How do spam sites generate traffic/money so fast?

Hope its not me

 

IamNed, you truly are a prize prat.
Do you seriously think that anyone playing with the 'Darker' side doesn't know how to get a site indexed.
Where do you get the 2000 page shit from, spam sites often run to 10's of 1000's of pages.
Optimization is so simmple it's un true. Most of us in the SEO business spend very very little time optimizing a site. The time is spent marketting the damn thing once you've built it.
Each page should be optimized for one keyword - it ain't rocket science. Now if you've got 5000 pages which are optimized to 4 or 5 word keyphrases. These searches might only ever deliver 1 click per page per month. You work it out - what might the income be.

And if you think it's difficult to rank for 4,5 or 6 word keyphrases then you need to go get a different job/hobby cos you obviously don't have a f'in clue.

You're right in one thing. Spam sites probably don't make any more money that 'normal' sites. But how long does it take you to create a 20K page normal site - a damn sight longer than an hour or so I'd imagine. It's not the amount of money a spam site can make, it's the number of the f'in things that can be made in a day.

 

Not that I do any of this stuff, but I think you're wrong about this: why is someone who searches for "car insurance" more likely to convert into a sale than someone who searches for "car insurance for my red BMW with low rates"? The only difference is in the amount of people who search for the terms every month. I still think the sites are junk and the internet is better off with them deindexed, but I don't think the advertisers are getting cheated.

 

I appreciate and respect your opinion. My point is, if someone is doing a search for say, bankruptcy lawyers in Podunk, South Dakota and they find a page targeted to that exact search, with ads from bankruptcy lawyers in Podunk, how is this not targeted traffic that will convert well?

Also, with smart pricing in effect, how can these BH'ers not be smart priced out of existance of their traffic doesn't convert well. It doesn't make much sense to me, and the few people I know who are BH don't divulge many of their secrets.

 

Firstly you can never get smart priced out of existance. Any BH'er would simply build more sites.
From what I can gather, the majority of BH stuff is a pure numbers game. It dosen't matter whether a site makes $0.5 or $5 per day. You simply decide what income you need and build the number of sites required to achieve that figure.

I agree with what you're saying that traffic passed from spam sites is probably very well targetted. People are stuck in thinking of keyphrases as 2 or 3 words max. When building a spam type site, you're talking phrases of 5,6 or 7 words. If I'm looking for insurance for one of my cars, I might get better ads by looking for 'insurance quotes for 3 liter xxxx in uk' rather than looking for 'car insurance quotes'. BH sites will have pages optimized for the longer phrase, where as a 'normal' site won't. I think the generic site will convert worse than a page optimized for the exact search.
For most 'normal' sites, it simply isn't worth the effort of creating pages for things that might only be searched for once or twice per month. A BH site will have 100's of these pages. They're basically looking to pick up the traffic that few other people can be bothered with. Do this in enough volume and you can make a fortune.

 

How is that logical?

You bring in traffic from search engines from people who searched for the keyword on your page.

Then they see ads for the keyword that they searched for.


How in the world is that untargetted traffic and as you assert 'non-converting' ?? Just because the words on the page don't say what you think is quality doesn't mean the visitor isn't quality

 

what if the BH site owner is also clever enough to do a redirect to a page that he or she thinks the websurfer is really looking for ?

If a BH site had only 1 keyword set searched for a month and they have 300 thousand pages per site and convert at .05c per click at a 1% CTR ?
would anyone like to do the maths,and then times it buy the number of sites the B,hatter owns.

You could say i am talking b*llocks but the new mercedes in my friends drive looks real enough.

 

Hi all, very cool thread ;-)

I've seen the word "footprint" mentioned a couple times so far.

I'm assuming that in the context of this thread, footprint means something common to all pages or sites that will indicate to the search engines the sites are spam or mass produced?

If so, you can go to the trouble of making every one of your 1000+ sites a masterpiece of uniqueness, but you're still leaving a footprint - your "google_ad_client = "pub-0xxxxxxxxxxxxxx3";" number.

K

 

well I agree with the fact that the visitors want just stumble across the site by accident. The fact of the matter is it is exactly what was stated earlier.. the BH sites have a vast majority of keywords they are using that others want..

Take a 1000 page site with little to no content but with each page setup for a specific search phrase// thats 1k search phrases .. they seem to target phrases more than single keywords.

I dont see how anyone can claim that the type of site would convert any less than a legit site.. if they come to the site for a specific search term,, and there is little to no content and they see a targeted adsense ad ,, the willclick on it,,thats why these sites can make 50% + CTR.

Now mepersonally I have none of these sites,, but my question is not about the traffic,, but whats the real downside to these types of sites,,, I have seen some that have the spammy look, and some that don't.. and with the MFA concerns and TOS,, it seems they continue to get a way with it because the TOS is so vague... what they build these sites and most dont add any content besides keywords,,, but there is a few I seen that will add a couple of paragraphs of content on the site, which I believe is all that you would need to make it legit..

But I also dont believe that smartpricing would really effect the BH sites, because they can crank them out faster than google can shut em down.. and I heard that it is just the SE part of google that drops them from serps,, not disabling there adsense accts... with the apparent high ctr i see no reason the adsense dept aint happy

like i said just curious as to what yall think,, as i have no expierince in this,, but if it is so wrong why wouldnt google close their adsense accounts down instead of just dropping them to the bottom of the serps?

