I recently encountered another 'keyword dense' article on a web site, and immediately clicked away from it. Then it occurred to me that maybe that is what the site owner wants. If the sire doesn't sell a product owned by the site owner, and is getting all its revenue from adsense and affiliate sales, people might be more likely to click on an ad or link if all they want to do is leave the site. I've read that those who go to a site regularly aren't as likely to click on ads, so keeping people coming back might not be important as long as the owner can drive traffic to the site. It would explain a lot.
In that case, it's probably exactly what they wanted you to do. They've done that in the MFA game for years. So that's often what you see in the low-end, crap content side of the business. Fortunately smart webmasters often know that authority content actually generally leads to much higher revenue over time. That's why people who go into the webmastering business with a good bit of forethought and resources often pursue authority sites. Regular users may not click as often as one-time visitors, but over their lifetime chances are very good you'll get more clicks from a regular on your site every day than from a one-timer who sees your content, is repulsed by it, and leaves to never come back. Those regulars are also most likely to buy higher-return affiliate products due to trust in the site, and they give you other revenue streams / marketing reach such as getting more ads in front of them via things like newsletters. The MFA model you're talking about won't likely go away. I look at it on par with get rich quick / WAH schemes you see advertised all over the place. People are in it for quick money, and most don't make much of it over the long haul. But because a few do, others aren't likely to stop trying.
To add to what Jenn says, it is also the case that these keyword stuffed sites don't get half the amount of traffic as an authority site. Therefore you would need to keep hundreds of these low quality sites going just to rival the revenue that is possible with a well-written site that actually wants readers and therefore has the ability to attract those readers!
Sometimes instead of thinking in terms of keywords and SEO, rather think of what do I want to write about that is of interest to me and to my potential readers. It's as simple as that, since people lose perspective of creating natural content. When I sit down to create a site, for example my aiononlinegame.com site which I wanted to specifically deal with videos from Aion: The Tower of Eternity, all I did was think of my design... what appeals to people and then added the videos for the game from youtube. I get a good few people that sign up regularly and that also makes my site unique from the other fan sites, since I work with the videos only. I get good traffic from the main game since my site has a link on their site and that is all I want. Page rank be damned, because in this day and age, the page rank doesn't matter. When I go to yahoo and type in "aion online" without the quotes, I am 4th and that is all that matters. ^__^
I'm a website publisher, and most of my money is made through adsense... so maybe I can comment on this. The idea of "keyword rich" articles is to get Google to bring the article/page to the top of the search results. By targeting specific keywords, webmasters hope that people will find the page, glance the article, get bored, and click an ad with a catchy title. Google likes several things in order to bring the site to the top: - keyowrd rich page (and keyword rich titles and headers, etc) - big sites (lots of articles) - old sites (older = better) - keywords in the domain name - and sites with lots of backlinks (links from other "authority" sites) Now the average person has trouble with the "links from authority sites", so he typically aims for the other areas - most importantly, articles with high keyword density. They don't care too much about quality... unfortunately. And, don't forget, QUALITY articles cost a lot more. People tend to think: Why pay for a quality article with low-keyword-density if it won't make it to the top of the search rankings? They see it as a waste of money. Personally - I don't buy into this. I aim for both. (I write most of my own content.) Sure, I try to sprinkle important keywords in the title and in the article... but I refuse to ruin the quality of the article for it. And, I think it will catch up with webmasters in the long run. I think google will wise-up to this tactic and begin to look for more "natural" writing. And they'll be placing more emphasis on sites with high RETURNING volume. Right now, you can write high-keyword articles and get to the top of Google's search results without having a great site that people love. I don't think this is what Google wants. I think their search system is becoming wiser (for example, custom search results). Quality will eventually reign over quantity, in my opinion. Just my two cents.
Agree with you fireboat. I've always found natural writing to rank better in the long haul (rankings tend to be more stable), making sure to use the keyword phrases but not excessively. I've also found that you have to do much less work to bring in relevant authority backlinks when you write this way, as good content attracts links naturally.
If it's low quality content they will hit the back button not click on an affiliate link in the article. It may make sense to get them clicking on adsense but the big money is in affiliates and you need credibility to make a sale.
I've never actually written one of these keyword dense things. I've done a couple of things where the buyer asked that several keywords be used two or three times in a 500 word piece. I don't know if I could even write one of those awful paragraphs where the keyword is mentioned twice in every sentence. I thought I'd read that google was now punishing people for having articles that were too dense. I hope that's true. And look how many times I've used the keyword keyword.
I hope that you guys are right and that Google implements a way to monitor this. But even if they don't, there are so many of these sites popping up all the time - hopefully it'll just become to hard for them to make money that way. I'm not sure that'll happen though, since some seem to create hundreds at a time.
I would not go for keyword density because most of the times, the article doesn't make sense when we put in too many keywords. However, I realise many clients request a certain percentage of keywords in an article. I guess when it comes to writing for clients I will have to follow their guidelines but when I write for myself, I write whatever I want to write about.
The golden rule of business is building trust. If the content is rubbish you never hope to have repeat visitor. A site with good content will gain popularity through word of mouth. This will help the site to have visitors who are more loyal than random visitors. If your content is good, the rest will fall in place.
Besides everything said, Google excludes regularly such Made For Adsense sites (MFA) using improvements in its algorithm. They are here to stay perhaps, but they will always need to create new content to receive some traffic. On the other hand, quality evergreen content will bring more money on the long run.
i believe these sites will eventually disappear and new ways of quick money schemes will come up. people need to learn to use tabs and the back button rather then clicking on links from useless sites.
I understand your point. Personally, I don't see myself clicking ads as a way of escaping a poorly written post. I will usually close the tab, or press back like you said. But I guess if they target the keywords well enough, then the ads should be related to what they were originally searching for. In this case it makes sense for a user to click ads as a way of getting away - though I can't see it making mega-bucks long-term!