How Not to Build a Website
Posted April 17, 2008 
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The last few days have seen a lot of activity by Joel Comm, author of the highly acclaimed ‘Adsense Secrets’ eBook. This valuable guide shows you step-by-step how to make the maximum legitimate earnings from your website or blogs. The Fourth Edition of Adsense Secrets has just been published and I recommend it highly. I have been reviewing Joel’s products for more than two years and generally they are written to an extremely high standard. Today, however, I followed another link to the latest eBook which offered a free guide entitled ‘How to set up a profitable website fast’. Ever-curious, I signed up for a download in the hope that there might be a technique that was new to me.
What I read was a really disappointing, out-of-date book that included many ‘recommended products’ that would get your new website banned faster than you can say ‘profitable website’. The first link I noticed was to sofware called ‘BlogBurner’ that promised to create and post customised keyword-rich content to your blog dozens of times a day. When I followed the link all I found was one of those free blogging sites that hosts a blog for you on their domain and promises to pay you 1c for a page view.
On page 67 Joel points to a resource for web content free of copyright (because it was published before 1921) called ‘the Lost Files’. Follow the link and you will see this message:
The Lost Files Has Closed Its Doors!
All Billing Has Been Discontinued.
Never mind, let’s try something else: next, a content aggregator site called completrss.com. Call that up and you will find a parked page because someone forgot to renew the domain registration. I know this, because one of my domains lapsed last year and the same page appeared.
There is a very long section on RSS feeds that I found quite confusing, and I use RSS myself. But here again I noticed a resource that was new to me – feedster. Search for Feedster and you will find the service has been moribund for well over one year.
Another software recommendation that is mentioned twice in the book is called Traffic Equalizer. This is one of the most dangerous ideas in this ebook: Traffic Equalizer takes or `scrapes` content from an outside source such for publication on your site as so-called fresh web content. There are numerous stories of sites being banned after employing this software and rightly so. I have been the victim of content scraping and I condemn this misuse of other people’s intellectual property.
Chapter 25 concentrates on cloaking techniques and redirects: if you want your site to remain indexed in Google, do not use either of these techniques – and do not use doorway pages, which are also mentioned earlier in the book. I could go on, but I have to go and do something productive.
Anyway, my conclusion – buy Adsense Secrets 4 and you will do very well. Ignore ‘Build a Profitable Website Fast’ if you want to stay in business.
Tags: Creating Websites, Web Hosting
