2017 Splogging Adsense Journey

KevinRB said:

With the scale that you are running at it is pure folly to think your Adsense account will survive....Google HATES publishers who run large networks of sites, realistically you should only display Adsense on sites once they are well indexed and getting meaningful amounts of daily traffic....and you should have x amount of sites per Adsense account....if not it will only end in personal heartache(been there got the teeshirt)

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totally agree, i highly advice to remove adsense for websites with low traffic

Unavailable said:

With more then 50 sites you still risk you adsense acc. Its clear they are MFA blogs. But who knows maybe you can at least get 2 or 3 payments before getting slaped
Good luck

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KevinRB said:

With the scale that you are running at it is pure folly to think your Adsense account will survive....Google HATES publishers who run large networks of sites, realistically you should only display Adsense on sites once they are well indexed and getting meaningful amounts of daily traffic....and you should have x amount of sites per Adsense account....if not it will only end in personal heartache(been there got the teeshirt)

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Unavailable said:

totally agree, i highly advice to remove adsense for websites with low traffic

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Appreciate your suggestions and concerns, but I'd rather let this journey unfold with the method I'm testing out. As I said I don't care if this adsense account gets a ban. At least you guys can watch from a safe distance, right?

What's motivating me to continue despite the risks? Let me show you a snap shot of my other adsense account which is 6 or 7 years old now.



See how many sites it has on it? 503. Is it banned to this day? No. Are most of the sites in there spam/MFA sites? Hell yeah. Have I cashed everything out? Yes sir. What I'm trying to do in this journey is to give structure in something I've dabbled in the past and scale it up. In the past I just kept creating sites at whim, sometimes forgot to renew domains and hosting because I could never properly record ROI, tried too many things, and was too busy with my day job.

Nice journey!

I had a somewhat similar story in 2011 with 50 websites pulling in 20 EUR/day. It all lasted under a year. It was a really bad timing as Google had this campaign to wipe out poor quality websites. Got deindexed and banned during the same year.

I usually don't copy the herd too and try to add my own flavor to the approach. I don't often use CMS just re-use my own plain php/html. I had my sites localized to one country/language so I had very low trafic, not much content and huge amount of clicks per visitor (all natural though).

This will be my last update for a while, as I will be leaving the splog network alone to grow (or die) by itself while I experiment with other methods. Rest assured I will update asap here if something drastic happens, which will be any one of the ff:

1. My splogs gets slapped
2. My adsense gets banned
3. I reach my targets earlier than the forecasts I will post below
4. I'm completely below target (25%+ error)

Here are the updates after 1 month of splogging.

Average earnings/day for the past 7 days: $13

I expect to end this month with roughly $290-$300.



The 947 new sites I put up for this journey are all growing but VERY slowly and contributing a measly $73.27 in the past month. However, traffic is growing very steadily. Full stats:



AdSense Experiments

I thought my niche would do well with text-only display units, so I ran a 10-day test for 35k of my ad impressions for "Text/Image vs Text Only Display" Ad Units. My RPM went down by 30%. I DO NOT suggest doing this test, it's a waste of time. Stick to Text/Image Display Ad Units -- Adsense is already pretty good at optimizing between them.



On the other hand, my current experiment shows more promise. I am blocking low-performing ad categories according to my niche and it is already resulting in 65% RPM increase after 14k impressions.

The Future: Targets & Expectations

Combining traffic & earnings data from my 53 pre-existing splogs (14 weeks old) and 947 splogs (4 weeks old), I'm setting the following targets for the next 50 weeks for the whole splog network:

After 10 weeks: recover 100% of costs (payback period)
After 2 months: $250/month
After 4 months: $570/month
After 6 months: $970/month
After 10 months: $1.5k/month
After 12 months: $1.9k/month

Regression analysis:



That's it for now. Thanks for tuning in so far. Expect next update in a month's time unless something unusual happens.

Care to share some info on what these sites look like?

Do they at least look like decent up to date/contemporary sites?

is the content readable?

blackbeans said:

Care to share some info on what these sites look like?

Do they at least look like decent up to date/contemporary sites?

is the content readable?

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Sure. They all use modern, mobile responsive themes. Apart from the theme I did not put logos/brand, design elements etc. so the pages look very dull and plain. Content is spun but readable. If you stumble upon one I'd say it looks decent enough -- to the trained eye it's an obvious splog. Long tails are in the headings and UL/OL. Standard adsense placements (responsive leaderboard in header, responsive links in header, links in sidebar, large rectangle ads in the posts).

Great Journey. Thank you.

