Finally finished my latest website: Home Business Australia.

I coul be blatant about it and say that it was written from an SEO perspective: using keywords in the url, having lots of content.

Also after doing research at the Google keyword tool, I realised that “work from home” and “work at home” are more American phrases, and that Aussies tend to look for “home business”. So I built a site to cater for those searchers. Also I saw how expensive the “home business australia” keywords were at AdWords. So it just made sense - the standard catchphrase.

If I was really competitive, I’d see how long it took to rank for a competitive keyword phrase. But I won’t have much time before Christmas - still painting the attic, and really need to clean out the storeroom. So there’s not a lot of time to write articles, which I still think is one of the best ways to increase rankings at search engines.

This is the first external link to www.homebusinessaustralia.com.au. See how it goes in boosting indexing.

I’ve dabbled with Google AdWords advertising for personal sites on a small budget over the years, with a fair bit of success. My most targetted traffic I get for around 6 cents a click, and has been as low as 3 cents. It’s very targetted. So I keep it chugging along.

About two weeks ago I thought I’d experiment with a more expensive area - the “work from home” field. Clicks are pretty expensive if you want to rank well - even $1.50 for an extremely targetted ad and landing page rarely gets page one results.

Based on conversion cost, it looks like being worthwhile so far. Money I’ve spent has been completely recouped with interest.

But the spam has been oppressive.

My goal was to get people to enter their contact details, so I could follow them up. I had an autoresponder in place, but would additionally contact people personally. I have a contact form to collect details, so I don’t expose my email address.

It was an old site I hadn’t touched for years. It wasn’t ranking on search engines for my preferred words (given that I hadn’t maintained it), so it wasn’t getting any traffic.

So now I am paying for traffic.

And I appear to be paying for abuse and obscenities.

Over half the paid traffic contains profanities. People who have clicked on my paid ads at Google, purely to enter their obscene descriptions, linking back to their obscene sites.

It’s hard to tell at this point whether it is automated traffic or not. But if it is, the fact that robots are visiting sites advertised on Google AdWords, and I am being charged for it, doesn’t seem right.

I validate server-side for valid email addresses. Most seem to be a .ru email address.
But it gets my goat that Google doesn’t seem able to prevent this.

I’ve emailed Google to see what the procedure is. Surely they should allow chargebacks for obvious spam sent through paid links.

I wanted to be able to recommend AdWords as a good way of generating leads for this field. But I have to hesitate, knowing that they would be receiving filthy responses.

I do get spam from other sites I own, even those with captcha systems to validate input. But none of them receive the obcene spam I get from the work from home keywords.

Would love to know what others are experiencing.