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There is nothing about adsense in particular, or creating sites with that as a model of monetisation that means it is spam. Yes - lots of spammy sites do use adsense or amazon affiliate. However so do lots of good sites and plenty of other things in between.  I would though agree that your focus on articles & backlinks does sound more like the sort of discussion I hear at that end of the market. We run a couple of mid-sized adsense sites and do pretty well out of the - enough to have regular face to face meet-ups with an Adsense account manager.  You can imagine that I wouldn't be too keen to walk in to Google's office to discuss those sites if they were spam! Increasing adsense earnings is complex. The obvious things can be counter productive in the long term.  For instance trying to push the click through rate through the ceiling on key landing pages seems like a no-brainer way to increase earnings.  Longer terms though that sends some questionable signals (both back to search quanlity and in terms of the ad quality) and you can seen both traffic and CPC decrease. What will work is going to differ from site to site.  One thing that is working well across the board is to serve the adverts through DFP (doubleclick for publishers) rather than directly with the usual adsense code. Using DFP not only makes is easier for advertisers to specifically target your site, but means that you can sell ads directly.  Adsense is an auction, so selling ads directly in fuels that auction and can help drive click prices up.  Direct selling also usually commands a far higher price - so we're quite keen on this! Using DFP also means that you can use other networks to compete against adsense. My other tip would be to try not to focus too much on the earnings per visit.  The logical end-point of that thinking it just to immediately bounce people out of the site by the quickest and highest paying means possible.  If you are getting your traffic from google then immediately sending them back out to Google your site has no value.  If you want to sustain the sites long term (which as sites are expensive and timeconsuming to build, you probably do), then you need to build on the site and keep adding value in to it.  Repeat visits is one of the best ways to measure if you are doing that well.

Welcome to Moz, Papp. We are glad you are here! EGOL is one of the most active members in our community, and has offered you some excellent advice on successfully using the Q&A forum. I look forward to seeing your future questions, and wish you the best of luck! ~ Christy