The truth about ready-made AdSense sites.
September 19, 2006
I get a lot of emails from my readers about packages of sites that have been pre-built and are ready to load with your AdSense code. They are often in niche categories and contain dozens or hundreds of articles, and the are usually pretty cheap (under $100).
On the surface, these packages sound like a great deal: they save time because you don't have to build them yourself and you can focus on promoting and ranking the sites. But the truth is that most of these packages are not worth a dime. Let me tell you why.
Duplicate Content Galore
The primary reason why you should not purchase packages of ready-made AdSense sites is that they are selling that same package to hundreds or thousands of other people. Every one of those customers is buying the same package containing the same sites.
The search engines are smart, and they will filter out duplicate copies of the same articles and sites. Chances are that by the time you purchase and upload one of these ready-made sites, dozens of others have already done so, and your site will get filtered.
If you're going to purchase a ready-made AdSense site, make sure that you are guaranteed to be the only one purchasing that site. This means that you will be paying a lot more money for the package, since you'll be the only customer.
If the site owner claims to be selling unique packages for $97 a piece, be very, very wary. Usually a quality ready-made site will cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars, so anyone offering them that cheap is probably reselling the same package over and over again.
Web Site Optimization
The ready-made AdSense sites I've seen have almost never been very well designed for the search engines, and almost never have the AdSense laid out in the most effective manner.
That means that even if you are the only owner of the package, that it will be difficult to rank well in the search engines, and that you won't make as much money from the sites as you could have if you had laid out the AdSense code in the proper places.
So if you're going to purchase a ready-made site, make sure that it is already optimized for the search engines and uses the proper ad placement.
Lack of Content Control
A third thing I don't like about ready-made AdSense sites is that you don't have much control over the content of the sites. The articles selected were selected by somebody else, and if that person isn't knowledgeable about the subject (and they usually aren't), their content choices may not be good ones.
Summing It All Up
The bottom line is that I've yet to see any ready-made AdSense sites that were worth purchasing. They're littered with duplicate content, aren't optimized for the search engines or proper ad placement, and you have little control over the content of the sites. So I don't recommend them.
P.S. If you're really interested in saving time, creating unique-content quality sites fast while maintaining full control over the content, check out ArticleBuilder.net which officially launches September 26th.
Comments
17 Responses to “The truth about ready-made AdSense sites.”
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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Jonathon, this is very good advice, especially with the attention by the search engines on unique content. Hundreds of pages, all the same, down to the last comma and stop, "does not compute" very well. If one cannot write original articles I think one should at least change 30% of the content, or even combine more than one PLR article, change a few words or sentences and, voila, a new article.
Your articles are timely and to the point, please keep 'em coming.
By the way, I posted a comment and question on your article, dated August 21, 2006
"Is Smart Pricing killing your AdSense earnings?"
but I haven't had a reply yet, probably you are very busy, but I do need an answer soon, if you can please.
Kindest regards
Leslie
Jon,
Why are you knocking these when you send out emails to your list recommending those that others sell - Joel Comm's package springs to mind.
I know that you get commission on the sales but it's very confusing for us - do you want us to buy these packages or not?
Pete
Yes! Jonathan you are right. I use Keyword Elite for finding high paying keywords, and it is good for this purpose.
And the software gives the user an option to make sites out of free articles for the found keywords.
I've tried this option and made a free subdomain on Awardspace with these articles.
I put on some quality links to it. And guess what, nothing happened no search engine indexed my site for weeks. Bud I made a photo galery on the Awardspace with unique photos and Search engines indexed within days.
Finally I've deleted the subdomain with the articles.
So the duplicated content worth nothing!
I agree with Jonathan don't buy these "adsense-ready" site templates.
arpiboy:
what function is that your talking about in Keywor Elite??
regards
I agree….unique content is the key to having a good website and as you said somewhere else market that content by submitting to every place possible. Too many packages out there with ready made and all are the same. But it's human nature to be lazy I guess. We all want $10.000 a month without doing the work
A tool I personally like is Hyper VRE. Got the gold version which lets me use my own articles.
I agree 100% with Leslie, that this is good sound advice and most, but not all, of these 'Made for Adsense' sites are a total waste of time and money.
The HUB of this debate centers around 'Duplicate Content' again.
Whilst many people believe that the penalty is in fact a 'Duplicate Page' penalty, rather than a 'Duplicate Content' penalty, there is still a school of thought that 25% - 30% of the content on the page must be unique, to avoid being caught by the Search Engine Filters.
Looking at this from the perspective of the 'Search Engines', if they now see that programmers in the 'Content Applications' are ensuring a certain amount of uniqueness by varying the content by 25% - 30%, it won't be long before they simply change their algorithm so that they mark 70% to 75% duplicate content as "Duplicate Content", and so on and so on.
Eventually only pure unique content, on these type of article sites, will be acceptable by the Search Engines. This may take a period of a few months and over a few stages to happen, but you can be as sure as eggs are eggs that it will.
