Adsense or Authority Site?

Published on this site: November 1st, 2006 - See more articles from this month

There was recently a clash of the gurus over whether or not AdSense is dead. You probably got all the emails too. No, I haven't bought anything from these emails; I just wanted to comment on the idea that AdSense sites are dead.

First of all, you have to define what constitutes an AdSense site. As I see it, there are several types. Some the search engines are working on killing; others will continue to work just fine.

Search engines are trying hard to drop the auto generated junk sites, or scrapers. While they can get rankings for a short time, they are very prone to being dropped completely. You can make these and might even earn money off them, but you will have to keep making more to keep up your income, and they are likely to disappear faster and faster.

Premade AdSense sites are a mixed bag. The trouble is that many people may buy and put up the same site. How the sites are made can in part determine their success or failure.

Sites made exclusively with articles from article sites have the advantage that every person will choose different articles and the disadvantage that some articles will be on an amazing number of sites.

Private label articles have similar advantages and disadvantages, although grouped articles are more prone to all being on individual sites, making entire sites more likely to match.

However, private label articles also have the advantage that you can modify the articles themselves freely. Anything from changing a few words to adding or deleting sentences to complete rewrites is acceptable.

Authority sites are built to be highly informative for the visitor, in a format that is highly usable. They're dynamic, so the search engines and your users always have something new to read.

Honestly, I don't see authority sites as anything new - just a repackaging of one way to build AdSense sites. They're simply a reminder that no matter where you get your content, you need to think of your users as well as the search engines in order for your site to last a long time and earn good money.

What kinds of sites do I think will last? I don't care what name you call them by, but sites that give visitors what they want are always the best. This means you will probably need to go dynamic at least a little, so that your information is more up to date, and you will need to keep an eye on what brings in the most visitors, so that you can make more interesting pages for them.

Any site can survive, even if it is not dynamic, if it has what your visitors want. That includes private label article sites and sites built with articles from article sites. When you build a site, stop to think about what will be useful and last a long time, rather than just what will be fast to build. You'll do a lot for your business if you plan for the long term.

Stephanie Foster - runs http://www.aspectsofhomebusiness.com/ and tries to keep realistic about what is and is not working for her home business. You can read her blog at http://www.aspectsofhomebusiness.com/blog/ to see the kinds of things she finds helpful to her home business.