If you are worried about people giving you "crap" for your recent posts, you might want to "stiffen" your back a bit and write what EVER you feel is RIGHT.
Else, you're just a non-payed Google employee.
That is part of a recent email feedback I got from a person after I told them I was going to lay low on mentioning aggressive SEO software for a bit.
Mentioning that blogspam script a while ago got me a few hate comments, but I knew that was expected (although I think some of the haters may have been a bit hypocritical, but that is for another day).
It seems as though the script is no longer offered for sale. Most likely some bloggers saw it and complained to 2Checkout or his host. I can't fault them and I was fairly certain that would be an eventaul side effect of me mentioning it. But he probably sold a few more when I did mention it.
I have not much used any software that:
- blog spams -or-
- creates automated content -or-
- cloaks
I don't necissarily think that one needs to use many automated tools to do well. I do well enough with this site without using any of those tools, but it does not mean someone is a bad person if they use a tool which may not comply with the search engine's TOS. Search engines do not always comply with publisher's TOS, either.
With all that being said, I do realize that if search engines no longer appreciated my site, if they chose to remove it from their index, that could likely eventually have a long lasting effect on my livelihood, or at least until I created other revenue streams.
There are large groups of people who move from business to business and person to person claiming how unethical they are and how right they are when a site eventually get penalized by Google. Now sometimes these people are right, and other times they rely on Google to tell them what is good and bad, right and wrong.
There is a ton of fraud on the web. It is a rather tiring experience trying to create a helful business model that is both honest and profitable while not spreading yourself too thin. I probably could have took on a half dozen clients today, but that would have made little sense. And my blog software was down a large part of the day :(
I think the web as a whole would do far better if on average we each looked for ways to do better ourselves than to point at the flaws with others. It is human nature to say that others are cheating if they are doing better than you or I. Controvercy also builds linkage data and attention, which is a must for blogs.
Now granted the fact that I have this blog makes me a bit of a pundit of sorts, but the point of this post is that generally the biggest gains are in improving our own sites, offerings, and marketing methods rather than wasting efforts on thinking about how unfair or unethical some idea may be.
When you were doing exceptionally bad and go to doing rather well in a short period of time it is easy to take it for granted. I do realize that some people expect certain things from me and from time to time my ideas or links or words will disappoint a few people.
My buddy Jason Duke recently created Widget Baiting, which is a free tool that can be used to mix content.
The tool can generate near matches of a seed article, allowing you to:
- set article length
- recreate at random or using Markov chains
- set the change percentage
- quickly change various words
- quickly regenerate up to 100 mutations of any article
- regenerate future generations from those articles
Two things that would really improve this tool would be to let people change conceptual word groups and to allow people to move the location of a word or wordset within a sentence.
This tool is most likely used for spamming purposes and could probably do well when combined with things like Yahoo!'s autolinker, but is not something I would recommend using on sites that you had long term goals with.
Having said that, this tool can also be used by professional SEOs to create similar mutations of pages to understand how conceptually related pages can be before they are hit by duplicate content filters and how some various search technologies may work.
