A couple of "route finder" reviews posts on an old personal blog of mine suddenly did well on Google and, as was the trend, I had Adsense on my site. Just from those few posts, I earned between $2000-$5000 most months of that year (with one stray month just shy of $10000) and did little "real" work that year. In 2009, Google penalized the blog because I got greedy and started running "text link ads" on the front page (dumb idea). Traffic crashed and the income stream disappeared.
I eventually got the penalty lifted but by then a lot of people had figured out that ranking highly for the names of the top route finders was a goldmine and now my posts are on page 2 rather than in the top 5 results and make rather little.
Interesting while it lasted but the work I'm doing now to produce an income feels more rewarding than checking Adsense 20 times a day ;-)
Online driving route apps like Rand McNally, etc. Thinking about it, these sites must have been hurt a lot by the features in Google Maps in recent years..
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I had that happen to me for most of 2008.
A couple of "route finder" reviews posts on an old personal blog of mine suddenly did well on Google and, as was the trend, I had Adsense on my site. Just from those few posts, I earned between $2000-$5000 most months of that year (with one stray month just shy of $10000) and did little "real" work that year. In 2009, Google penalized the blog because I got greedy and started running "text link ads" on the front page (dumb idea). Traffic crashed and the income stream disappeared.
I eventually got the penalty lifted but by then a lot of people had figured out that ranking highly for the names of the top route finders was a goldmine and now my posts are on page 2 rather than in the top 5 results and make rather little.
Interesting while it lasted but the work I'm doing now to produce an income feels more rewarding than checking Adsense 20 times a day ;-)
What do you mean by route finders?
Online driving route apps like Rand McNally, etc. Thinking about it, these sites must have been hurt a lot by the features in Google Maps in recent years..