It is so weird when the ones we look up to go bad, and why try to go
for a last haul from thier loyal subscribers and affiliates who have made them lots of money in the past.
I don't think that I would even pay the $27 price, because I think it is a whole load of hog wash to pay for an update.
James, strategy worked well, but the search engines are getting smarter and smarter. Only those coming up with better strategies will survive.
It seems that when products no longer work as well, they are dumped for a quick "big pay day", but I think this stinks from James.
Colin sent me a free copy of his veo report, and I must be honest, It made me realize that there are honest people online who isn't just out to make a fast buck.
Great book, and I do believe he is right, we should get back to basics and build more content richer websites, That will survive any search engine update.
James, took away my trust, and I will remove his links from my sites. _________________ Alex Marlin a.k.a achiever
Discover How To Build A Website, in just weeks, with this simple yet easy to use program.
Colin sent me a free copy of his veo report, and I must be honest, It made me realize that there are honest people online who isn't just out to make a fast buck.
I absolutely agree. I purchased Colin's book and later asked for refund as I found there's nothing new. He replied me one week later after he returned from an affiliate conference. He gracefully refunded and sent me an updated copy(for free). He is absolutely helpful, honest and sincere. His customer support is superb.
I read Colin McDougal's ebook too. But I was disappointed from my own personal perspective. Not because it wasn't "right on", but because it was not new information for me.
What Colin teaches is common sense and exactly the way the search engines want you to build websites for them. It has always been about rich quality content. Rich quality content is nothing new.
Don't get me wrong, Colin's ebook is an antidote for those webmasters who had their mindset shifted toward black hat methods or who are new to building and promoting websites. Quite frankly I'm glad to see the mindset shifting back toward quality. Like millions of other search people who are serviced by the SEs, I'm tired of landing on garbage pages when I'm trying to find good information. My time is valuable and I don't like wasting it digging through riff-raff websites.
I received Colin's latest newsletter probably like some of you here. It's good, but some of the info condradicts another in his newsletter. In one paragraph he talks about how important good content is and establishing trust with your website visitors. Then further down he talks about using articles from membership sites (private label articles) to distribute as ebooks for newsletter optin. Not cool.
I believe Colin is slipping back into the gray hat marketing area which is probably easy to do. All of these private label articles will soon be the target of near future algorithm changes. SEs are getting real smart and they don't like dup content. First, you don't know where these articles came from even though they say they are not plagerized. Second, there are thousands of people using them or even portions of them. Third, if I go to Colin's site and optin (trust him with my email address- anymore that is a big deal) to receive an ebook and find its an article that is copy/pasted on 100s of sites (it's very simple to find this out) or in newsletters from other people I'm subscribed to, he's lost my trust - forever. First impressions are the most important. Wow me with pure Colin - not some garbage lifted from private label membership article sites.
In other words, if I stick my neck out and subscribe to Colin's newsletter or optin, I want his words, his content, his ideas and advice based on his experience because I respect his work and his mission. The last thing I want to see is material I can find on dozens if not thousands of other sites (perhaps even 50% reworded) written by who knows. Don't trick me because it'll only happen once. No one likes to be tricked and when someone tricks you once, don't you usually remember it?
I firmly believe Matt Cutts would agree with me about these private label articles. Just because Google and the other SEs are not doing anything about it now, doesn't mean they don't know what's going on and big G will soon be saying: "enough is enough". If it gets out of hand which I'm already seeing it, big G will step in to protect their indexes and public.
Seriously though, if you were burnt by using black hat methods or JM's narrowly focused affiliate site building techniques all you have to do is look at it from a SEs perspective and any real business' common sense marketing strategies. Colin explains it well in his ebook.
Content ... Does the website you are building add quality to the web for the consumer? If you were searching on the topic and found your website, would be glad you found the information? Would it be helpful to you? Does it answer your questions about the topic?