 

A footprint is not like a fingerprint of the publisher it is a piece of code that is the same on all the sites, so when a spam site has a human review at google they look at the code and then wipe out all sites that have that footprint.

maybe you are unlucky and have a WH site that has the same template that has been modified by the B,hatter and you will be dumped as well,it does not happen that often but does happen.

As for site reviews google do not employ 100,s of people to scour the net for spam sites they just wait for people to report them through the ads by google link on the adsense ads on the site.

 

Has nothing to do with what someone is looking for.. The fallacy some of you are under is that everyone is looking to purchase a product at that time and not just looking for information. A substantial number of people are just looking for information. People don't run adwords campaigns to just hand out free information.

There is no chance a site that really on displays ads is going to convert better. It is simply IMPOSSIBLE. Conversion Ratio is entirely based on the number of people who clicked versus the number of people who converted. On a site with little or no content, the click-through rate will be SUBSTANTIALLY higher, but there is not a shred of evidence to support that all those people will be interested in the end product, as the only reason they clicked is because they had no choice. If they were, then content laden sites would have higher click-through rates as well.

Because conversions rely on people buying something. As I mentioned above, not everyone searching for a given phrase is looking to commit or buy to something at the time. They may be searching for laywers in podunk, SD because their nephew is a lawyer in Podunk SD. By the fact that you take away all other options from visitors means you are going to have a substantial increase in non-conversions.

If I have a site with a 10% clickthrough rate and of those 10% of those convert.... well that is 1% of my visitors converting for that advertiser. If I take away all the content and now 50% of my visitors click on the ads because they have no choice... You think that 10% of that 50% is now going to convert for that ad just because the ended up there? That is not the way it works. While exposing more people to the advertisers page might increase the overall percentage, it is not going to jump by 500%. So maybe the overall conversion for my visitors is 1% and the scrapper is 1.5%. Problem is the scapper is delivering 5x the visitors. So his conversion rate is significantly lower.

The pennies all ad up in the scheme of things. Not exactly like they are spending a lot of time and energy putting this sites up.

I explained it above. Hopefully now you have some idea what conversion actually means. More people clicking on ads does not mean more conversions, in this case it means a lower conversion rate. The visitor isn't quality because they ended up on the advertisers page by default. They didn't see a page full of information and see the ad and go, "hmm out of all this related information this ad really is closest to what I am looking for." That would provide a highly targeted and qualified visitor to the advertiser.

Just clicking on the ad because there are no other options doesn't deliver high quality traffic to the advertiser if the only reason they got there was by default. Again you have to go through a serps filter and the adsense filter to get a match, and you also have to have a customer who is interested enough in purchasing a product/getting more information and not just browsing or lurking. A spam site is not weeding any of that out, they are just dumping them all on the advertiser.

This is a reason why Google implemented Smart Pricing, and it was to help advertisers who were growing leary of sites providing low quality traffic with no conversions. Forcing someone into clicking on an ad does not make them quality traffic. Only a very small percentage of ALL traffic on any giving search is going to be someone who is going to convert.


This is pretty basic marketing and advertising. The real fear is abuses continue unchecked everything is going to wind up being affiliate-style programs except for the most premium publishers.

 

I would imagine BH'ers would have several AS accounts. I can't imagine having thousands of sites tied to one account. Even if they are above board, if they get banned for any reason, that's a lot of sites with no AS revenue.

 

I think we'll have to differ on this one.
I know exactly what conversion means. You haven't imo put forward an arguement for (or against) 'normal' sites.
I've only had access to a couple of adwords accounts (one was a bluechip company) and from the stats I've seen, spam sites covert at least as well as normal sites (in some cases way way better). It would be interesting to see what the big adword spenders see - my guess is that they are seeing the same as me otherwise they'd be putting more pressure on G to remove spam sites from the adsense system.

 

NO because only the sites get banned never the account.

All they have to do to win is build faster than there sites are deindexed.

Even if they are deindexed they just move the content to another domain.

 

Most BH sites won't target your nephews name who is a lawyer in Podunk. What they are targeting is long keyword phrases for products. When someone searches for products, they are most likley in a "buying" frame of mind. When they see an ad for the exact product they've searched for, they click on the ad and probably make a purchase.

No one is making visitors click on the ads. I'm not sure how you come to the conclusion that visitors get to the advertisers site "by default" or that they have no other options. If someone searching for information on something doesn't find it on your site, the first thing they do is hit the back button, not click an ad.

As to the question of why google doesn't disable these accounts, there's only one word -- Money. These type of sites bring in tremendous amounts of money, both for the site owner, but more so for the big G.

 

competition has just heated up. with chikita , yahoo and others. Google is now more busy with finding new ways to cope with the competitions than to disable accounts. The more accounts they disable, the less money they are going to earn. In fact, it is now easiler to get approved for google adsense than in the past.

 

Wow! As a newbie I didn't know this sort of thing existed.Just shows how much I still got to learn.Has anyone got an example of one or two of these types of site.It will be interesting to see what they look like.

On a lighter note: I built and published a site yesterday while wearing a black trilby and have been wearing it for the last 24 hours .....yet I haven't made a cent.What am I doing wrong?

 

Those don't count. You need a beret.

 

Spammers need a momentum, they get it and cash in quickly. Takes a ton of energy to do this, but IMO it's a complete waste. If you have a real business plan, you'll be much more effective and with less effort overall. Spammers IMO are very nearsighted. Of course, you could categorize black hat seo as spam as well, but there are some very well organized black hats who have been doing well for a long time.

 

I agree - for most it is a numbers game. Keep building spam sites and hope one lands them the big one.