So I thought I had this brilliant idea for making money. I still think it is a brilliant idea but Google’s search engine is too smart. I want to tell you what I tried so you know what will not work. I went an automation route for generating web pages. I am talking not 100s or 1,000s but 10s of millions of web pages. All of them contained advertisements. I wish I knew these rules when I started, as I would saved a lot of time.
Rule 1)
Learn SEO or search engine optimization. This is critical.
Rule 2)
Don’t duplicate content already on the web somewhere, even if it is a unique combination of duplicated content. You will not get Google to refer to your site. Even if you take a paragraph here and a paragraph there, Google will not index the web page. They may initially index it but not long-term.
I learned how to web scrape using BeautifulSoup (a Python library). I took an abstract from PubMed/NCBI, a paragraph from Wikipedia, patent related information, and a related YouTube video automatically. Google would not index these. I had 30 million of these web pages. Not one of them were indexed. Thanks a lot, Google.
I automated all of this using Django. I created an auto-search engine that randomized words in a dictionary into a list, searched for related documents, and had them auto-posted onto a website. These actually are my biggest money makers and they do get indexed and I am planning on doing many more. I mainly searched for PDF documents. I have downloaded over 100k PDF documents. I did not want to post them myself because of copyright issues. I used <iframe> to show the home address of the PDF. I did not want to get caught up in any law suits. I am just pointing to another website basically. About 3% of my views on my other website (was a Heroku app which I shut down because it was costing me money – in the hole) were these PDF iframe web pages. I like these and I think these hold promise. I do a bit more on the web page though to get it to be indexed. I automatically read the PDF document, it extracts information from it, gets page numbers, authors, keywords, etc. All of this information is also on the web page.
Previously, I had search engine for my PDF database using Django and the Heroku app but it never got used. I had over 100k PDFs in my database and no one used it so I got rid of the search engine. There are better PDF search engines out there so mine never took off.
I had links on a website that search engines, such as Google, would read, where if you went to the web page, it then generated a webpage. I had millions of these links. Again, these were paragraphs taken from multiple sources all related to a particular topic. None of these were indexed. No one ever visited them.
Rule 3)
Use the proper HTML formatting techniques so that search engine bots can get very useful information about the web page from the HTML (This is related to learning SEO.)
Rule 4)
Create and submit sitemaps to major search engines (i.e., Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo). In my opinion, the mentioned list here are the top search engines.
Rule 5)
Lastly, I’d like to start by saying, do not try to trick Google by making or asking others to click on your ads as this will get you banned from AdSense.
Good luck in all your endeavors!