I had a banner on my sidebar on all my blog pages, and since I have been doing some work on my blog design lately I came across it being there and checked out the actual site that is supposed to be a hub network for outdoor blogs. I found their links page, and there I found about 20 categories or so. Each page only has a few sites on it so you have to go to another page, and another and another in an endless search. I checked fishing category, then checked photography, and between those two there was about 300 websites that I had to look through to try to find mine, but I never did find it and realized I had been taken. I wasn’t the only one that got suckered into this one sided network scam, there is probable over 1000 sites that did too and they probably still think it’s a good thing. Its a good thing for outdoor blogger who gets their large ad placed onto everyone’s site and in return they will put a link up to yours, if you have all day to try to find it. Then if you do find it, you click on the link which is a live feed of you blogs image in small size, well you don’t go to your site, instead you get yet another page of outdoor blogger that gives you more information about the blog so they can capitalize even more on your key words. They do have a small link somewhere on that page. So I removed the banner, I am leery about linking to some sites anyway, I don’t like sites using my content and making a detour for people looking for my website content.
For those you who understand sharing links, websites share links because google gives priority in their listing order if a site has more links coming in. That is why most sites have a links page. Usually they hide this page, so it is only to fool google and not to send their traffic to another site. Sites can get hundreds and even thousands of links, that is easy to do, but most of these sites don’t have much content so they have to cheat. I did have my own links page but I don’t have that many links on it, just enough so that I don’t get left in the dark by google searches. Google is talking about cracking down on sites that cheat in this way, and the ones who take a paragraph from the web and post a bunch of ads on it, making thousands of these pages. Sites also have their own index lists of other websites, like this blogger network. You see these all over the top of google, search sites that are nothing more thank a detour to the content you are looking for. Like if you want a product at a store, instead of getting the store you get a list of stores. Well you already had a list in your google search, so now you have another list? These are parasites polluting the web and stealing google ad money from the real sites with the real content. They find content on the web, put up a ton of ads all over the place, and get paid when people click on those ads. Since they don’t find what they are looking for, there is a good chance they will click on the ads. But the real website with real content is at a disadvantage because since they have the content people are looking for, visitors don’t need to click on ads and so the real site doesn’t make anything for all their work.
So it’s like this, I was giving outdoor blogger prime real estate and they were giving me a campground in the deep woods with no map.
I’m sure everyone has searched for something on the web and found it frustrating when all they see is sites that offer nithing but stick all kinds of ads in your face. So many ads that you can’t tell what is their site and what is ads. After not finding what they are looking for the ads appear to have more than the site does, so people click on those ads. Since this works so well, it spreads like wildfire, and soon the web is full of sites that offer nothing as far as content but they give you plenty of ads to click on. They try to think in this way, how can I get people to come to a page and then click on my ads. So they will find popular stories on the web, sometimes its just one paragraph and a million ads all around it. Do a google on this paragraph and you find hundreds of websites all using this one paragraph with ads all around it. Google can’t or won’t stop it so it gets worse and worse. It’s not only stories they use but names, businesses, anything to get people to land on their ad page. Type in someones name, and you get information about a person that is common knowledge, and an offer to pay money to get more, which is again just common knowledge information. The whole first page of google could have websites using a name with ads, maybe two or maybe an infinite amount of pages, all parasites using a name to make a page full of ads.
And if that isn’t enough, the ask if you own this name or business, and to give them more information so they can redirect your traffic through them. And of course people fall for it and think they are doing them a big favor. There are huge websites that specialize in doing this sort of thing, like Squidoo. Someone told me they liked a photo of mine and that they made a page in squidoo for me to get more customers. I was not happy, I already have this photo on my opwn pages and I don’t need a detour stealing my traffic. Those people can make good money depending on how many clicks they get. Once a person goes to a squidoo page instead of your own, they might see your link to your store hidden in a ton of ads that might look better than your photo page. So chances are, they won’t redirect your traffic to them, but they take your traffic and send it to someone else so they can make money when people click on those ads.
If you get a website, you will be listed on top of google in time, maybe 60 days but probable more like one or two days. Your key words will get listed pretty good. Every site that picks up on your site name and key words (content) will likely get listed ahead of you in google because they are more established, so the last thing you want is for them to use your website name or business name to list in google.
Building a website and coding it yourself is a tremendous amount of work, but most websites are made with templates offered by their host and it only takes a few minutes to make a website and get it on the web. So these outfits take a content they find on the web, throw a page together in minutes and then move to the next, making hundreds of pages everyday, pages of parasitic trash.
My website and blog is mostly photos, cartoons and images and google doesn’t recognize images as content, so a parasite can take a paragraph and google will consider that more useful for the web. Maybe someday google will crack down on these parasites and that would be a grand day when only the sites with real content are left.
These wordpress blogs are nice and easy, it doesn’t take any knowledge of code and anyone can do it. Google gives these blogs priority over websites, but websites are more long term, they take a long time to get listed but they can be like mine, huge in size and organized where these blogs can get difficult to navigate get if the get too big.
