Buying Websites Banned By Adsense - Do You Do It? / How Do You Value?

[ChrisGuthrie]

Every now and then I get emails from people asking for advice on how to get their Adsense account re-instated because they just had their account banned.

I almost always point them to these types of links:

http://support.google.com/adsense/bi...722&page=ts.cs
https://support.google.com/adsense/b...on_appeal&rd=1

But I've considered offering to buy sites like these and do one of two things:

1. Get them re-instated myself (not guaranteed, but I could trying playing the "I'm a new owner card / I've fixed the violations" and see how that pans out [I'm in the process of playing that card right now])
2. Switch them over to other monetization methods. These would vary by niche of course but often times just switching over to text based affiliate links to sell the products that were normally being pitched in the Adsense ads can work really well too.

My assumption is that the website owners that get banned really have no idea how to make this money back without adsense so they're probably alright with just dumping the sites.

So my question is two fold:

1. Have you ever bought a website you already knew was banned by Adsense
2. How have you valued websites like these?

I'll leave my opinions to myself on the two questions above, but I'd love to hear what you think.

Chris

[Clinton]

Good topic for discussion, Chris.

Some years ago I tried just this. I ran WTB threads in Sitepiont and DigitalPoint looking for sites that had been banned by Adsense.

With respect your first plan, I don't believe it has much mileage. Google generally don't reinstate sites just because they have new owners (though I must admit one of my long owned sites got reinstated thanks to some inside help from someone I know on the Adsense team).

Adsense is the lazy way to earn money. There have been several cases of webmasters saying that getting banned was the best thing that happened to them as they were forced to explore other avenues and ended up making even more money than they did under Adsense. Speaking for myself, I'm not into testing and tweaking and optimising earnings. You could say I'm a lazy sod.

But I'll share a good example. paid2review.co.uk came up for sale in Flippa for the second time recently. Flippa even made a blogpost about it. This is an interesting site because it has competed with my own article for the #1 spot in Google UK for Make Money Online, a spot I've held for most part of the last several years.. At times paid2review overtook mine in the SERPs. So when it came up for sale the first time I was very interested in buying it and I got copies of all the stats.

This site was aggressively monetised with various affiliate programs while mine used just Adsense. It was an interesting comparison because I got to see what exactly the same traffic as I was getting would make if monetised "properly" with affilate programs. Let's just say his site's RPM was several multiples of mine! If mine was similarly "optimised" I would have earned an additional six figure sum (provided traffic levels remained the same). As you'll see from the Flippa blog post the new owner optimised the site even further!

So, yes, there's mileage in taking Adsense sites - whether banned or not - out of Adsense and into affiliate programs. Or even to selling a product you create specifically for that market.

How do you value such sites? It helps if you know what similar sites (with similar traffic) make via affiliate programs. You need to study the traffic logs of the prospect site very carefully. Are those visitors from the same country? Do they come from the same type of referrers? (Some referrers convert far better than others). And, as usual, my advice is to avoid the site if it gets the majority of its traffic from a single source such as Google.

[DomainMagnate]

it's very difficult and rare to get a site reinstated no matter the cause. But you can always redirect everything to a new domain and put up adsense there, after removing the initial cause of the adsense ban.

It'd be great if the site is in a niche where you can use some affiliate programs, but almost always these are general niches with relatively low cpc and no aff ads. As long it's a good quality site and there are other ways of monetizing it and of course its cheap this is a good idea. But if you only plan is to try to reinstate the adsense account on the site I wouldn't risk it, the chances are slim.

[aaronc]

One of my favorite buying strategy is to purchase adsense sites that target product names such as white socks or baby strollers etc and turn them into amazon sites. Typically, my criteria is that:

- the products they target must be over 100USD in amazon so that at the 7% comission, you can get at least USD7 per sale.
- I can find good reviews for certain models so that I can promote them
- the sites are already ranking in the top 5 for its product category

Once the above conditions are meet, I find that I can usually make more money using amazon than adsense. So, I have made 4 investment during this method and the results have been satisfactory.

One small example is a recent wine site that I purchased for only USD100, which is making USD8-9 per month with adsense. I switch that over to amazon and now it is making about USD40+ per month (and about USD100 during Dec and Nov). There was no additional stuff that I did except to place three best rated product images on the home page for people to click to. I also removed adsense.

The great thing is that this site is ranking number one for a long tail variation. The main keyword is the second page. I believe with a little work, this site can easily make 200-300 per month once the main keyword gets to page one.

Hehe, I know this example is a very small investment but after getting burnt, I want to try out different investment strategies with smaller amounts of money first. I think my biggest mistake during the first year was not formulating a strategy and just buy buy buy. LOL

[Kay]

- I can find good reviews for certain models so that I can promote them

Please can you explain how to go about using other people's reviews whilst still being legal and/or ethical? In some countries it's illegal to include "reviews" on your site for products you may not have tried or used yourself. Yet it's something frequently recommended by MMOers as being a great tactic. They often suggest that you find other people's reviews and spin them. In other words, they recommend that writing shill reviews is a good way to make money.

I suppose one way to stay on the clean side might be to say, for example, "This product was rated very highly by XYZ Magazine..." along with an excerpt of the review (fair use of their content) and a link to the source. But then you've still got to figure out how to add value so that the customer will buy from you.

[aaronc]

I think my writing there really suck.

What I meant by 'finding good reviews' is not to use them but to find products that have good reviews.

I just paste the image of the product in my site and say 'this is the best rated product. Click here to read the reviews'. Off they go then to read the reviews. I didn't do any spinning at all.

I hope this is clearer

[ChrisGuthrie]

One of my favorite buying strategy is to purchase adsense sites that target product names such as white socks or baby strollers etc and turn them into amazon sites. Typically, my criteria is that:

- the products they target must be over 100USD in amazon so that at the 7% comission, you can get at least USD7 per sale.
- I can find good reviews for certain models so that I can promote them
- the sites are already ranking in the top 5 for its product category

Once the above conditions are meet, I find that I can usually make more money using amazon than adsense. So, I have made 4 investment during this method and the results have been satisfactory.

One small example is a recent wine site that I purchased for only USD100, which is making USD8-9 per month with adsense. I switch that over to amazon and now it is making about USD40+ per month (and about USD100 during Dec and Nov). There was no additional stuff that I did except to place three best rated product images on the home page for people to click to. I also removed adsense.

The great thing is that this site is ranking number one for a long tail variation. The main keyword is the second page. I believe with a little work, this site can easily make 200-300 per month once the main keyword gets to page one.

Hehe, I know this example is a very small investment but after getting burnt, I want to try out different investment strategies with smaller amounts of money first. I think my biggest mistake during the first year was not formulating a strategy and just buy buy buy. LOL

Good strategy. I've heard of a lot of buyers going after Adsense sites and then selling something else on them. I have a few recent Adsense focused buys and rather than just replace Adsense my strategy is to find and sell related Clickbank products off them instead.

[kmander]

Curious topic of discussion!

As has been well documented here, I used to be a former employee at Google (moreover, I was in the AdSense team).

I really respect Google and the confidentiality agreement I once had with them. That said, if you have any questions, post them here and I'll answer them the best I can.

Yes, sites can certainly be reinstated, especially if there's a new owner.

Keith