There is an article publishing business model that is that is due to be launched in October that allows people to buy unique articles, which are then automatically uploaded to well optimised pages on a variety of 'Themed' webstes. The system then polices the internet to ensure that the articles are not copied/duplicated and thus remain unique.
If people are looking for "long term" gains with 'Pay Per Click' and 'Affiliate' programs, then unique content is surely the way to go.
Yes, there is a small cost in purchasing this unique content, but you should be looking at article marketing and publishing, or any investment on the internet from a 'BUSINESS' perspective.
Considering the potential returns from the 3rd party advertising, associated with well written and properly optimised article, the question must be: How long will these article pages be giving me a revenue?
Articles on themed websites that are totally UNIQUE, well written, based around high paying, high volume, low competition keywords meets all my 'investment' requirements, as there is no reason why they should ever be flagged by the SE's.
This long term view will not only save you a ton of money, but also a huge amount of time. Isn't it time to STOP chasing that illusive 'pot of gold'?
Pete:
Joel Comm sold AdSense Templates, not ready-made sites. His templates didn't come preloaded with content. They just gave you a lot of good, high CTR format AdSense templates.
Jon
Johnathan,
Very good article and well put. The bottom line folks is you need to develop your own unique content. This means using your PLR articles as research and utilizing them to write your own unique article. In addition, you are in the business of selling (directly/preselling) this involves knowing your prospects and the problems they face. Will a canned adsense site or generic PLR article fit your customer? Probably not. So the lessons are 1. know your prospect 2. research their problems 3. solve the problem with your product, affiliate or use adsense as a last resort. 4. write presell content/articles that will serve the customer with the search engine as a secondary consideration - this is what Googles Guidelines tell you to do - do this and you will get traffic, ad clicks and sales. Thank you!
Hello Jonathan, I have a quick question since you are the expert on the Adsense. I've received an email from a person claiming that Google Adsense is Death. Here is the title of email: "The Death of Adsense" and sub-title "Google Adsense, Born June 18th 2003 - Died, August 1st 2006." Is this true? Thank you! Ryan
Ryan:
See this post.
Jon,
I'm interested in trying out some of the things Scott mentioned in his "reports" however, I was wondering if you knew of a page generator that would be good to use for this type of stuff.
Thanks,
Brian
I purchased a group odf ready made sites and your right you get dinged for the duplicate content and there is no SEO in them, so until you do a lot of editing there is no hope for good placement.
Jonathan,
I agree after testing 10 various adsense websites that the templates are nice, but when you have over 100 article pages or more and all the articles need to be updated it`s tough.
So, in my experience with these adsense websites, they are not worth the time and money. Only fresh content will help you see traffic! But what ratio of new articles should you have if your website is over 100 pages?
If you were to write 100 articles that would take a long time. Should there be a mix of your own articles with other authors articles?
Chris
Hi Jonathon,
The bottom line is that hand built sites last the test of time, remain high in the SE's and still earn good adsene income. I have several sites that earn $25 - $30 a day in adsense income and more from aff. sales, but those site have been online since 1997.
I think people are always looking for the easy way and the truth is that there isn't an easy way, all the "quick"claims are short lived.
Just my 2 cents
rgds
Mike
http://www.mikerussen.com/members/
Jon can you help me with this coundrum?
If I post an article that I have written today and it gets picked up and used by 300 other sites in the following month how is it that I don't suffer from duplicate content also?
Does anybody know if Google can tell where thye original content originated ie where it entered the internet first?
It would be a weird scenario if the original author got penalised.The duplicate content may or may not still credit me with the creation but whether it doses or not the catch22 remains?
I agree with Mr. Jonathan Leger.
I am the kind of guy that but everything just to try it. My adsense sites are not making any money. But I'm not sorry I got them. WHY? Because they are filled with useful material I can use later. There are so many ways to make tons of money on the Internet. Banner Ads are on the comeback. And one of the best way to get your Site seem.
A few Google criteria of acceptance/rejection of some site for Adsense purposes are:
site design including duplicated CONTENT,
links (or backlinks) with other RATED sites,
correctness and relevance of TAGS,
CODES used (engine robots prefer HTML code)
etc.
Adsense duplicate packages that are commonly sold on Net nowadays are mostly useless not only because of its duplicate content, but also
and probably mainly that they are not well SEO designed. With bad SEO they cannot survive ads competition.
It's not true that only fresh content will help you see traffic! More important is correct SEO angle.
There is higher arcana involved in right SEO of web page. It's good to learn this - it can
let you try redesign page that is badly
optimized. What I consider pretty tedious is a process of building links with other sites. And obviously there is softwares available that can build those links automatically, so far I hadn't have time to seek and use them.
All that packages are not completely useless though- if suitable, consider learning and reusing some elements from source code - sort of you can reprocess some elements through your editor.
Jan