Internet Business Blog

Yesterday, whilst browsing one of my regular blog reads on my PDA, I saw something that wasn’t quite right. Above all of the actual blog content were dozens of links with various financial terms. I was out for the day and didn’t have access to my computer until the evening, but when I returned I went to the blog in question using Firefox and saw that all appeared okay even though my PDA was still showing the spammy-looking links.

There were two possibilities, I thought. Either there’s a problem with my viewing i.e. my PDA or Internet connection had been compromised or there’s something not-so-obvious going awry with the blog. Since I couldn’t see any other sites affected in the same way, I decided the latter was actually the case. Looking at the underlying web page source code in Firefox confirmed this. Near the bottom of all of the legitimate source code was this:

The reason why nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary when viewed using a standard web browser was because CSS was being used to prevent the injected links from being displayed. That doesn’t mean that they’re not there or that search engines can see and index them. Using the Firefox Web Developer plugin to disable CSS for the current page showed what was underneath the CSS cloak:

Why you should upgrade to WordPress 2.5

If you’ve been wrangling about whether to upgrade or not, then consider the consequences of leaving your blog unpatched such as Technorati refusing to index compromised blogs. Even big names have been affected by the hacking of insecure blogs.

Also, if you’re using a freely distributed blog theme then you might want to check that too in case it’s been laced with code that will allow unscrupulous others to take over your website.

I’m off to upgrade all of my pre-2.5 WordPress blogs!

Private Label Rights material can be a great way of getting content and products that you can call and sell as your own. It can also be a great way to spend good money on a load of rubbish.

As I see it, there are two main problems with most PLR material I come across:

1. The quality of the written content is poor. A lot of what’s produced is from the hands of cheap labour and this usually means it’s sourced from countries where English is not the primary language. It is possible to have a board vocabulary and a good grasp of English grammar, but often you need to be able to think in a westernised way before you can write content that reads like westernised content.
2. It’s already been distributed across the Internet so you can forget about it being original content in the eyes of search engines. It also means that it’s usually no good for submitting to article directories because someone else will have already beaten you to it.

Both of these problems result in the need for a further investment of either time or money or even both as rewriting the content to some degree is required before it can be used to benefit you.

Why do these issues exist?

As happens with many maturing markets, as demand increases for PLR products, the number of suppliers also increases. As the number of suppliers increase, people start thinking a step higher in the food chain, moving away from the end consumer and towards supplying the suppliers instead.

For the end user, this means instead of getting material that’s been produced by their supplier and supplied to a limited number of people, they’re getting material that’s being offered by any number of suppliers to even more end users. Therefore, the chances of someone else already using the same content increases greatly because instead of having one supplier selling 100 copies of an article pack you might have several suppliers each selling 100 copies of the same article pack.

If you’re publishing the same content as hundreds of other people, whether or not you believe in duplicate content penalties will be irrelevant because you’ll still be competing for all the same keywords as the other publishers.

For these reasons, I don’t believe you should consider the majority of PLR material on offer today as ready-to-use.

What do you think of using PLR? Do you use it yourself? Are you happy with the quality of the written content?

Domain names are one of the Internet’s underpinnings and not much would happen without them unless you had a thing about numbers. As you’re reading my blog, you’re probably the type of person who has a domain or two registered and has probably carried out a number of domain name searches in your time.

Imagine if every domain name you searched for was intercepted and then registered by someone else. You probably wouldn’t be too pleased would you. What if the people intercepting your domain name searches then offered you the opportunity to take over the domain for a fee? It’s all starting to sound a bit seedy isn’t it?

This is exactly what Network Solutions will do when you use their domain search service. They claim it’s to protect their customers from other people front running, but in fact the domains they secure are available for anyone to register as long as it’s through them.

Here’s one I cooked up earlier:

1) Check if some random domain name is available using Domain Name Pro – it is.

2) Check the domain name is available at Namecheap – it is.

3) Check if the domain name is available at Network Solutions – it is.

4) Then go back to Domain Name Pro and check again – whoops, someone’s registered it.

5) Go back to Namecheap and check again – yep, it’s totally gone.

