Your biggest problem is you are focusing too much on SEO and monetization and not on your users. Here are a couple tips:

1) Write interesting, compelling content for USERS. You have to compel users to read your site. You shouldn't be using tools such as scrape box, etc. AT ALL. If you are using 3rd party tools, you are doing it wrong. If you can't attract users to your website, you won't succeed even if Google indexes your site.

2) You need a UNIQUE NICHE where not many competitors exist. It's easier than it sounds, think of something you like to do and google it. If google can't pinpoint a website fitting your niche, it's likely a good fit for a blog.

3) Once you have 5-10 400+ word articles, build a sitemap (if using wordpress, there are plugins that generate a sitemap for you) and submit it via google webmaster tools. Google should crawl your website in a week or two and index it. If Google refuses to display your search results, it's because you are writing about an overly popular niche (making money online for example). Google may also take time to bump you up in search results (Remember, you are a new, untrusted site). Try posting articles from your website on social media and attracting visitors via other means. Eventually you'll get indexed and see a couple visitors a day.

4) As your website ages and you build up quality content, your traffic will grow, and you can eventually try to apply for Adsense. I hear that Adsense is really picky these days (got my account about a decade ago), so make sure things are top notch before you apply. Things like a privacy policy, contact us page, etc. are all good to have. Adsense requires specific terms in your privacy policy, be sure to have them.

Good luck!

Where did your "20,000 totally clean articles" come from?

20,000 quality articles would take years and year to put together for a small operation. At one a day, that would be 54 years.

If you think there are shortcuts, then yes, you should probably find something else to do.

Echoing woop01, 20,000 articles? How long did that take? Are they 100% original and interesting and well written? If they are cut and paste or spun or 10 words each, then that explains why they are not showing up in Google.

I read here that it's not unrealistic to expect 5-10 dollars per indexed page per year.

Depends on a host of factors, including the niche.

I have about 20,000 totally clean articles, that I've checked in Google search and they don't exist.

So the articles were produced by a source you don't fully trust, otherwise you wouldn't feel obliged to check up on them-- and you'd have some other indicia of quality than "exact text matches don't exist".

How much did the authors charge for 20,000 fully researched, native-speaker-written articles? Can't have been an awful lot, if $3/year (assuming page = article) is enough to make them profitable. Even cleaning up the OCR on material published in or before 1922 would involve much more than $3 worth of native-speaker labor-- and you did say this stuff was custom-written, didn't you?

I smell a rat ... and not only because today is cage cleaning day.

HI I know, where did I get the articles?

It's a good question.
I have a colleague who has a PLR membership business, that he's had for a long time. They were limited distribution. Only a few sets a month or so. Limited base.

We started checking them in google and ironically lots of them seem to have never been used. We were surprised.

Weird, I know, but maybe it was just like lots of folks buy IM products and never do them.

I would have thought that they would all have been used OVER and over. And I have other PLR that if you test it has hundreds of results. It's junk. I stay away from PLR.

My conundrum was, if these articles were written years ago, never used, and they are keyword targeted, why not publish them, but only the one's that have no results in Google Search.

I wouldn't use scrapebox to SCRAPE, but it has a blog drip plugin. Maybe use it as a dashboard. Using the multisites was just a way to avoid buying Exact match domains.

You are all right with the equations, I sort of got the articles as part of the separation in a venture. They got abandoned.

I actually don't think it's worth it because I'm not vested in the content.

I remember seeing that in Afganistan they have loads of Ore that is under their feet, but they can't mine it with the situation there. But it's worth billions.

I Thought, why not just publish them?

I know it's crazy, but perhaps a missed opportunity.
but still crazy.

Actually I know and trust the source.

And the articles are read, edited and enhanced by me before posting. They aren't blindly posted. I just use Scrapebox's plugin to drip them to the blogs, with tags and categories, etc.

It's surprising, I never thought I'd have found this much content.

And it would take a year to post them all, and do it nicely.

I might spend a day a month on it, not more.

but still probably crazy

Well, from a pure SEO standpoint, how fast did you publish those 20,000 articles? Because, especially after Panda, dropping that many pages in a short period of time (even a year) will get a site sandboxed lightening fast. Google's been doing this a lot longer than you have, and guess what they know. Spammers using article spinners can drop 20,000 pages in a short period while quality sites, even large ones with armies of writers, can only do relatively small quantities of pages at a time - and even the big ones can maintain their somewhat higher output over time. So, yeah, in Google's eyes, dropping massive amounts of pages all at once and then not being able to maintain that output is instant clue that you are a spammer.

Second, there is a good chance that all those articles have been used, LOTS, by spammers. And Google now has a good idea that if those articles get used on a site - or spun versions of them (latent semantics has gotten that good that you have to be using a pretty sophisticated spinner - even a custom built spinner - not to trigger Google's dupe content filter), and that by association your site is spam as well.

Sorry, but you are a little late to the game to be using such basic techniques. I don't spam, but I do know that spamming these days is something a lot harder than throwing a bunch of words up on pages. You have to fake natural linking, natural social signals, natural site growth. Not to mention your hosting. Bet you have those 20K pages parked on a garbage shared hosting account. A quality site that could afford to have 20K in articles written just for them would also afford dedicated hosting instead of a shared account (with dozens and dozens of similarly icky sites hosted on the server). Google (and really every search engine operating today) knows all these things.

And on top of that all - even if all of what you think is true, what will you do when all of that content is out there and someone else comes along to the PLR and says - "oh look, all this content is only on ONE other site. This will all be perfect for my site."

I will say again, G's been at this game a lot longer than you. Spamming isn't something you "spend a day a month on" anymore. It takes work. I think almost the same level of work just working on building a normal, real site does. There are no free rides anymore. There are no easy rides anymore.

Oh, and for the record, your projected money per article. My articles do at least that per month, not per year. But then again, I make sure I give people good stuff.

I agree with all of you, and I think that it's a wasted effort.
I think I won't fill the web up with any garbage, and move on to another model, one that adds value.

Thanks for the input, and best wishes to all.

Mark

move on to another model, one that adds value

I think you will find you will enjoy it longer in the long run.

I have known some world class spammers who made good money spamming and I can say that every one of them gave it up for building "legit" sites. Mostly because spamming profitably has just gotten that difficult. Yes, still some people who do it. But most people these days really, really do find that just building high quality sites is just easier than constantly trying to beat the system.

Doesn't matter if the articles are all unique, if they are on topics that have been well covered elsewhere, they won't go anywhere.

If you can find something unique that your users can engage with, you have a much better chance.

One of my niches is pretty specific to me, and I am an authority, but even when I launch a new site for a new location, I count on two years to really start making money from them. I launched two new sites in May, and they won't begin to pay for themselves until 2016. In the meantime, I work on developing a following for them and making sure the users know who I am, so they trust the site and come back to it.

This approach has worked spectacularly well for me, but it's not for everyone.

I'm grateful for all the help. You guys are fantastic.

It's one thing to work, but I'm glad I won't work at this.

Thanks for all the assistance!
N