Some of you may have heard about Google’s latest Brain Fart … Sidewiki. It’s an add-on to your browser that sits right on the left hand side of your website, taking up a large amount of room (room that would have been your website), and allows any Tom, Dick and Harry to literally say whatever they want to about your site, without you having the ability to moderate these comments. Google says you can report abusive comments, but it’s entirely at their discretion as to whether or not it is abusive. Essentially, Sidewiki is a parasite on the Web that free rides on the hard work and the investments website owners.

To top it off, they have not even given website owners the option of opting out of having Sidewiki comments alongside of their site.

There are many reasons why I find this objectionable … more than objectionable … it’s downright evil.

1. First off … it creates a huge distraction. Here you are, working your butt off and maybe even spending cash to get traffic to your sites, and now you have this enormous conversation hosted on Google going on about you and your site completely out of your control.
2. Google is stealing your comments. Many site owners work very hard to develop a relationship with their readers and get a lot of comments on their blogs. This dialogue with their readers is an important part of their blogs and makes your blog more valuable. Well, Google is stealing that. Now they can just use Sidewiki to comment, but it isn’t moderated in any way and it isn’t really threaded so you can’t respond to a particular comment.
3. Google is providing the means for spammers and for competitors to sabotage your blog. Competitors can drop by and pretty say anything they want to discredit you or attempt to ruin your reputation. Spammers can drop by and offer their bill of goods … cialis anyone? How about some viagra? Maybe a little peep show? Blackhatters and other garden variety spammers are already testing it’s usefulness for getting traffic from your site to theirs using Sidewiki and it’s only a matter of time before the programmers have bots that can do this to thousands of sites at a time. This is very evil.
4. How long do you think it will be before Evil Google runs ads on Sidewiki that competes directly with your own ads, thereby stealing your ad revenue that you’ve worked so hard to get?

So how do you fight Google? Are they likely to listen to the feedback of webmasters? If past history is any indication, I doubt that there is a Google solution on the horizon, but that doesn’t mean that you have to just take whatever Google decides to dish out.

If you want to block Sidewiki on your blogs and your static sites, here is a script that does just that. The Evil Sidewiki sidebar is still shown by the website and a user can leave a comment, but as soon as the page is refreshed, the comments do not show. Poof … gone!

If you’re as outraged at Google hijacking the Internet and your websites, send Google feedback here.

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If you do business online and receive payments via Paypal, you probably already know that Paypal does not protect sellers of digital downloads from unscrupulous buyers.  A buyer can, and many do, purchase an item and then immediately file a Paypal dispute.  Many sellers will just issue a refund to keep their Paypal accounts in good standing, even if they know that the dispute has been filed fraudulently for the sole purpose of receiving the product for free.

I have heard over and over in forums that there is little you can do to fight back against this type of Paypal fraud, but that isn’t exactly true.  You can’t recover the money they sent if you refund, of course, but you can prevent them from using the product they bought on a website. Read the rest of this entry »

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What could I possibly say that I haven’t already and many others haven’t already said about Sitepoint launching it’s new marketplace for buying and selling websites, called Flippa. Suffice it to say, buyers and sellers alike are very unhappy with it.

For whatever reasons, they thought that switching from a highly successful and highly usable interface to a queasy looking Twittery blue Web 2.0 with pathetic usability was a good move. They also apparently think that shoving something down paying customer’s throats that they don’t want and charging them a great deal more for the service is a good idea. When users complained about the interface as well as the exhorbitant price increase, this is what Mark Harbottle: Co-Founder of Sitepoint has this to say to his paying customers who voiced their thoughts on the new Flippa:

Thanks for all your positive feedback guys. We appreciate it. One thing to keep in mind…
Our buyers aren’t going anywhere. They are savvy business people. They don’t care about the design of the site or the fact the logo sucks (the current logo is a placeholder BTW), they simply get on with the business of buying, and we’ve made it a lot easier for them to do that on flippa.com.

Meanwhile while you all whine and complain about the fees, the design, etc. the smart sellers are listing their sites on flippa.com and they are attracting the majority of the buyer interest. They will also get the added benefit of the PR we’re about to roll out. Read the rest of this entry »

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These blog packages now have a home of their own due to expansion of the line of niches. See all of them at NicheBloggingTreasure.com

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Are you sick of seeing sites or buying sites that have a great Wordpress theme, but little else … no commercial plugins and no content.  In other words, they are just another pretty face, like hundreds of pretty faces.  They are barely indexed and contain about 10 short articles and normally go for anywhere from $147 to over $500.

