Mike Griffiths

A couple of nights ago I decided to do a little experiment. I was going to create a generic website with a few hundred pages of content, SEO the hell out of it, and see if I can earn anything from AdSense.

The website is All Phobias, and it lists every ‘known’ phobia out there. It’s written in PHP ontop of CodeIgniter. I created a small C app to scrape all of the data off a few different websites and generate some SQL for me. All in all the whole thing took about 4 hours to make. The design is some crappy free one I downloaded, as I’m not really interested in how it looks.

I’ve made sure every page has everything it should like unique titles, h1 tags and all the meta tags to go with it. I have also made a couple of blogs on external websites and made 5-10 posts on each, some linking to the site, and some not. I’ve submitted to some free submission sites, as well as linking from all of my major sites with a decent page rank.

I’ve submitted a hefty sitemap (I think there were 750 pages) to Google, but the domain is still in the incubation period, so I guess I’ll need to wait a couple of months to see any real progress.

Since the site went live 2 nights ago it’s earnt me a whopping £2. Which, to be honest, isn’t bad at all. If I can earn £1 a night from 2 nights work then I’ll be a happy man. Do the math on that, 15 sites per month, for 6 months, that would be ~£90 per day, or £2.7k a month. Not bad. My hope is that in 6-8 months time it will be top of Google for a lot of keywords ‘all phobias’, along with many of the actual phobia names and short descriptions (’fear of spiders’, for example), at which point the £1 a day would easily jump up to £5-10 per day, with a bit of luck.

I recently worked on and launched a website for a very large, and very well known global organisation. Within a couple of hours of the site being launched it was receiving thousands of unique visits every hour.

The website in question was quite busy, but the business it was involved in is quite light-hearted and probably not the most competitive in the world – not by a long shot.

This being said though, within a day of it’s launch the server was on it’s knees. After some quick tests and looking through the logs it was obvious there was a Denial of Service (DoS) attack going on. Not a very sophisticated attack, as I just added a few rules to the firewall to totally block it, but someone had still gone out of their way to attack the website from a handful of IPs from all around the globe. I traced the IPs and they came mostly from mainland Europe, each from various countries.

I find it quite amazing that someone has taken the time and effort to try and bring someone’s livelihood to it’s knees, for what appears to be no apparent reason. The website doesn’t have any real competitors so this attack seemed to be either totally random or an unprovoked malicious attack. Pointless either way. The site has since been running totally smoothly without a single hitch.