Marketing ... Use common sense. Anyone who tells you to stick to one method of building and promoting all of your websites regardless of the topic or your target market is leading you astray. Diversify. If you want to build one or two sites the JM way, go for it. Build one or two Rosalinda's way too, and any of the other hundreds of marketers who have ebooks and info products. You now have some pretty good testing data in front of you. Which method works the best for your target markets?
But never, ever rely on one single method of building sites and marketing it if your family's finances depend on it or you are looking to build an evergreen website. I think the biggest mistake most of JM's students made was doing everything with all of their sites "exactly the same and not looking outside of his ebook for other answers and better solutions". That's not a sensible way to build any business. That's too many eggs in one basket. Sooner or later that basket is going to break.
Now ... I've got to quit writing and stop adding my own quality content (pure me) to Allan Gardyne's website instead of my own.
Nicely said defrag, the truth is very hard to digest.
What can we conclude here, is that your own method is the best method.
Blend what you learn from others and make your own brand.
Create the sites you like and use the tricks and tips from others
that improve your overall site performance. _________________ Alex Marlin a.k.a achiever
Discover How To Build A Website, in just weeks, with this simple yet easy to use program.
Joined: 09 Aug 2003 Posts: 1838 Location: Columbus, OH
Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2006 3:04 pm Post subject:
PLR is an interesting topic that's always bubbling with debate.
The key advice I or anyone can give is to almost use each article you receive as "research" for your own. The key is to make your articles unique. No that's not simply slapping an RSS feed on the same page as the article, that means taking time to rewrite it. Everyone knows practically anything you want to learn about is already online, just chopped up in different languages, writing styles, etc. A rewritten PLR article is no different.
Any search engine would need to walk an extremely thin, brittle line to filter out PLR content ( at least they should). My guess is they would only succeed with blocking articles that the body text is largely the same. Anything more than that to block rewrites of PLR, I imagine they'll begin to run into many false positives.
defrag wrote:
Content ... Does the website you are building add quality to the web for the consumer? If you were searching on the topic and found your website, would be glad you found the information? Would it be helpful to you? Does it answer your questions about the topic?
It sounds like you've been burnt with some dodgy PLR content. Most of the articles I get are good quality. Even if I didn't rewrite them and disregarded the search engines, I could still use them to provide value to my site visitors.
Also, for anyone else using PLR content, think outside of the box with it to avoid duplicate content issues altogether:
- Drive PPC traffic to your PLR sites
- Use the content to create ebooks to sell or give away to build an email list
- Create hard goods from the content (spiral books, CDs)
- Create an audio report using the content to sell as MP3s or CDs
Joined: 14 Sep 2004 Posts: 110 Location: Vancouver, BC Canada
Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2006 3:28 pm Post subject:
Quality content vs. duplicate or crummy content.
Big discussion point and the debate is usually about the search engines finding duplicate content or "methods" they deam to be inappropriate, right?
What about your code! Clean, quality code??
Come on you guys. If the search engine cannot even get past the declaration tag on line one... they AIN'T READING YOUR CONTENT
Someone on this board just emailed me a site link to review... asked for my professional opinion regarding the overall construction: 258 lines of (very bad) HTML before the content even starts and the site had 171 errors in the w3.org validator
Add "code" to your next checklist of what the SE's are looking at
and... where's Gary Anthosh when we're talking about Web Content Made Easy? _________________ Andrea Thomson
PLR is an interesting topic that's always bubbling with debate.
I agree and I'm sure we will have to agree to disagree on this one.
Quote:
The key advice I or anyone can give is to almost use each article you receive as "research" for your own. The key is to make your articles unique.
Simply rewording even 50% of your article isn't making it unique. Unique would be an article purely written by you. ie, If my dog suddenly becomes sick and I look for the symptoms to determine the cause on the web only to find loads of BS articles (written nicely, but still BS) on the topic written by people who never owned a dog, that's not adding value to the web and it waste website visitors time.
