No pun intended, but hopefully I got your attention. Do you own a Blogger Blog for your home business blog or do you own some micro niche sites or intend to create one in the near future? If you do, then do spend the next 5 minutes to read some important revelation. It could well make a difference between keeping your blog – or losing it for good.
Why You May Lose Your Blogger Blog
From what I have been reading lately, Google is on a crackdown of spam Blogger Blogs using an automated classification system to identify them for their deletions. However this system seems to be totally unreliable and Google openly said so too in a reply to one deleted blog “…If your blog is not a spam blog, then it was one of the false positives, and we apologize.” Such audacity, such ruthlessness.
I went to check out 2 such blogs just to confirm how flawed their system was and how frustrated and angry the blog owners were made to be by the mother of all search engines. One happens to be my good friend Chandan who lost his PR 3 blog due to this ‘false positive’ and all 170 blog posts built over the last 18 months. He is now rebuilding his new blog after saying goodbye to his blogger blog. The other blogger is someone I found at random on the Internet who suffered a similar fate as Google labeled as “spam”. Believe me, he wasn’t amused at having to reconstruct his lost blog and a full year’s posts at a new wordpress blog. This is his reconstructed blog and you can judge for yourself if this blog is spammy : “The Job Seeker’s Blog”
What we suggest you do…
If you value your blogger blog and have painstakingly created 100s of posts over the years, you really ought to think about moving it to a self-hosted wordpress blog. It’s for complete peace of mind and it costs about 7 dollars a month to do so at Hostgator. (yes you only pay 1-cent for the first month if you used the coupon code “wordpress”.)
The Micro Niche Adsense Site – Any Danger Lurking Ahead?
There has been much debate over the risks of creating Micro Niche Adsense sites even before the recent Google’s de-indexing saga came into the limelight. Is Google targeting small niche adsense sites next? Grizzly seems to think so in his post Making Money Online in 2010-A Facelift and warned about this in his post:Don’t build “thin sites”, he says. These sites are focused on Made for Adsense (MFA) as they are usually short, badly written posts in which adsense takes centrestage and predominantly fills up the better part of the page.
I sent an email to John Xfactor, the creator of Xfactor’s Micro Niche Adsense to find out his thoughts on whether his micro niche adsense sites are in danger of getting de-indexed by Google. He said ” …..I stick with unique content and do not do any backlink practices that is considered unethical. Also, I grow all of my sites. All of my micro niche sites are nearing 100 pages each (and I have 100 of them).”
There is actually nothing wrong with anyone wishing to focus on building micro niche adsense websites. In fact, if you learned the right strategies, it can be a very profitable online business to go into. However many Internet Marketers looked for short cuts to making good adsense profits and behold the one page niche website was born. Perhaps that’s why Google seems so firm to get rid of the trouble makers, even if it means having to injure a few innocent law abiding ones. It may be adopting a “Shoot First, Explain Later” kind of policy which many of us do not appreciate.
What we suggest you do….
Gone are the days when you could easily set up a one page website, get it easily ranked on Google’s page one and start making money online. Then continue building an empire of these one page wonders and continue making more money blogging. As Google seems to be on a crackdown on them, first and foremost, stop making MFA sites and start growing your niche sites by adding more pages for every one of them.
If adsense has been giving you a nice online income over the years, this may be a wake up call to find out if you are in violation of Google’s TOS. Spend the next hour or so to review all your adsense sites and do your bit to protect your adsense account.
Did you miss any of these?:
- Blog Income-December 2009
- My Strategy To Increase My Google Adsense Revenue
- Blog Income & Stats – November 2009
- Here’s How To Bring More Traffic To Your Blog
- How My Niche Site In Blogger Ranked No.1 In Google
May 30, 2010 at 12:55 am
Nicely written, Peter. I've been working on getting people to not use these Blogger blogs for reasons like that, but they don't seem to get it. Some folks just have to learn for themselves.
May 30, 2010 at 1:14 am
@Mitch: Thanks Mitch….hey you still up at this hour?
May 31, 2010 at 11:48 am
Hell Peter Lee,
Sorry but i am going to be hard here: That serves them right! Sorry i had to scream that. My sympathy goes to the innocent ones that were affected by google flush. It's really time people realize that there is no short cut to making money online, if you try to do the short cut, even if it benefits you now, it wouldn't last long.
The best way to build a lasting e-business is through Content-Traffic-Preselling-Monetization. This is a proven strategy to making money online where you wouldn't be worried about google changing it algorithm or deleting scam blogs.
Take time to help people with valuable information and good things will naturally happen to you.
I really hope they learn fast because very soon it's only the real business people that will be left online, atleast with google.
