If you’re a blogger or web publisher you’ve no doubt had it drilled into your head over and over again that content is king and if you have any hope of making a living online then you’d better be sure to write some insightful and, more importantly, unique content for your sites. In my experiences this is mostly true but if your aim is to earn money from Adsense then things might not be so cut and dry.

Take this page about backpacking Canada that is a part of my budget travel site as an example. It was never my intention to whack up a useless page such as this filled only with ads, a brief blurb about Canada, menu items that can’t be clicked on and a ’site coming soon’ statement. I can’t believe I’m actually even drawing attention to it because I hate pages like this. It’s my secret shame!

I had intended to build a full Canadian section of the site, really I did, but just haven’t had the time. One of these days I will, but in the meantime the page has been an interesting little case study. It gets a little bit of traffic from Google and has a massive Adsense click through rate. While it hasn’t made me rich or anything, it’s earning a lot more than it deserves to.

I never intended to build this page solely to raise my Adsense earnings, things just sort of turned out that way. On one hand I’m quite pleased with the little bit of surprise income it generates, but on the other hand it doesn’t add any value to anyone but me and I feel sort of like a spammer.

It seems as though sites have popped up all over the web that give just enough information to rank in the search engines but not nearly enough to be useful. They’re plastered in Adsense and I wonder sometimes whether Google’s mighty ad program might be clogging the internet with spammy websites such as my own uber crap Canadian backpacking page.

What say ye?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS