Lungs (Image source: Flickr)
What is mesothelioma?
It is also called Malignant mesothelioma, and is a terminal lung cancer. The main cause is prolonged exposing to asbestos fibers dust. The resulting asbestosis leads to shortness of breath because of the asbestos irritating the lung. Asbestos cannot leave the lungs naturally and very often the disease is caught too late.
The main symptoms are a chest pain and shortness of breath on minimal exertion or even standing still, without doing anything in particular. You better visit a doctor, even if you are not exposed to asbestos fibers (anymore). The disease may take years to develop.
So what happens, when you are exposed far too long to asbestos and develop terminal cancer?
In all cases – You need to take care for the ones you will be leaving after your demise while punishing the employer that allowed you to work with hazardous materials without mask.
Anyway, to get to the point which most bloggers-for-money ask:
Why does it pay so much?
There were claims 2 years ago, that mesothelioma ADs are paying $200 per click. Nowadays, the black hat forums claim that the keyword pays “merely” $55 per click.
The question remains: Why so much!?
In a WikiPedia article, we see that in mid 1982, a retired employee named James Cavett, won a lawsuit of $2.3 million for compensation and another $1.5 million in punitive damages.
This triggered even more lawsuits and led to a group of lawyers specialized in this category of terminal cancers.
Lawsuits in US only are to reach $270 billion in compensations and punitive damages. There are more than 8k defendants and 700k claimants.
Imagine how many Lawyers are actually giving their left kidney to be hired for such a lawsuit.
Simple math from statistics:
- ~3 in every 1000 clicks will end in hiring the Lawyer for a mesothelioma case;
- 1000 clicks will cost the lawyer $55 000;
- 3 cases won will total in approximately $3 million in compensation (with $2.3 million being the record for a single case);
Imagine the lawyer’s tax in this process. It must be huge. And because of the very high competition, the lawyers are paying A LOT to sites that publish their ADs.
As simple as that.
Why I say it WAS high paying keyword?
After the Google Panda update, the search engine algorithm has changed. High paying keywords are now targeted by a heuristic relevancy check and spammy sites that target the high paying keywords are now penalized.
You may still write an article filled with high paying keywords, but this article will never reach page 1 of SERPs. And even if it does, you have NO control if the relevant high paying ADs will be displayed to your article.
So, regardless you place the keywords, you article will probably NOT benefit from them for real. It will be another article farm designed for money, that will be marked by Google bot for analysis by heuristics. Later, when the page rank algorithm evaluates it, you may have your whole site penalized and even sand boxed.
Be smart. Help the big G clean the internet from nonsense and heavy AD packed sites. Write an article that answers questions and helps the others. Don’t try to benefit from dieing lung cancer sufferers.
I am not telling you to abandon SEO optimization. Just don’t target a profit from the misery of the others.
3 Responses to “Why is (was) mesothelioma such high-paying keyword?”
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You are not benefiting from dieing cancer sufferers, you are benefitting from greed of “sufferers” willing to sue for millions, and shark lawyers willing to represent them. If not you – then somebody else will.
Now, let me tell you my story. A couple years ago I made a site, purely as an experiment, targeting few of the very highest paying keywords. My site was never on first pages in google, and it did get very few visitors, like, maybe 20 per day – 1 per page, that is. However, I was getting 3-5 adsense clicks daily each 0.75 to 1.5 bucks, totalling 3 bucks per day on average. Roughly 100 bucks a month. Do I give a shit that I was not getting paid $30 per clisk for the very expensive keywords I was targeting? Nope, I was paying $1 per click for keywords from that niche, and I was getting 100 bucks a month on virtually nothing. Just when I was going to start seriously multiplying this scheme, I found a better stream of cash so I gave this one up. But hey, this works.
Good luck!
True, but today it is more likely you are getting punished by Google search for making targeted site for profit only, and you get no search visits at all.
I was experimenting with keywords for about 1 year with moderate success.
In the end, I understand what everyone was already telling me about blogging.
“Content IS the king.”
I guess you are both right in your own way, i have been monitoring high paying keywords lately, personally i think ranking high keywords is not an issue, when you rank low paying keywords and you get the traffic as you want but dont get the clicks and make money with adsense it’s useless, i prefer not to rank get few visits that will convert into clicks and money …