earth is the point of all these? Do any of them make any profit whatsoever? It is frustrating as 90% of the search results are made up of this junk, and buried in this lot are so interesting links from forums where people have referred to my site. We all like to read what others say about our sites! These days, when searching for my site on google, I always include the category in the open directory as a -query exclude term. Takes the number of hits from 1000 to 300! Much easier to sift through. Sorry for so many remarks and questions... I am always guilty of starting to write something short and ending up writing something long. btw my username has no affiliation with the domain of the same name.
Are they copying the code or just the text? If you affix copyright notices you can always bring about intelectual copyright breach. You own publishers rights to your text, although it is quite a heft job. Send anyone who you know who steals your content a stop notice.
Duplicate content can affect your rankings. But Google is smart. They know where the content was originally from. If your content was indexed first, and the copy-cats was indexed second, then obviously it was yours. You shouldnt worry too much about that. I would still send them a notice if you are worried about it though. About the increase in traffic: This is not a guaranteed reason why YOUR traffic has increased... but you will normally see an increase in traffic during the end of the year. When the summer is gone and the cooler months are upon us, people sit in front of their computers surfin' the net more often. You will definatly see more traffic if your content is seasonal in any way as well.
How about my site is brand new tiny little site with worthless search engine ranking. And my article is duplicated on another well established website whose ranking is much better than mine. Would Google still put more weight on my original article?
Given that your visitors are coming from google, I think google gives you decent 'trust' and that the people copying you are given low-trust (you said yourself that they have low PR). So I don't think that in practical terms you have anything to worry about. You should check whether your traffic is increasing to the same extent as your income. If so: that's the cause of your increased earnings. If not, the key-words that your articles are related to are getting more expensive: more ads, more competition, more money for you. If it's an increase in traffic, this is a bit uncertain as traffic does have its ups and downs. On the other hand, a good site should automatically be able to increase traffic numbers, through asking related sites to link to them and getting links from satisfied visitors and stuff like that. Especially as you do sound like you keep building your site. If it's an increase in the amount that gets payed per click, there is even less to worry about: the market isn't saturated yet, so chances are this is just a reflection of your site(s) being in a good niche where ad-prices are still growing. As for smart-pricing - I have only heard people complain about that lowering their ad-revenue, not upping it. Anyhow, I think that's something that only websites that are MFA (Made For Adsense) and have no original content risk.
Thanks, that goes quite some way to putting my mind at rest: I'd not seen anbody actually stating that Google uses some intelligence on duplicate content. Content is a bit seasonal - half of it is astronomy related. However, the increase in August was literally overnight. On the 12 August (very much the Glorious Twelfth for me!) my page impressions/earnings increased by 30-40%. I myself did no changes around this time. Looking at my Adsense account, it is almost like it started looking at a different website on the 12th Aug. NB all my sites have been PR4 for as long as I remember. No change there.
Earnings and page impressions both increased proportionally... which of course pokes holes in any smart pricing theory! Mind you, if I play with the numbers enough, it does seem that the earnings per click has increased over the last few months. Not suddenly, but gradually I've seen a 20%-30% increase in earnings per click in the last three months. Mind you, if anything, the actually numbers of clicks has tailed off a bit, but earnings have increased!! Sometimes I think looking at adsense stats is a road to madness. I just stop and think "sometimes it is $5 a day, sometimes it is $25 a day, how can you hope to draw any meanful conclusions from that???"
I don't think too hard about fluctuations in AdSense revenue. I ride the waves. I am a bit like you, in that I add content, I try to produce an attractive package, one people will come back to, and hope for the best. I do give some thought to graphics, ad placement, etc. But I can't be bothered to lose sleep over the vagaries of smart pricing, and seasonal fluctuations. I will say this; my summer month income is 30% of my winter month income, so I do brace for that. If you PM me your URL, I'll be happy to take a look, and give you a few pointers, if you want to.
If you find sites that are copying your content without permission, you can file DMCA notices with Google to get the material out of Google's index. Unfortunately, it's a pain to do this for every site you come across. I have people copying my content all the time. One approach that works well is to embed links back to your own site in the content. I have a little bio (that I vary every once in a while) appended to most of my blog postings, for example. Most scrapers are too stupid to take out those links (because the scraping is automated) so I get links back to my site. No, they're not from quality sites, this is true, but it's another way for people to discover your site. Google is always making changes to fight the scraper sites, but it'll always be a problem to one degree or another, unfortunately...
See? There are different types of website people. You say you are hopeless at graphics but it's so easy for you to write content. I'm exactly the opposite. I love graphics and designing, but I can't write content worth anything. There's only so much one can write about the product I sell. I hate that because content is free and can be done on your own time. But I just sit there looking at a blank screen, so I usually pay someone else to do it.
Oftentimes MFAs will post snippets from your site, much like Google will post snippets in their SERPs, rarely more than 2-3 lines. I don't think there is much you can do about that, but I might be wrong. I never heard that there was any harm in it. If they are copying full paragraphs, it's another can of worms.
I've made so much more money with Adsense by writing my own content. Yeah, takes alot of work, but set aside some time and do it.
Hi Possibly your visitors are getting slightly ad-blind. If your site is good (and it sounds like it is) then I bet a good chunk are returning, not new visitors. Maybe try moving the ads around a bit to stimulate more clicks from the existing traffic. My 2p Good luck with it! DD