Great SEO case study.

Exact match keyword domain + links = traffic.

http://www.semrush.com/search.php?q=mortgagecalculator.net&x=0&y=0

Yes, I think affiliate links pose much less of a threat to Google rankings than Adsense but when speaking about affiliate links the key is original content.

Many people simply build sites with hundreds of affiliate links to Amazon using copy from product descriptions which is nothing more than duplicate content so it takes skill to use the affiliate links in the right way but if done right I would bet a site without Adsense would rank higher than one with.

As for other revenue models – there are many more than just Adsense such as surehits, leadpoint and more.

I remember Ron Jackson wrote about insurancequote.com and how it was such a great site. This is NOT any kind of diss on the owners of this domains since it is a great site however when you know development, graphic design and the revenue models outside of Adsense this site (as nice as it is) really would take about an hour to create. Of course, writing the content takes time, creativity and research but the layout and revenue model is nothing more than an affiliate program of PPC ads served by surehits – basically another adsense for the newbie.

I wrote an article a while back about how mini-sites (in their CURRENT form) suck and this website is a pure example of what mini-site providers could do but still charge the same instead of churning out sites that all look the same. Many people might think a lot of work went into this but … again, take away the content which IS time consuming … the graphic design and ad code is an hour at most.

Now getting approved and maintaining the quality standards for grade A revenue models like surehits is not as easy as one would think but if you can deliver quality traffic then it opens up the ability to use these fully customizable programs which happen to become part of your site rather than a box of text links to the right. Design wise they look much better and unique and with insurancequote.com I would be willing to bet that the same site with the same content splashed with Adsense Ads all over would never be on page #1 of the results for the term “insurance quote” in Google.

My best advice would be take one of your good domains – build it out using NO ads or affiliate links for 3 months. Just build, build, and build the content for three months – then start adding some ads.

Is it your view that an affiliate link to, say Amazon, won’t ‘penalize’ your site rankings as much as Adsense, if placed on a new site within the first month or two?

Thanks for your post.

Nice post. In the ‘competitive’ keyword space that this domain is in, the 1600+ backlinks that they have has a great influence on their rank in google.

But I agree with you, that google on sites is thinking in terms of pennies !!

- Richard.

Many sites exist with Adsense in the search results but very few stories are ever told where an owner makes more than a couple dollars a day after launching a mini-site with 3 sets of Google Ads so the growth of these sites with Adsense and little content submitted to search engines is certainly not something that should make anyone jump to develop imo.

I’ve always viewed Adsense as something to complement your site once the content is built – not something to start with. About 6 months ago we launched a site with no ads and now get about 5,000 people a month to it – still a while before we add any Adsense ads if we ever do. There are so many other good revenue models that seem not to be critiqued by Google and the like as much as Adsense imo.

My favorite quote is “Stop thinking in cents. Anybody can make a buck” – sometimes I think many first time developers see the cents and can’t seem to visualize the long term.

Adsense is the pennies in my opinion and this is coming from someone who has made over $1.5 million from Adsense so I should love it but Google can turn on you at any given moment – we have been at their wrath a few times. So the faster you can build content and get indexed the better long term picture – a couple dollars a day to slow that growth is just not worth it imo but hey, its all one big theory that changes day after day isn’t it