Actually, you could just purchase the same theme, hire a cheap writer to rewrite some content for you and save yourself a boatload of money.  The real guts and value of a site is the content.  Google doesn’t index themes …  it indexes content.

The sites I sell pre-made or build for you are already well indexed by Google and have tons of content.  They are also completely hands off auto automatic posting of high quality rss feeds.  Only feeds that have something to offer are used … none of these two sentences and go here to read full article feeds.  These are full feeds with images included. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m in the business of creating and flipping websites. One thing is abundantly clear when dealing with my customers … there are a lot of people out there who are trying to get in this business or just make a success of the web properties they buy or create that don’t know the first thing about how to set up a blog, what to do with it once it is set up, how to promote it, how to get it indexed, how to get traffic and make sales.

I just launched Niche Demon exactly for this reason. If you fall into the category above, this ebook is for you. Geared towards newbies, it gives detailed information on how to set up a Wordpress blog and then drive traffic and make sales from it. This is a 98 page ebook jam packed full of information that even some more experienced affiliate marketers don’t know … ranging from setting up a website to marketing, social bookmarking strategies on autopilot, traffic and linking strategies that will send your site to the top of Google results, to setting up a Google Adwords campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m writing this because probably a lot of my readers are newbies who buy sites and may be buying from Sitepoint and other forums/auction sites.  I use Sitepoint to sell my sites and occasionally buy some sites from Sitepoint.

If you buy sites on Sitepoint, you really need to do some homework. There are a lot of sellers who are purchasing MMR products that cost $10 or less, setting it up on a domain, and selling it for $167 more or less.  When I say a lot, I mean a lot.

Some of them even try to pass these MMR sites off as unique.  They advertise them as unique, but they are far from unique.  I saw yet another one of them two days ago that advertised the site as unique.  I found it for $49 by Googling and this scammer was charging $797 for this site.  I pm’d him and gave him the $49 link to the exact same site.  His response?  He gave me a link to the exact product that costs $5.99.   What can you say to that kind of arrogance and pure rip-off mentality?

Apparently this type of thing is not against TOS, so it is up to YOU to research the site before investing your hard-earned cash.

How to Flush Out the Rip-Off Artists

Use Copyscape.com for starters.  It will tell you if a site has duplicate content.  In addition, you can use Google.

Take a headline or paragraph and do this

“place headline here or paragraph or sentences” in Google with the quotes.  It will return any content within the quotes.  When you look at the results, look for Master Resale Sites listed and check it out.  You may find that there’s a Master Resale Rights product for a couple of bucks identical to what is being sold as a unique product on Sitepoint for over $100 or you may find that the site being sold is using PLR articles that are already all over the Internet.

Here’s another tip on how to spot the scammers.  Click on their profile and check all the sites they’ve been selling.  Click on each of them to see if they keep selling the same sites over and over.  Right now there’s a little scammer on Sitepoint who is selling the exact same “traffic selling” site over and over, just changing the template and domain name, but it’s the same site and he’s listed well over 20 of them so far.  And people keep buying them.  Not only is the market completely oversaturated with this BS site he’s selling, but Sitepoint is now overrun with people trying to sell “traffic” from these clone sites.

Take the time to do the research.

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I have close to 300 domains … some of them crappy, but quite a few domains that are worthy of developing. In my experience, the quickest way to sell off my domains is to develop them. Quite a daunting task when you have a lot of domains. My problems are solved. I just purchased the unlimited version of Autoblogged, the best damn autoblogging plugin for Wordpress I’ve seen, bar none. Check out this site I put up yesterday using it. TekPop.com. It has nearly 200 posts being pulled in from the top technology blogs on the web, all citing the sources, pulling in the images and saving a local copy, tagging and categorized. You just set this up and your domain is good to go … instant quality content on a regular schedule. Check it out below.

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In a heated bidding war, ToysRUs bought the domain name Toys.com at auction for $5.1 million. ToysRus really wanted the domain, for obvious reasons. Everyone except ToysRUs and domain holding company National A-1 (owner of domains such as free.com, boys.com, girls.com, and divorce.com) bowed out of the auction at $3 million. The last $2 million was just those two companies going back and forth for hours.

ToysRUs really didn’t have much choice. If it wants to be the first thing people associate with toys it really couldn’t afford to allow anyone else to own that domain, even in this economy. Who says real estate is dead?

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