Lord save us...
Am I the ONLY internet marketing person out there online who is not frothing at the mouth about the newest "trend" to hit the fad-of-the-month Internet Marketing community? Joel Comm (Mr Adsense) has been pushing his 500words.
com site lately, and when I originally saw the site, a feeling of deja vu overcame me in a major hurry! Remember that pixel selling craze of a year or so ago, where everybody went crazy buying 1 pixel ads on a website to get link popularity from Google and the other search engines? That was great for the first 1-2 players in the field (from memory, the guy who came up with the idea made a million dollars from it?), and it got a LOT of free publicity for the early mover, but have you noticed that no one seems to be going crazy about those sites these days? Why, you ask? It's simple really - because it goes against what the search engines are looking for when it comes to measuring the value of incoming links.
My opinion (for what its worth) when it comes to any "fad of the month" Internet Marketing "Secret Sauce" technique is simple: If I can't show it to a Google Search Engine "cop" because he will penalise the link because it doesn't meet their requirements for a quality link, then I don't do it.
These sorts of short term thinking strategies might work for 1-3 months, but once Google figures it out, they will adjust their search engine algorithms to ignore links from sites like this.
However, I think what most disappoints me is that Joel Comm is the one pushing this.
His AdSense Secrets ebook (which I brought and liked) gave me a good impression of the guy, but he just threw that reputation (for me) in the bin with this little venture.
If the 500words concept is so good, he would keep his mouth shut and just build these sites for himself to get the link popularity.
Instead, he's pushing the script to build the keyword sites instead - because THAT's where the money really is.
He'll sucker in heaps of get-rich-quick starry eyed types who think they'll make a bunch of money with it, when in reality, HE will make the money and perhaps only 1-2 others as well.
People, can we use some critical thinking here PLEASE! If this system is really as good as he says it is, why is he selling it instead of just using it for himself? It's simple really - he makes money on the people who buy the links AND he makes money on the people who buy his 500words script, who are also hoping to cash in on the fad.
However, I can guarantee you that within 6 months (probably less), Google will be giving any links from these sites minimal value.
All these word links are doing at the moment is getting traffic because of the buzz, which is obviously nice, but it's not a sustainable long term way to bring in site visitors.
If you want link popularity, instead of paying Joel to buy his script and/or buying some words on his site, hire a ghost writer from elance.
com or rentacoder.
com to write you some unique articles instead.
Publish the articles on your own site, and then rewrite them so that they have at least 25-50% different wording (and change the title, etc) to the original, and publish them on the major article sites like EzineArticles.
com.
Make sure you link your primary keyword/s in the author resource box back to your site when you publish them on other sites.
That's where the link popularity will come from.
The link popularity you will get from doing this will outweigh any link popularity you will get from the 500words site over the medium to long term.
This technique has got my largest client to #1 GLOBALLY on Google (against 115 MILLION competing pages!) for one of their primary keywords in less than 6 months.
It took me about 2 hrs of work to publish those articles for him, and that's all I've had to do since then.
Now, you can take THAT result to the bank! It's a solid linking strategy, it keeps Google, Yahoo and MSN happy, and my client is over the moon, and it makes me look good (which I like).
What more can an SEO consultant ask for! ;-) I love working in the Internet Marketing/SEO field, but I despair at times at how many people just jump from fad to fad, hoping to get rich quick, instead of working smart, hard and putting together a quality site with plenty of cool unique content.