I have a splog that makes me about $500 a month. Has been for about 2 years. From one article that I spun thousands of times.

Never even done indexing. What gets you sandboxed, the thin content or the indexing?

Maybe I have not been banned as the posts are a splog but the pages are unique content that people use often.

Gary Carlyle said:

Great Journey. Thank you.

I have a splog that makes me about $500 a month. Has been for about 2 years. From one article that I spun thousands of times.

Never even done indexing. What gets you sandboxed, the thin content or the indexing?

Maybe I have not been banned as the posts are a splog but the pages are unique content that people use often.

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Thanks for dropping by! Pretty cool that yours has been going on for 2 years -- this is the UK sports niche site?

I had some experiments over the past years where thin content penalty is the one that hits after about 1 year. I also think it's because I installed Google WMT/SC on it.

Adsense Experiment Fail

Ultimately, my latest adsense experiment did not work -- this is where I blocked most evergreen-ish niches.


So far 2 experiments failed. Again experiments work variedly on a case-to-case basis depending on your site, the point is to keep trying variations out but make sure to put some thought into it! It's really handy that Adsense has already integrated this into their system, make sure to use it to full benefit.

Next Experiment

Now I'm moving on to the next experiment -- blocking User-based ads (Interest-based and Third-party ads). Kind of scary since this means I'll be limiting my advertisers, but we must continue to test, test, test. I've been reading around that this may work better for my type of content.

Average earnings/day for the past 7 days: $11.5/day

Average daily earnings are less than before BUT they're more consistent going up and less volatile, with traffic increasing as well. This is good. This week I got a boost from some trending stuff happening in Europe and the Middle East. Looks like I'll hit my month 2 forecast of $250, hopefully breaking $300 now. Again all costs have been covered so this is pure passive profit moving forward.

Doesnt you get copywritted or anything other hurdle while doing splogging.

I also want to do splogging but i fear if somebody could fuck me or sue me.

Plz help

EagerToEarn said:

Doesnt you get copywritted or anything other hurdle while doing splogging.

I also want to do splogging but i fear if somebody could fuck me or sue me.

Plz help

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Just try it out. For small players the most you can get is a DMCA complaint, then you can just remove the post. You get whois privacy protection anyway for new domains. But if you want to completely avoid this, just think really hard about your content sources and how you can spin/augment the content to make it copyright safe. Of course, that's the one thing I can't reveal in this journey.

seyer said:

I've a list of RSS feeds which I then use to populate custom spun articles.

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you spin all by hand ???

W9go said:

you spin all by hand ???

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You mean per article? No, at the start I created spintax templates for each batch of sites so I can set and forget.

seyer said:

Just try it out. For small players the most you can get is a DMCA complaint, then you can just remove the post. You get whois privacy protection anyway for new domains. But if you want to completely avoid this, just think really hard about your content sources and how you can spin/augment the content to make it copyright safe. Of course, that's the one thing I can't reveal in this journey.

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I was thinking of that too. Big player like big news website could fuck us quickly.
But small and rising website can do DMCA complaint. Offshore take care of that.

I just want to know if there is chances that spun content can get copyright. I saw somewhere spinning can cause copyright issue.

seyer said:

You mean per article? No, at the start I created spintax templates for each batch of sites so I can set and forget.

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ok now i got it

How do you get the domains ect? Are you buying domains at 0.99p or how do you do this? And what auto software are you using to auto upload your blogs?

how do you get w/o to automate so many websites at once .

do you use a script to turn on multisites and make new wp blogs to a folder but auto .

how to get such code?

then you need to get add-on for the blog like
adsence now you need that added auto how?

must be a way ...

please help

AeroDynam said:

How do you get the domains ect? Are you buying domains at 0.99p or how do you do this?

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Yes, and some on subdomains/subfolders.

redarrow said:

how do you get w/o to automate so many websites at once .

do you use a script to turn on multisites and make new wp blogs to a folder but auto .

how to get such code?

then you need to get add-on for the blog like
adsence now you need that added auto how?

must be a way ...

please help

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Some scripts and tools will be able to help you. Sorry I'm not comfortable giving specifics/spoonfeeding, I had a hard time figuring out some of these as well! Maybe when I do a method thread instead of a journey thread. Least I can do is point people in the right direction in general and show what's possible.

Hope you guys understand, thanks

your adsense got banned? they give you any reason ?

alexdimac said:

your adsense got banned? they give you any reason ?

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Nope! It's just an adsense experiment that did not work. You can go to your adsense account > Optimization > experiments and try stuff out.