Dave and Jay - Crazy Web Entrepreneurs

In my last post, I mentioned how I pushed to build a large number of sites late last year and how that has got us into trouble now. You’re probably wondering how we did this and the simple answer is LinkMetro.com. Last year, things were a lot different. You could put tiny 50×50 images beside your Google Adsense boxes, increasing your CTR to ridiculous levels and Adsense was paying us a lot more per click then they are now. So at the time it made sense to build basically a lot of spam sites. The plan was to get them ranked on MSN with Link Metro and then late in the year start building them into legitimate sites one by one. Sure that seems really stupid in retrospect, but at the time (as Jason mentioned in one of his previous posts) we were basically making about $100 per hour of the work we put in, and we outsourced all the LinkMetro link building to emerging economies so we didn’t actually have to do any of the tedious repetitive work ourselves.

LinkMetro is basically a service that allows you to setup reciprocal links with other websites that are members automatically. We used the service to get hundreds of anchor text links for our sites that pushed us to the first page of MSN for our desired keyword (and in some cases page one of Google as well). Once we started doing that, it was very difficult to stop the process…basically you’re putting in a little bit of work, a little bit of money and receiving a large return on that investment. You’re probably thinking “You’re stupid, I can’t believe you did that”, but I bet if you were in our situation where your income was growing by about $1000 every month you’d continue to build the sites in that manner too.

So why did we stop? Basically, we aborted early because LinkMetro stopped working. It was not getting us to page one of MSN anymore and so it was no longer financially viable to invest the money and time to build more sites. Furthermore, I’m 99% sure the link profile from LinkMetro, even though all software and links have been removed from our quality sites, is the chief reason we are being filtered by Google and Yahoo.

We’re still making about $1200ish a month on Adsense and we have several other projects that earn money in other ways, so that gives us a good base to build from - but we’ve learned our lesson. We’re now starting from scratch and will be building quality sites from the ground up.

Good Profits.