Tony's Thing on the Web

A summary of the misleading claims made by Dr Andy Williams for his software, the Fat Content Creator which he claims shows a connection between high ranking pages on Google because of themed content and those that don’t rank highly.

Dr Williams software claims
Dr Williams content creator software is designed to enable a user to improve the themed content of a web page using Latent Symantec Indexing or LSI.

LSI or themeing, is a process used by Google and other search engines to look not just for main keyphrases in a page, but also other words it would expect to find associated with those words and phrases.

He claims by using his article content creator software, that he has shown top 10 ranking pages on Google rank well because they contain themed web page content, when compared to similar pages ranked outside the top 800.

He has produced two pdf case studies and a video that support his claim, with the objective to persuade the viewer to buy his article content creator course and / or his article content software.

"All I am showing is that there is a correlation between top pages, and well-themed content (which there is), and I am using my tool to do that."

When asked if he would like to open our discussion to the wider SEO community, to see if they would agree with his views, Dr Williams declined, but replied:

"I believe, with all other things being equal, a page of content that is well themed, will outperform one that isn't well-themed.”

In order to make things equal Dr Williams chose pages with a similar low page rank from the top 10 on Google to compare them with similarly low page rank pages outside the top 800. This was in an effort to compare like with like in so far as PR was concerned.

He also chose pages of low PR generally below 3 to avoid the influence of rank boosting effects of incoming page links which might give higher PR pages a boost in the rankings.

Dr Andy on pages that don't agree with his results
When presented with pages that didn’t fit with his own published results he replied:

"Keyword stuffing at its best. If this page is ever inspected by Google, I am sure it would be penalised."

In fact the page was last modified Aug 17, 2007 and Google had not seen fit to penalize its No.6 ranking even after almost 12 months.

For another page the quality theme score indicated by his content creator software dropped from 63.3% to 42.4% just on changing one word !

Dr Williams replied:

“The article has all the symptoms of keyword stuffing, especially since the content is so long.”

The article was actually less than 800 words, hardly long by any standards. It also had a keyword density less than 3% so not keyword stuffed either.

In his own video case study one page he chose had 6,304 words, but he didn’t consider that too long !

When presented with another page that did not fit his theory Dr Williams wrote:

"Comparing this page to a page of basically written content is just not right."

This page had over 200 words of content, excluding menu and link texts and had a Google ranking of 10 with a PR of 3, so it should have fitted his theory.

The Video
Dr Williams in his video “Does Google Really Rank Well-Themed Content Higher ?” uses his Content Creator software and the keyphrase "liver detox" to show how pages in the top 10 rankings of Google ranked better because of themeing - when compared to similar pages outside the top 800.

When I repeated his video example I also looked at pages in the top 10, but unlike Dr Williams I also looked at pages outside the top 30, 50, 100 and 200. I also did a statistical correlation analysis on the results.

There was NO strong or consistent correlation, between pages ranking on Google and themed content results produced by his software.

In fact there was a closer correlation between a page’s ranked position on Google and its Alexa ranking.

One page that ranked 106 was better themed according to Dr Williams content creator software than a page ranked on Google at position 8. Clearly this did not match his theory and they both had a PR 1.

His claims strongly imply that his software can help you achieve a better ranking with Google for your pages – Otherwise why else would you purchase it ?

Dr Williams chose to maintain his claim
So I chose to publish my findings

Tony Simpson
web page optimization
Making Your Website Work for You

My version of Dr Williams Disclaimer:
This web page is not meant to provide definitive proof, that Dr Andy Williams is deliberately making false and misleading claims with his software it merely highlights some of the compelling research I have done on this topic.

Continue reading "Content Creator Software a Waste of Time ?" »

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 05:51 PM | web page link

This week I came across Easy Ad Splitter that enables split-testing different Adsense Ad formats on your web pages, but you may not get what you expect.

The product is being sold in various forms, with and without resale rights formats and re-branding rights. So, you might find it being marketed by different people under different names at anything from $7 to, well you name it.

I should however warn you, if you are expecting a script like an Adsense Tracker that runs on your web site you will be sadly disappointed. The "software," if you can describe it as that, is quite simple.

The software installs on your PC and you provide it with two sets of Google Adsense Code for the Ad formats you want to test. Let’s say you want to test one Ad with black text and another Ad with grey text.

You copy and paste the two different Adsense Code blocks into the "software" and it adds a simple javascript function to the page code. Once added to your web page the javascript rotates one block of Adsense code for the other each time the page is loaded.

