One of my favorite websites for ideas on building a website is digitalpoint.com. They have a fantastic forum and there are a ton of really smart webmasters and it’s full of ideas on how to build your web presence. One of the things that struck me awhile ago, when I was reading the forum, was how everyone wants to game the system to drive traffic to clicks, pay content, affiliate marketing links etc. How many times have you done a search for a particular product and end up going down the rabbit hole of crappy websites?
Yesterday I started looking for a hosting company for another project I am working on. Shared hosting works, but sometimes servers can be driven to their knees if too many sites are being hosted. So I searched for independent reviews on webhosting. I must have spent an hour or so searching, before I found what I thought was an unbiased, legitimate review on different hosting companies. Most sites I hit were affiliate type sites that wanted to drive you to whoever was paying the biggest commission. Ultimately I found a company, Westhost.com (No this is not an affiliate link), that seems to have their act together. For $10 a month and your own IP address, you can have a very fast site with every option you will need. I’m thinking of moving this and my other site, Terrydivyak.com to them as well as this one.
Ok, getting back to Digitalpoint, I ran across this post and felt that he was right on. I know Google is the 800 lb gorilla, but if someone could come up with a search engine that got rid of 80% of the websites that seemed designed to send you to other websites, they could make a ton of money. Below is a snippet from the post.
So what are your thoughts?
“I’m writing this and it’s almost three in the morning, so please bare with me if this doesn’t make any sense, it’s just something I feel that if I don’t get out of my system now, it won’t be in my mind when I get up later today.
I’ve been looking around the internet in the past couple of years, and today have finally realized how much of a waste dump it is. You go to any webmaster related forums and everyone’s going on about how to cheat the system, get to the top with their little niche/affiliate sites, and how to basically make unlawful profit. Yes, I said that, I think the tactics people use to make a quick buck on the internet these days are unlawful.
Personally, when I want to find a site about “acne treatment”, I want to find a place that tells me different methods, advice for avoiding them, and a support forum. But what I do get is a site with affiliate links, Google Adsense ads, and filled with links to other related sites that have the same content. Do you think people really want to read this? Do you think they’re going to get results with the crappy products you’re trying to sell just to get a huge commission? No, they’re going to feel scammed and not wanting to buy from the internet ever again!
Another thing is with YouTube, we seem to think that it’s okay to buy links on videos that have a huge amount of views because we then know that it’s going to get a lot more hits. It’s not really reasonable really, people aren’t looking for sites to visit when they go and watch videos on YouTube. You gotta remember that people have iPhones and Apple TVs now, so your links aren’t going to be viewed most likely anyway. I personally am not looking for affiliate/make money videos either.
Yet people seem to think that if they continue to buy links, their site will become more valuable. What’s the point of buying and selling links with these sites if they’re worthless aswell? It’s not like any of these sites are getting hits to begin with anyway. The acne treatment site I saw was ranked #1 and only had less than 70 sites linking to them. Guess what? They were all health related sites and directories. What is the point, really?!”
