Is unique content really better than duplicate? or Why is Matt Cutts so chummy with search engine spammers?

I’ve always believed that the best way to make a successful website is to have solid unique content. First, we need to make some assumptions. Unique content can be useful, or useless. Duplicate content can be useful or useless. So, I could spend an hour writing up an article that would be of no use to anyone, while I could go to an article site and spend an hour hunting down useful articles. But, the big monkey wrench in this equation is that if you write uniqe content that is useful, people are going to steal it from you and publish it under their own name on their own websites. Google will reward them for doing it. So, what’s the better business plan then? Spending tons of your time to create great content, and having search engine spammers take it and publish it as their own? Or, be a search engine spammer and take whatever content you want? From what I’ve seen, Google gives bigger checks to search engine spammers than it does to people who create genuine unique content. Oh, I know, my perception of it is skewed, but really why is Matt Cutts so chummy with the search engine spammers?

Full Circle - How I Bought a Website I sold Two Years Ago

Approximately two years ago, I was divesting myself of my hosting business, and in a separate transaction I sold off .  I sold it for about what I paid for it. A few days ago, I bought it back from the person I had sold it to, back in 2003. I paid less than half of what it had originally sold. I’ve upgraded, and am refocusing the site. It was focused on being a technical support site, but since the osCommerce main site does that so well, there’s no need. There is a need, however, for a site focused on helping people who don’t need technical support, but would like to learn more about managing an ecommerce site. So, the focus will be on subjects like marketing, SEO, fullfillment, and other non-technical issues. The technical stuff is still there, just consolidated into a smaller area. Come over and say hi!

My Blog Forum

Well, I’ve finally gotten around to putting some more focus on my forums. Recently, I’ve started trying to further develop my Blog Forum. Started posting more, getting others to post, tinkering with the design a bit. I also reconfigured the sections to make more sense, consolidate a few areas that hadn’t seen a whole lot of action. I’d like feedback on it, and bloggers go and post!

Google Image Search

I’ve noticed on a couple of my sites, Google Image Search taking up a lot of bandwidth. This helps explain it a bit. I’m not sure if it’s worth it at all. On one of my sites, they were pretty much just hotlinking my images, so I disabled hotlinking. The site wasn’t getting very good rankings in the search anyway, and still isn’t. If Google is going to take my bandwidth, I’d appreciate if they’d at least give me a good SERP in return.

*disclaimer: if any Google employees ever read this, I’m being sarcastic with that final remark, please don’t ban me.

Google Toolbar PageRank - - you may have misconceptions about it

One of the most commonly misunderstood subjects about Google is PageRank. It’s difficult to understand the whys of how Google approaches this, making some facts very secretive and some very public. But, there are some things that we can understand, such as the PageRank as shown in the toolbar.

Toolbar PageRank is a snapshot of real PageRank. The most recent toolbar PageRank update happened just a couple days ago. What the toolbar is now showing is how the PageRank appeard at some point in late December.

How do I know this? Well, because it included PageRank from some links that I added in mid-December, but not some that I added on December 30th and 31st. It’s possible that Google captured the PageRank on Christmas weekend itself, and updated the toolbar on New Year’s weekend.

Why is it important to understand that this is a snapshot? The PageRank you see in the toolbar is old news. The search engine itself updates PageRank on a daily basis, more or less. In fact, it depends on the importance of the site how often it’s updated. If you get a link from a very important site (high PR), you’ll get updated far more quickly than if you get a link from a low PR site. You can test this by adding new links and monitoring your positions before, during, and after.

Progress toward my end year goal

I haven’t had much time to post to this blog in the past couple weeks, even less than usually, as I’m working day and night to meet my year end goal. The goal is 100 presentable websites. More precisely I will have ten forums, twenty-five content sites, and seventy-five micro-sites. Yea, more than a hundred, but it’s a nice round number. One of my latest is The Lemon Laws a content site about consumer protection and auto laws. Many more to come.

Relaunch About-Auctions.com

I’ve had this site around forever, and finally decided to clean it up, install my CMS, and relaunch it. I started this site, Online Auctions back when I was heavy into selling on Ebay, did little with it and it’s languished for the last couple years. Seems this week I’m on a roll of launching or relaunching a site per day. I need to work out the buttons on the site, but am beginning to like how the coder I hired did the templating system. Now, I need to get more content.

My new CMS

I think my new CMS is looking pretty good now. A couple more additions I might like to add, but it’s starting to look like I want, and work like I want. I ran into this problem earlier this year, that I was launching so many new content sites and was not satisfied with any of the commercial or open source CMS scripts available, so I contracted a coder to build one for me. It was a long process, as pretty much anything is when I’m involved, but it’s ready to go live and near perfection. Today, I rebuilt my Go Rock Climbing site with the new CMS, and I have a list of about a dozen other sites I’m either building or rebuilding, and that doesn’t even take into consideration the dozen or so ideas I come up with on a daily basis for new websites.

Micro Sites

The recent bargain price for .info domains has prompted me to come up with ideas for micro sites. Obviously, I’m not prepared to take on the management of twenty-five new full websites, but it will give me the incentive to create a group of micro sites. I’ve selected a group of extremely targetted travel-related keywords matched to the domains, and have started putting the development of this group of sites out to bid. The idea is to create a static html website, maybe five pages, with a specific keyword in mind. I’ve tried to collect names that show a potential of at least 100 searches a day in the search engines. These are also fairly un-competitive keywords. Bring traffic - sell ads. I expect to have ten to twenty-five dollars in each website (each one taking a developer an hour to make, from content to coding, since they’ll have all the same coding it’s just plug in the content). After that, the only outlay is for the hosting. If I can’t make more than twenty-five dollars per site in 12 months, it will have been a total failure. I anticipate twenty-five a month, though. Small dollars, but if the idea works well, the sky is the limit.

Time to Reorganize

Well, I never thought it would happen, but I’ve received the proverbial “offer I cannot refuse” for my site www.small-business-forum.com. The deal isn’t inked yet, but if the buyer is earnest it will be within the next week or two. I just have a few loose ends to tie up with the site, receive the payment, and that’s that. I’ll free up some time to spend on other sites, like my blog forum which has been long-neglected. There are a few projects left on the back burner I’d like to move forward with too. Change is invigorating.

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