Okay this is sad and pathetic, or is it?!
I have a Google alert set up for a couple canine keyphrases, and one is “dogfood recall” – I recently received an email alert the same story from four different web sites….I don’t want to give them any credit, so I won’t be linking to their web sites, but the latest story was about the pet food recall back in 2007. It was the same story (same author) on at least four different web sites.
With additional digging around on google, I found interesting info regarding niche content websites. Yeah, I had an idea this was going on, but I didn’t realize how BIG it was. E-zine stories can be copied and published to a web site, and they wait for a few visitors to click through their “adsense” and other advertising links; because they have several web sites with different content, the $ starts to add up even with only a few visitor clicks from each page.
Sounds pathetic, yes, but people must be clicking the ads or they wouldn’t be doing it! The only salvation is hopefully Google is somehow banning them!
From wikipedia:
Online niche marketing
An often used technique for affiliate marketers. By seeking out smaller segments of larger markets, a website can be developed and promoted quickly to uniquely serve a targeted and usually loyal customer base, giving the affiliate a small but regular income stream. This technique is then repeated across several other niche websites until a desired income level is achieved
Moral of the story? Don’t support web sites like this by clicking on their ads! Give your support to web sites with original, helpful content, not a site that regurgitates e-zine content just to make some money.