Quote:
Any search engine would need to walk an extremely thin, brittle line to filter out PLR content ( at least they should). My guess is they would only succeed with blocking articles that the body text is largely the same. Anything more than that to block rewrites of PLR, I imagine they'll begin to run into many false positives.
Why should they? When anything starts to become a problem that clutters the SEs results, they will start weeding out the problem. That's why we have these ranking fluctuations so often. Google in particular is wise to this kind of thing. About.com and askthebuilder.com didn't become successful because they rewrote existing articles that they didn't have any idea of the original origin. Joel Comm will tell you to stay far away from PLR. I'd love to hear Matt Cutts opinion on this one. I'm sure we'd hear some funny retorts.
I admit it would be an interesting long-term a/b testing project but I'd prefer to use my time more wisely and write my own. Its worked very well (darn well) for me over the years.
Quote:
It sounds like you've been burnt with some dodgy PLR content. Most of the articles I get are good quality. Even if I didn't rewrite them and disregarded the search engines, I could still use them to provide value to my site visitors.
Not at all. I've not used PLR and everything I've seen (even those that initially appear to have some meaty information) are not worth my time reading. If you found some that are, that's great but to me its searching for a needle in a hay stack when you can use that time writing your own. Everyone can write even if they think they can't. If they can think, they can write. Write it yourself and then outsource it someone to edit for you, if grammar or spelling isn't your thing. There are tons of virtual assistants who'd love to do the job and are reasonably priced.
Quote:
Also, for anyone else using PLR content, think outside of the box with it to avoid duplicate content issues altogether:
- Drive PPC traffic to your PLR sites
- Use the content to create ebooks to sell or give away to build an email list
- Create hard goods from the content (spiral books, CDs)
- Create an audio report using the content to sell as MP3s or CDs
I'd be very careful redistributing articles in any manner that you do not know precisely the original source. I can imagine there are many freelance writers over at elance or other freelancing type sites that are reselling articles as PLR that they might have written for their paying clients. Republishing anything that you are not positive of the source, is not a means for long-term business growth nor a wise business decision, imho. But then you know what they say about opinions, right?
Got to work on my own stuff now. I'm sure Allan loves the content we are providing him, but there is much to be done here and so little time.
I find PLR content very useful. If you're just slapping it up on sites you may not get all the benefits available from it.
Don't "blow off" rewrites of content as worthless and useless. I would encourage you to "study" what askthebuilder.com does.
Don't assume "your" content is the only one "qualified" to be on your site.
If the article gives the searcher what they want - then it's valid. What's the matter with expanding on it.
Quote:
Marketing ... Use common sense. Anyone who tells you to stick to one method of building and promoting all of your websites regardless of the topic or your target market is leading you astray. Diversify. If you want to build one or two sites the JM way, go for it. Build one or two Rosalinda's way too, and any of the other hundreds of marketers who have ebooks and info products. You now have some pretty good testing data in front of you. Which method works the best for your target markets?
I use to believe Diversify was smart - now I don't - Great for stocks and investing - not for building web sites.
Quote:
But never, ever rely on one single method of building sites and marketing
The problem I see with much of the talk on content PLR or otherwise comes from being - one sided and close minded. That being ONLY FREE search engine traffic is the ONLY consideration. Bad move and - stinkin thinkin!
How will your site stand if you had NO search engine traffic? The problem isn't PLR or writing it all yourself, it's how you use content to get traffic.
Andrea
Quote:
What about your code! Clean, quality code??
How true - how true! _________________ Gary
- ONE is to small of a number to be a success!
Learn HOW TO create targeted, focused Content for your website!--> http://webcontenttips.com - Join Our Weekly Newsletter
Joined: 06 Jan 2005 Posts: 105 Location: Oxnard Ca 1 Hr North of Los Angeles
Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2006 9:55 pm Post subject:
I cancelled the BUZZ a long time ago. SEO radio gave me more content. I got the upgrad notice for Martell's manual. I have no problem with him charging for it. HOWEVER, I will not buy it. I was not impressed with my 2005 manual. I'll pass on the 2006.