May 31, 2010 at 5:59 pm
So are you basically saying that if you have a real domain on real hosting the chance of your blog not getting shutdown increases?
May 31, 2010 at 11:51 pm
Thanks for sharing these ideas. I will definitely be improving my blogs and webpages.
June 1, 2010 at 12:44 am
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future. Feel free to check out my blog on the 36 Best WordPress plugins for 2009.
June 1, 2010 at 12:44 am
True about blogger….i have more than 300 blogposts..had no PR..when i stopped working on it ..it got a PR of 1 after when i havent worked from 5 months..
June 1, 2010 at 1:04 am
This is the one reason why I've always hosted my own blogs because then I am the master of my own fate and I don't have to worry about someone closing down my blog because of some false positive or because they just didn't like what I was writing.
June 1, 2010 at 4:18 am
I'd have to agree Sire. Why would you let someone else decide your fate? If you are serious about blogging then you need to be self hosting your websites.
June 1, 2010 at 8:39 am
“I have been using Google's Blogger for some 8 months now with great success. It is possible to build a solid readership in a short time using the tool, and it is very user friendly.
June 1, 2010 at 11:50 pm
My blog already 1 and half month old. At the moment it is already indexed by google and MSN but not yahoo. Why? Do we need resubmit or add URL to the search engine each time we update our blog? Thanks…
June 4, 2010 at 3:28 am
@Win Money Online: Absolutely. You are almost untouchable since it is your own blog. Unless of course you do something really illegal or other stupid things.
June 4, 2010 at 3:32 am
@Mitch: Hi Mitch. I guess only if they knew someone real close to them lose their blog for no reason will they get worried. Most people think that if they keep their blogs clean, then there is nothing to worry about. Not true anymore I guess.
June 4, 2010 at 4:19 am
I used blogger for a year and never benefited from any of the hard work i done, i have since moved on and happy i did, nice post
June 4, 2010 at 4:30 am
@make genuine cash: You are wise and glad you found out before it's too late.
June 4, 2010 at 9:39 am
PeterLee,
great post. I agree completely, if you build niche websites for making money with AdSense or Affiliate programs like Ebay and Amazon, please put some effort into building the sites and fill them with unique and good content, create several pages and make it worth while for a visitor to visit your site!
June 4, 2010 at 10:19 am
@Petra Weiss: Hi Petra, thanks for dropping by. Yes I agree with you. It's important to give good visitor experience when they arrived at your website. First impressions last forever too.
June 5, 2010 at 8:11 pm
that is very good to know. It is real scary at the beginning because adsense is the easiest way to make money…. That is you disrespect the big G you are going to have a hard time to catch up.
June 6, 2010 at 7:42 am
@Win Money Online: Hi Brian, yes indeed, so the best way to avoid this unnecessary worrying is host your own blog. Better safe than sorry.
June 8, 2010 at 3:51 pm
Great post thanks for the advice, I think it might be time for me to make a few changes, thanks again
June 8, 2010 at 7:10 pm
@Russell: Thanks for your comment. Appreciated.
June 13, 2010 at 10:42 pm
You can find plenty of duplicate content in Google's Main Web Index. They don't really care if they index duplicate content as long as their users don't complain, and in many queries users often find duplicate content to be acceptable.
June 14, 2010 at 2:55 am
well, We add and update new sites to our index each time we crawl the web, and we invite you!
July 23, 2010 at 12:42 pm
Information such as this deserves our thumbs up. Seldom we can read a code of warning with a touch of concern. Look forward to reading more.
July 23, 2010 at 5:42 pm
Information such as this deserves our thumbs up. Seldom we can read a code of warning with a touch of concern. Look forward to reading more.
July 31, 2010 at 12:29 pm
Good post Peter.
I have quite a few blog sites now that have Adsense on and are populated with auto blogging content. I'm sensible and always include some original content as well, but if google ever did decide to de index these sites, it would love a bit of a whole in my business.
Matt
August 3, 2010 at 5:45 am
@I'm always fearful of using autoblogging features. Be careful since you are doing it.
February 10, 2011 at 4:49 am
You are almost untouchable since it is your own blog. Unless of course you do something really illegal or other stupid things.
March 16, 2011 at 11:24 am
Thanks for this informtion as I like your post as I am also having a blog but didn't having any adsense account. Whenever i request for the adsense account it come oending only. Tell me how will I get Adsense account so that I can also earn money from my blog.
March 16, 2011 at 11:30 am
Your blog should have sufficient content and of good quality and unique content as well. Avoid putting any ads during the period of Google's review. If it is new try to get some traffic like join a few online forums as you're bound to get some traffic this way.