seolounge
My other site runs community news, so I receive press releases from businesses, city hall, civic groups, etc. on a regular basis. Last Friday, I received a news release from the county sheriff’s department about three women who were arrested at a local hotel for prostitution. This was pretty scandalous AND there were mugshots, so of course, I was happy to post it.
So, now I’m ranking #1 for Lafayette IN Prostitution and my friends are teasing me mercilessly. There is a nice little bump in traffic and it’s been fun to see who’s searching for what and ending up on that article.
The other interesting thing I’ve been keeping an eye on is what ads are showing in my AdSense now. The last time I ran a story about a topic that contained a lot of highly suspect keywords AdSense freaked out. (Short version: 60 year old pedophile was soliciting what he thought were 15 year old girls in a chatroom for sex — turned out to be cops.) Anyway, all of the ads on my site switched to PSAs for like two weeks (and as you probably know, you don’t get paid for Public Service Announcements) and it sucked. Since then, I’ve diversified my income streams quite a bit so I don’t actually care if AdSense disappears on me for a couple weeks; however, it is interesting to watch just in terms of how the story is treated.
It doesn’t look like the ads have kicked over to just PSAs yet, but my AdSense revenue over the weekend fell through the floor. If anything changes I’ll be sure to post an update.
How are you getting around duplicate content issues that arise when the same press release is up on other sites? Are these organizations sending these articles to you directly or are you able to grab them off an RSS feed of sorts?
They send me press releases via email… I have very little stuff that comes off of an RSS wire feed. So there’s no competition with automated sites posting stuff.
Also, I compulsively check email every 5 seconds, and I’ll handle posting something that looks hot as soon as is comes in, which is the kind of turn around the local newspaper website and tv/radio stations don’t/can’t do. So I have it online first, and Lafayette Online tends to get crawled more frequently than most of the other local sites, so I get to be flagged as the first site with the content 🙂