WHY
NO examples of his sites is a major reason. Give us a sacraficial lamb to see by example.
When people found his new sites and posted them in this forum, they did not follow what he said we should do. _________________ Bob
Joined: 09 Nov 2003 Posts: 86 Location: Langley, BC, Canada
Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2006 10:59 pm Post subject:
This has kind of split off from the original topic, but since the PLR discussion got started, I'll continue it here anyway
Personally, I don't see any problem with using PLR articles on my sites, under certain circumstances.
If the traffic is solely from the search engines, it's probably not the best way to do it. If you use the article verbatim, you'll run into duplicate content issues and if you spend much time rewriting it, you quite likely could research and write your own in the same time.
If you're driving pay-per-click traffic to the site (or generating traffic through your email list), it doesn't matter if it's exactly the same article as 20,000 other sites. If you're willing to pay for the click and people are clicking your ad, they're going to see your article - not the other 20,000.
It's really no different than the thousands of news sites that all run the same article from the Associated Press. CNN may get the top spot in Google for that article but the Vancouver Sun newspaper still runs it on their website because they get traffic from other places as well.
Quote:
Simply rewording even 50% of your article isn't making it unique. Unique would be an article purely written by you. ie, If my dog suddenly becomes sick and I look for the symptoms to determine the cause on the web only to find loads of BS articles (written nicely, but still BS) on the topic written by people who never owned a dog, that's not adding value to the web and it waste website visitors time.
This can be the case whether you use PLR articles verbatim, rewrite them or write your own from scratch. If you don't know anything about the topic, the information is likely not going to worthwhile to anyone. This gets back to providing quality content.
I also believe that just because an article is written 100% by you, it isn't necessarily unique. The particular order of words might be, but the information in it may be the same as any number of other sites.
Now, I'm going to assume that these PLR articles are good quality and accurate information. This isn't a given by any means, but if you choose your PLR sources well you can be pretty confident in the content. A lot more so than paying some Elance writer $5-10 to write an article, in my experience.
The thing you have to remember about people searching for information on your topic is that many of them probably haven't seen the same information on a bunch of other sites.
A lot of them are probably new to the subject and even basic information that's essentially the same as any number of other sites will be of value to them. As they get more experienced with it, they will probably be looking for more than what is generally given away for free on the internet.
(And if you are giving the more advanced stuff away, I would suggest perhaps that is a missed opportunity )
Quote:
Someone on this board just emailed me a site link to review... asked for my professional opinion regarding the overall construction: 258 lines of (very bad) HTML before the content even starts and the site had 171 errors in the w3.org validator
Now if that site was using a template, how many other sites are using the same bad code. And would those 258 lines be considered duplicate content?
In my opinion, this whole duplicate content debate is a perfect example of why you should be building a business that doesn't need the search engines at all, via pay-per-click, building a list, etc. Then it doesn't matter what they think of your site because you don't need them anyway.
Ditto on your post. _________________ Gary
- ONE is to small of a number to be a success!
Learn HOW TO create targeted, focused Content for your website!--> http://webcontenttips.com - Join Our Weekly Newsletter
Just saw your post suggesting that I am slipping into grey hat because of my mention of Private Label Articles.
I am not going the least bit grey with these.
Here is how I use PLA's:
1. Content for launching and testing PPC campaigns
2. Use articles to create mini-ebooks for free giveaways for newsletter sign-ups
3. Inspiration for content for my site.
I don't use Private Label Content directly on my site. I will have the good articles used as inpiration for content.
In my opinion, this whole duplicate content debate is a perfect example of why you should be building a business that doesn't need the search engines at all, via pay-per-click, building a list, etc. Then it doesn't matter what they think of your site because you don't need them anyway.
