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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

"I can only imagine that going up as Google starts to recognise this as quality content and not just content farm rubbish."

Uh, no. It will go up as a function of traffic volume, so as your site starts to rank higher organically you'll see more revenue but the amount paid isn't a function of the 'quality' of the web site, its a function of what people bid to be there and what they pay per click.

Note that if it goes up really suddenly your likely as not to have your AdSense account suspended/cancelled, which after a lengthy review process they may re-instate but Google may not (according to web reports) ever replaced the ad-revenue you lost while you were in this process.

That said, it is great you are making this information available again. If such efforts create a modest return then perhaps the archivists job is once again secure.

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I think you're misinterpreting what the OP means when he says that quote.

The way I read it, the OP was not saying that his AdSense payments would increase because he got higher bids for the ads due to higher quality content, but rather that as Google started to recognize that it was quality content, the PageRank of his site would go up, display it more prominently and generating more views and uniques.

I could be mistaken, but that interpretation seems to make a fair amount of logical sense.

Yeah that was my meaning. Adsense income once you're in a certain vertical (car repairs in my case) is just a factor of traffic. Traffic comes from Google Pagerank for this sort of site. So to be clearer, I'm hoping that Google's algorithms decide this is quality content and give me a bit of a boost - at least that was my understanding of the Panda update (admittedly ages ago).

PageRank is based on links, not on content. His PageRank will only go up if he gets more inbound links to the site.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

I think the point was that Google spend a lot of effort to identify quality content vs. link farms, auto-generated content and low quality adsense-optimized content.

yes, but PageRank is a specific term with a specific meaning. It is a rank based on the number and quality of links to your site.

To say that PageRank will increase because the content is good quality is wrong, and I was just pointing that out.

What he meant to say was "... the search engine rankings of his site would go up..."

You're right, I misspoke when I said PageRank. The gist was the some though: higher quality content -> better search rankings (either through links due to higher quality content or google's non-PageRank algorithms).

The OP did have an advantage that not every archivist benefits from: permission from the copyright holders.

are you sure of this ? - How does one go about acquiring such a copyright?

Sorry I wasn't clear - I meant that traffic to the site would only go up as Google recognises meaningful content.

No worries, organic growth is a function of longevity. So to some extent you don't have much to do. Of course if you want, you can sign up for AdWords and get something like a free $100 credit just for signing up. Then you spend that by buying keywords that people might use for a query that your page would answer. That is called 'search engine marketing' (SEM) and once you burn through the free stuff you'll have to decide if its worth buying more ads or not.

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