If you’re looking for a new domain name, steer clear of Network Solutions!

You know how people are constantly getting sued over domain names that breach trademarks… I wonder if Network Solutions could land in hot water for ‘protecting’ a domain name containing the trademark of some huge corporation?

That would be such a shame to see.

It really would.

It’s strange why people place value in the website rankings from a statistical tool that inherently collects skewed data.

Alexa, a part of the mighty Amazon (the book store, not the rain forest), is well-known throughout the Web for their ranking and traffic measurement tools, but just how useful are they?

To answer that question, I suppose we need to first determine exactly what service or product it is Alexa provides.  The title of the Alexa home page tells us that they’re the Web Information Company.  Well, I’m not quite sure whether or not they could have been any more generic than that, but then they do have lots of interesting graphs and distracting button ads to avoid.

Playing around on Alexa.com gives me an indication of how popular other websites are and how mine fare against them, but the measurements only include those people who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their active web browsers.  There was talk of other Alexa gadgets installed on websites helping to boost their figures, but I can’t say conclusively whether or not they actually do.

Okay, so you and everyone else can see how popular websites are with the users of the Alexa toolbar.  Since I don’t know a single person with it installed, I can’t really say whether there’s anything other than bragging rights on offer.

Alexa hates me.  The reason why I say this is because this blog has been stuck at over 250,000 for the past few months.

Why and what can I do to increase my Alexa figures? Should I even care?  I suppose one way in which I could lose out from a lower Alexa value is when it comes to advertising.  Advertisters might use Alexa to garner some visitor counts in order to help them decide whether a website is worth the fee.

I guess as a consolation, I could look towards this Alexa alternative as it shows this blog get an increasing amount of traffic on a month-by-month basis.

Not so long ago, article directory scripts were sprouting up all over the Internet marketing scene along with promises of AdSense riches using nothing but other people’s content. Adopters had seen the success of the likes of EzineArticles, ArticleCity and GoArticles to name just a few and now was their chance to sit back for an easy ride on semi-autopilot.

What these adopters didn’t realise was that maintaining the type of article directory that authors and publishers would visit again and again took hard work.

First there was the set-up. Unless the directory was customised, it would look and function just like any of the hundreds of other directory based upon the same script.

Then there were the bugs. The people who had sold them their article directory systems were marketers and not programmers who appreciated the importance of concepts such as testing and maintenance. Their primary concern was to get their scripts developed as cheap as possible and ready to market as soon as possible. The signs were that the pent-up demand was about to be met by a wave of similar scripts so time was of the essence. Thorough testing would have only slowed things down and the rush was about to begin.

Of course, this eventually led to the inevitable; exploits. Like dominoes, the directories succumbed to the will of the web hosts who pulled down directory after directory as they were being compromised through the same weaknesses. Instead of distributing syndicated content they were sending out masses of spam and consuming large amounts of server resources in a runaway fashion. The fact that so many directories hadn’t been customised and so could be searched for by the default text made it almost too easy for the crackers.

Those who were determined enough to get their systems fixed or to seek out better supported systems were then faced with another hurdle; the articles! With so many people wanting to syndicate their content, owners of directories with even a whisker of PageRank would quickly become swamped with an endless number of submissions.

At first, the novelty of reviewing articles was enough to keep them going. Once this had worn off, the process of reviewing would become a chore that would ultimately culminate in a number of choices:

1. Open the flood gates and accept articles without a thorough review.
2. Abandon the directory for something less time consuming.
3. Stick with it. Perhaps even hire some people to carry out the review process.

It’s my opinion that most people who rushed into the directory business settled for the first two options. Those were the easiest choices, but also the ones that would sound the death knell for the directory. Publishers weren’t interested in empty directories or those filled with articles spun so many times over that they read like they were composed by soul-less machines. And genuine authors didn’t want to submit content to sites which wouldn’t result in their work being read and so all that was left was the automated, spun content submissions.

So, if you ever feel like complaining about article directories having quality requirements that are draconian, remember that maintaining an article directory isn’t easy and that maintaining a directory where people will keep coming back is even harder.

If the review processes are keeping your articles out then perhaps they’re doing their job as they were meant to!