Defrag was seemingly down over my newletter about Private Label Articles...hhhmmm...I guess Defrag missed my newsletter where I mentioned Robert Allen's Multiple Streams of Income book as recommended reading.
The internet is not the only place to make a buck and even with the internet, natural search placement is not the only way to turning a profit.
Don't get me wrong, there is a lot to be made online but as every wise entrepreneur knows, everything is volatile in the world.
Making a go at any business really comes down to:
1. Learn
2. Try things
3. Have successes
4. Have failures
5. Learn more stuff
6. Try things
7. Have more succeses
Joined: 14 Sep 2004 Posts: 110 Location: Vancouver, BC Canada
Posted: Sun Apr 09, 2006 2:16 am Post subject:
John says
Quote:
Now if that site was using a template, how many other sites are using the same bad code. And would those 258 lines be considered duplicate content?
The problem is not in the template alone. It looks like many of the errors have been created by the software / HTML editor and the template. Let me explain - if you don't know a lot about creating HTML, you may want to buy an HTML editor that provides you with a user-friendly experience.
There are two problems with the site I reviewed (a) the author probably doesn't know they are producing horrible code and (b) they have no control to stop it because it's (probably) the HTML editor that is producing the bogus code.
There are clues to this - tons of deprecated tags (html tags which have been deemed to be outdated) and redundant tags. What do I mean by redundant tags? The same instruction several times for one item. Trying to make some text red? No CSS here - but even without a style sheet, it shouldn't look this bad. I think the author has clicked some for the "user-friendly" buttons more than once and the program keeps layering more instructions into the code - like this:
Each table element has html instructions - and then again in the paragraphs. And it repeats over, and over, all the way down the page. The code is so heavy, it's really crazy.
Sad, cause this is clearly supposed to be an SEO friendly site. And I would bet money that the owner of this site is blissfully unaware of the tangled mess behind the scenes. They have *trusted* that their cool new tool is doing a great job. Afterall, it's WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) and all they probably see is the user-interface - not the code.
<sigh>They've were likely swooned by the lovely buttons and user-friendly (looking) interface.</sigh>
Tip - only busy software from trusted sources. Ask to see some live sites which use the tool. Even if you cannot assess "good code" from "bad code" you can always ask a professional for advice before proceeding. Also, make sure there is an evaluation period where you can assess the product first-hand.
<sigh>They've were likely swooned by the lovely buttons and user-friendly (looking) interface.</sigh>
You know you are a true html coder when you do ^
Andrea => j00/^ 4 1337 |\|i|\|j4 c0|)3/^
Translation => your an elite ninja coder
But you are so correct Andrea, while I do not design my own sites (usually because I lack the creativeness), I do know how to code html. Yes, lots of html editors out there add their own code, add out-dated tags, or do multiple-layer coding that can hurt SEO and SEM. That is why I try to edit my code (html, xml, java, c++, or any code for that matter) in a text editor instead of a WYSIWYG editor. My personal favorite to use with Windows is notepad++ and with Linux VI Improved. However, not many peeps can code or even distinguish bad looking code, so, they turn to dreaded WYSIWYG editors. My advice would be the same as Andrea's; before you publish your site, try and get a professional to look over the code. Better yet use the w3c validator, and if there are multiple errors then look into having a professional take a glance at your code.
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
Your host: Allan Gardyne. Earning a good living from affiliate
programs since 1998.
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Private Messages
Log in
All of these private label articles will soon be the target of near future algorithm changes. SEs are getting real smart and they don't like dup content. First, you don't know where these articles came from even though they say they are not plagerized. Second, there are thousands of people using them or even portions of them. Third, if I go to Colin's site and optin (trust him with my email address- anymore that is a big deal) to receive an ebook and find its an article that is copy/pasted on 100s of sites (it's very simple to find this out) or in newsletters from other people I'm subscribed to, he's lost my trust - forever. First impressions are the most important. Wow me with pure Colin - not some garbage lifted from private label membership article sites.
