Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I make 15K a month at AdSense

blackhatworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 84 posts

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#71

Post by gojomo »

cedsav wrote: post #42
gojomo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why Google would spent cpu time on this CPU time is cheap, and it could be useful ranking information. Compared to an H1 tag, a graphical header is harder to create, so it shows a certain level of investment. If the words in the graphic aren't repeated elsewhere in the page, then the page author may be naive in the ways of SEO. But that could be good, because the savvy SEO people are all trying to pull one over on th…

CPU time may be cheap, but Google has billions of page and images to index. If they were able to extract text from images, they'd probably use it for their image search. I'm also not convinced that the header image is a good indicator of relevancy.

Tens or hundreds of billions of pages -- but many, many fewer images. Images repeat across a site, and change much less often than text. Header and navigational images are easy to pick out and also relatively easy to OCR. (These images are not trying to be inscrutable, like CAPTCHAs.)

Further: Google has an intense interest in OCR, adopting the open-source 'Tesseract' project, spending millions on scanning first catalogs then books and journals, and most recently announcing they are OCRing bitmaps in PDFs:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/picture-of-thousand-w...

Finally: any reasoning based on Google being miserly with cycles is going to be wrong. (They invest a lot in efficiency, yes, but that's so that they can spend cycles freely to collect data.)

It's possible they ran an experiment and found text in embedded/header images was no better than inline text. (I doubt they would find such a thing, because generally indicators of sustained effort -- careful design, site longevity, good writing -- are also indicators of site quality.) But there's zero chance the CPU cost or scale deterred Google from testing the idea.

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#72

Post by vchakra »

AndrewWarner wrote: post #4
tptacek wrote: post #3

This sounds suspiciously like A Real Job.

It really is. That's why I don't understand why he wouldn't channel that creativity towards a business that has more meaning. Still, he he won't, you and I can by learning from him. Seems like a smart guy.

I dont understand why you would call this a business that doesnt have much meaning. Hes basically a more modern version of newspapers, and magazines. They hire editors, and content producers, pick topics of interest, and make money off of advertising.

So from my perspective hes just a smaller scale Rupert Murdoch.

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#73

Post by derefr »

gojomo wrote: post #71
cedsav wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPU time may be cheap, but Google has billions of page and images to index. If they were able to extract text from images, they'd probably use it for their image search. I'm also not convinced that the header image is a good indicator of relevancy.

Tens or hundreds of billions of pages -- but many, many fewer images. Images repeat across a site, and change much less often than text. Header and navigational images are easy to pick out and also relatively easy to OCR. (These images are not trying to be inscrutable, like CAPTCHAs.) Further: Google has an intense interest in OCR, adopting the open-source 'Tesseract' project, spending millions on scanning first cata…

Just one additional reason, to add to your own: the original intent of YouTube, as I recall, was to OCR video for search indexing, which was a lot more complicated and processor-intensive than even OCRing pictures. Google bought YouTube; obviously this tech, laying about somewhere in their archives, came with the acquisition.

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#74

Post by cedsav »

run4yourlives wrote: post #67
amouat wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $8 a pop? I expect they're complete drivel.

I found this site as a "sample" of SEO writing from the guy he links to. Seems to be high enough quality to me. http://www.businessaviationtraining.com/

That's not a made-for-adsense site. It's heavy on SEO, and looks indeed like high quality content, but for a different purpose. The content on a made-for-adsense site is designed to look good enough to fool Google, yet not helpful enough so the visitor has to click on a ad link to find something better.

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#75

Post by cedsav »

gojomo wrote: post #71
cedsav wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPU time may be cheap, but Google has billions of page and images to index. If they were able to extract text from images, they'd probably use it for their image search. I'm also not convinced that the header image is a good indicator of relevancy.

Tens or hundreds of billions of pages -- but many, many fewer images. Images repeat across a site, and change much less often than text. Header and navigational images are easy to pick out and also relatively easy to OCR. (These images are not trying to be inscrutable, like CAPTCHAs.) Further: Google has an intense interest in OCR, adopting the open-source 'Tesseract' project, spending millions on scanning first cata…

I wouldn't be surprised they tested it. I agree with you on that.

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#76

Post by curej »

axod wrote: post #19

Here's another you've probably never heard of. http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=345974 (Guy owns some websites you've likely never heard of, not getting masses of traffic, but he knows how to do PPC and make money). The thread is from 2005, and at that point he was spending $300k a month on adwords, and making a ton more from affiliate networks including adsense. (Attached bank statement screenshots)…

What's a good place to start learning about this, if you wanted to try it out? The site you linked to?

I have a suspicion I would suck at this or would not be willing to stick it through long enough to be successful - sounds like a lot of busywork - but I'm definitely curious to know more.

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#77

Post by cedsav »

run4yourlives wrote: post #66
cedsav wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not providing any useful service. He's taking traffic and ad revenues away from legitimate sites while providing low quality content, which wastes people's time (hence they navigate away clicking the only links available: ads).

99% of the web is low quality drivel, often wrong, misinformed and uneducated opinion pieces. If he was writing all of that content himself would you still have a problem? If not, then what makes him any different than any other two bit blogger - you (presumably) and I included? If outsourcing is your problem, then that's another story altogether. The provider he linked to seems to output relatively high quality piec…

Everyone in the media/blog industry write with an eye on optimizing advertising revenues. The difference I guess is how much you care about what you write and how much you care about your readership (your integrity if you will).

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#78

Post by Shamiq »

curej wrote: post #76
axod wrote: post #19

Here's another you've probably never heard of. http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=345974 (Guy owns some websites you've likely never heard of, not getting masses of traffic, but he knows how to do PPC and make money). The thread is from 2005, and at that point he was spending $300k a month on adwords, and making a ton more from affiliate networks including adsense. (Attached bank statement screenshots)…

What's a good place to start learning about this, if you wanted to try it out? The site you linked to? I have a suspicion I would suck at this or would not be willing to stick it through long enough to be successful - sounds like a lot of busywork - but I'm definitely curious to know more.

hm...if it's "busywork" you'd think it would be computationally tractable.

That, would be interesting.

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#79

Post by fatbat »

Does anybody else see an opportunity from the interest of the other posters?

On a seperate note though, how does the top keyword provider mine the google trends data without Google flagging their IPs, etc.?

Re: How I make 15K a month at AdSense

#80

Post by gojomo »

run4yourlives wrote: post #69
gojomo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google provides a lot of this data to advertisers -- so they bid for more word combinations. Even though Made-For-AdSense microsites are polluting the infosphere, in the short term they probably even make Google money. Overstuffing natural results with repetitive, poorly-written information? Great, you're more likely to click a paid ad instead! Making it so all the top 10 natural results are AdSense-holding pages? Gr…

Making it so all the top 10 natural results are AdSense-holding pages? Actually, that's probably the one area Google won't go for, but it results in a smaller pool of people to make money off of, as consumers can't get the right answers to their questions. The key needs to be high-quality content delivery. Without that, you leave yourself vulnerable to being banned.

Yet: there's an inherent tension. Unless there's a credible threat people will go to another engine for natural results, for Google to degrade their own natural results slightly can improve Google's quarterly revenues!

Let's say Google is A/B testing a ranking tweak. Option A results in more searches (because people don't find exactly what they're looking for on the first try), and more clicks on ads (because they look relatively better). Option B results in one click on a natural result and nothing further.

Are we sure they'll always choose option B?

Maybe Google can add a new advanced operator: [-src:googlesyndication.com]. That is, don't return results that 'source' (as in ) Google ad units.

I won't hold my breath.

Post reply on HN