What The Hell Do We Do Now? –

See What Gauher Chaudhry Has To Say!

I have been in business for over 30 years.  In every business there are a number of stakeholders, all of whom provide value to the overall business.

In most cases the most important of these are customers/clients, “Those who buy your stuff”, and vendors, “Those who supply materials or services to make your business work”.

Every business worth its salt treats both sides of the business equation with equal value and respect.

Because……each are essential to the business.

Although, another rant about Google would seem somewhat pointless I believe that they have forgotten that their “vendors” – “Those who build websites and supply goods and services and advertising on the web” should be given the same respect and consideration as their customers/clients -“Those who search and surf and buy, etc”

We recognize the requirement to provide value to the end user and realize there are scammers and spammers out there, but just like any real business on the street, the customers in the end will determine the value of the business and whether it in fact should remain in business…..and this goes for websites as well.

It is intensely frustrating and disheartening to have many hours and many $’s of legitimate work and investment disregarded and devalued by La Grand “G”.

In a recent article, my friend Gauher Chaudhry made some very valid points about the whole situation”.  Here is what he had to say:

“I just recently had my Google Adsense account disabled after having it been active for over eight long years.

The reason?

Google sent me one of those canned auto emails below:

–>

Hello,

After reviewing our records, we’ve determined that your Adsense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due to invalid activity, we’ve found it necessary to disable your AdSense account. Your outstanding balance and Google’s share of the revenue will both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers.
Please understand that we need to take such steps to maintain the effectiveness of Google’s advertising system, particularly the advertiser-publisher relationship. We understand the inconvenience that this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions or concerns about the actions we’ve taken, how you can appeal this decision, or invalid activity in general, you can find more information by visiting
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

–>

What do they mean by my account “poses” a risk of invalid activity?  I think basically it means that I have not violated anything, but my account poses some sort of risk of generating bogus clicks.  The email doesn’t even tell me which of the dozens of sites I have running Adsense ads is causing the risk.  But Google is known for not telling much of anything when they ban advertisers and publishers.
At first when I saw this email, I was a bit annoyed.  But after a few minutes I just chuckled because I couldn’t believe how badly Google treats their advertisers, publishers and customers.  It could be very easy for one of my competitors to come to one of my web sites and generate bogus clicks on the Adsense ads.  Would that be my fault?”

He goes on to say that any website building who is trying to build a revenue model based on Google Adsense should reconsider.  I suggest you click on the link above and go read his whole article, and then subscribe to his newsletter because his material and thought processes are always on target.

Somehow in the quest to build an internet some players have become too powerful.  When millions of independent small businesses who bring G business and advertising revenue are treated with such distain this is a very disturbing trend.

So back to the title of my article “What the Hell Do We Do Now”?  I wish sincerely that I could tell you.

Back in January I was pleased when one of my sites achieved close to $500 for that month in Google Adsense revenue and I believed it was heading for $1000/month..  I am thinking, if I can do that with one site I can do it with 100 sites.

Right?…..Then Google decided that it did not like so much Adsense “Above the fold”.  So we had to reposition our ad blocks.

Problem is….revenue dropped by more than 50% when the visitors could no longer easily see the ads.  So my question is,  how does this improve the visitors ‘experience’ on this site?  It continues to include high value high quality content which is easy to find.

This just rendered my site and this business model unprofitable as it still requires the same time input for half the revenue.  Just to clarify, traffic stayed about the same even though G sandboxed the site for a couple weeks.  The site recovered for all keywords and traffic got back to normal.  Only thing that has really changed is the CTR (click through rate) which dropped from about 10% to below 5%.

So how does anyone benefit from this….I fail to see the answer.

Unfortunately, I really do not know “what the hell to do now” because….how can you play a game when the rules change in the middle of every period?

But…!

In the words of Winston Churchill:

“NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, SURRENDER”

Here is what we are going to do.  And….I hope these are the right moves!

1.    Continue to add new and valuable content to all sites.  Write and post articles based on “long tail keywords” that are regularly being searched for in our niches.
2.    Build a community around our niches and enter communities already out there on our topics.   This includes new Face Book fan pages and other social networking sites.
3.    Build links naturally by entering the internal conversations of our visitors.  (And encouraging their social likes, tweets, pins, etc).
4.    Build niche email lists and give people great value for being part of our lists.
5.    Try to ‘De-Googleify every activity we are involved in.

Big G really doesn’t give a sweet crap about you and me and all those website developers who have built the damn thing in the first place and that really sucks!

If I did that to my customers I wouldn’t have any!

I have to retract my recent recommendation about SEO Link Monster.  This is unfortunately a very good product that got sucked down in Google’s purge of blog networks.  I cancelled my own subscription, even though I believed this product was very well done.  Right idea but at the wrong time.

I have quoted Gauher Chaudhry above and would state that he is one of the good guys.  Visit his site and buy his stuff.  He is always ahead of the curve.

Meanwhile, we will try to reinvent our own game.

Stay tuned!