Web Spamming 101

Great points, Mark. Often times what I've found out is that you end up making much more money going the "adding value" route long term than you ever could by focusing on the short term.

Coming from the world of email marketing, I've seen some crazy stuff but luckily had the same realization you did before it was too late and I did too much damage to my personal brand (and long term earnings potential).

Mark,

You mentioned earlier that you have 100 websites. Does this mean that those 100 websites are spam websites? I like the whole idea of niche websites but I choose not to create spam sites but rather highly focused content sites that cater to a specific niche or sub niche. is this what you have done or do you think that this strategy is not worth pursuing?

Thanks,

Richard

not all are spam - but most of them are sites I'm not proud of.

Most of them aren't sites that if they were missing people would not miss or go looking for.

plus most of them get 90% of traffic from search engines. not something worth pursuing.

the strategy might be worth pursuing if you need to pay your mortgage quick, however long term if nobody really cares about your mini niche sites then nobody really cares ;) that's what i'm realizing.

it's really relative to your goals, both ways do work, and the spam works to, just depends on what you want out of it.

Personally I'd rather not spend my days writing content about treadmills or food processors just to satisfy some "niche" I probably will never care about.

@sam - thanks, yeah I can imagine that the email world was very shady

Mark,

I see where you are going with this. I just take a different route with my niche sites in that I am interested in the subjects I write about. Also alot of other people are interested in these sites as well. But I can see that having one site that many people will care about is the better strategy in the long run. Cater to the masses and you become wealthy.

But regardless though Mark your website ShowYouradshere.com is catering to a niche as well it is just a broader niche in that it caters to bloggers. If can figure out how to add value to everyone's lives then you will become truly independent and wealthy. Just my opinion of course.

Thanks,

Richard

Mark, I just love your honesty. :)

Richard, I think there's a big difference between building for a popular niche and spamming - I would define spam by its tactics, which are pretty dependent on search engine whims and have little to do with delivering something of quality to humans. For example, it's completely possible to start a quality web site about weight loss even though most of that niche is Spam City. The difference is the site and what it delivers to users. Spam sites deliver... not much, because they're focused on keyword density and stuff only a bot could love. Quality sites deliver ideas, information, community... things that humans wants.

Sapphire,

I totally agree and this is my intent on creating these sites. I completely agree that content that is geared towards a specific niche and that is focused on quality is also a legitimate avenue to persue. However, you must realize that all websites are "niche" websites to some extent or another and that is what I was pointing out. So I guess we are all building niche sites to some extent it is just to what extent this is done that defines the markets we seek. That is basically all I am saying.

Thanks,

Richard

Yeah, if we ban blip though, maybe we should see who else Tubemogul can pick up.

@digital - they still have plenty of others, veoh, metacafe, etc

@sapphire - thanks much, it's all true ;)

@richard - i see what you are saying. Most people however don't build niches around topics they are interested in. Instead they play with goofy keyword to "competition" ratios and perceived click costs etc. But I see where you are coming from, most aren't like that though.

I think you are right to ask "is that really the online business you were hoping for"? Creating useful/valuable content is the only medium to long term option. After all, job satisfaction comes into it as well. After a year of creating valuable content that people want to read, it's going to feel good, and you can't really put a price on that.

yup, everybody is learning these hard facts one day. Some of the stuff you mentioned is actually not too bad and could be considered a legit way to improve the exposure of your good quality content. The typos for example. I am not a hardcore SEO myself to spend my day on experiments of that sort, but if anybody is bored and want to check something out, try the following...


Typos in the content that are visible to the user are of course not good and should be avoided. Hidden text is also a bad idea, because SE don't like that. SE are in general pretty smart when it comes to typos or synonyms that they still find the stuff, even if you mistyped it at the search engine. However, giving bots a hint about it does not hurt either, right?! I put weird misspellings of the main keyword for a page sometimes into the "keywords" meta tag of that page. It would interesting to know if this is used by Google. You have to test it for a misspelling that Google does not know about, which is hard enough by itself. Once you have a good test keyword, create a test page and only add the misspelling to the keywords tag and not anywhere in the content or anchor text, alt tags, title tags of links (or text nearby) for that matter. Then wait and see if it ranks for the misspelled term or not.

I do articles from time to time, yes, for my site and the blogs I write for of course, but I am talking about "free to republish articles" for article directories.

This is always a modified version of the article or post at my site or the blogs I write for, for obvious reasons.

I don't do it so much for using those articles for SEO purposes. I often find them on not so favorable websites and much less on decent sites. Why am I doing it? Good question.

It gives a little bit more exposure, but I am more looking for humans that read it than spiders. I also get an increasing number of requests to republish content that I wrote. If I have a free to republish version available, it's easy for me to just point to that in cases where I am not so sure, if I want to have my unique content from my site or blog be republished or not.

If it is a good article, people who read it and like the content will actually come and visit your site and probably come back too.

p.s. regarding content. Mark, go and add a site search to 45n5. Your content is growing daily and you do it for a while already so browsing your blog does not work so well anymore. Use Google's custom search engine. It's easy to implement (on your own site), fast and relevant. You have to show AdSense ads for the free version, but you can provide your AdSense account and Google will share the revenue with you. You can also pay an annual fee to have a version without any ads. I do that actually for the site search at my site Cumbrowski.com.

Just another tip :) No link, because you don't allow links in your comments, sorry, you have to find it for yourself.