I will save you buying Easy Adsense Splitter, here is the javascript code it adds to your normal Google Adsense code, it’s a simple random rotation function.

Here’s the javascript:

<script type="text/javascript">
var random_number = Math.random();
if (random_number < .5){
//your first ad unit code goes here
} else {
//your second ad unit code goes here
}</script>

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"></script>

To track the results of this you also need to setup different "channels" within your Google Adsense control panel for each Ad.

Also with this product is a pdf document called "Three Little Tricks" that gives tips on boosting your Adsense income by using different Ad placement techniques.

To anyone well versed in Google Ad placement on web pages there are no new revelations – so I suggest you save your money.

So is Easy Ad Splitter - "software ?" – well you judge for yourself.

Tony Simpson
website design optimisation
Making Your Website Work for You

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 12:07 PM | web page link

Unless you were on another planet you should have witnessed the slick marketing launch of Jason Potash and Marc Quarles latest product Portal Feeder.

But whilst it may have been slick marketing, perhaps it was too clever. Reading between the lines of Jason’s own words, I suspect it backfired.

Portal Feeder has been promoted as the Google Untouchable next generation of automated website creators. It is claimed to leave no footprint for Google to detect.

Therefore unlike other automated website creators, like Traffic Equalizer, Traffic Hurricane, Smart Pages and Directory Generator, it is said that Portal Feeder websites are immune from being banned by Google.

It should be noted that Google is on the warpath to eliminate websites created by such automated programs that can spew out 1000’s of web pages at the push of a button. The value of such sites to the owners is largely from Adsense Revenue and other Advertisements.

Only 375 Portal Feeder copies to be sold
During the pre-launch advertising it was being made clear that only 375 copies of Portal Feeder would ever be sold. In addition the asking price for the Portal Feeder package was $397.

At this price it would still be affordable for serious buyers. But then came the rub, the $397 was just the first payment, there was $197 per month, every month to continue using the product…….Ouch!

According to postings on the Portal Feeder blog, existing customers of Jason’s other products and his affiliates were not happy at only 375 copies being available.

With such limited numbers available affiliates did not want to promote it because they felt few of their customers and subscribers would have a chance to buy it. I suspect that they were afraid of the backlash from their own lists.

The solution arrived at by Jason and Marc was to allow anyone to purchase provided they did so within 24 hours of Portal Feeder going on sale.

2 Hours before the Sale of Portal Feeder Closed
On the day Portal Feeder went on sale Jason wrote an email to all those on his announcement list, 2 hours before the sale was to close, which said :

"Before the launch, some people were speculating (complaining) that we'd pack this thing with 2000-3000 members. This is clearly NOT the case. We are still way under 1000 members (as I suspected)."

So if you take Jason’s statement of "way under 1000 members" to be true, many people must have stayed away, because this email was only 2 hours before they were due to stop the sale.

The initial sales limit was 375 and they had lifted that to be as many as wanted to buy it within the 24 hours it was going to be on sale, so there was no limit to the number they would sell.

So where did the figure of 1000 come from ?

After the 24 hour for which Portal Feeder was on sale Jason sent out another email to those on his announcement list which read :

"In case you were not aware, the doors on Portal Feeder are now closed. As promised, there was a small 24 hour window of opportunity that has now passed.

However, many of you have been asking when/if there will be another chance to get onboard.

We haven't made any concrete decisions here about if or when this will happen, but in the meantime you can put yourself on our Priority Waiting List when you click the link below:"

So what happened to the statement Jason Potash had in the sales copy which said :

"I know that some marketers play clever "tricks", place limits on things, create scarcity, and then use some ridiculous "excuse" to re-open the program in 30 or 60 days to 500-1000 more people. It’s not going to happen here."

Now Jason is saying they have made no concrete decision as to whether Portal Feeder will be offered for sale again.

3 days after the sale finished the sales page for portal feeder has a sign-up form on it to join a waiting list. On the form an interesting line reads:

"Once the Priority Waiting List has been notified, if there are still available seats, the general public will be notified as well."

So what can we read into this, either Jason speaks with forked tongue and does not mean what he says or fewer sales were made than they expected.

Jason also said in the same after sale email :

"Since Wednesday afternoon, we already have 832 people on the waiting list and that's without me really mentioning it to anyone at all."

So why mention it, Jason.

My thoughts on this being a clever Marketing Plan that Backfired are:

1. If people rushed to buy Portal Feeder during the 24 hours they made it available, why do they feel the need to offer another chance for people to buy. Before the sale they were adamant they would not do this.

2. If they sold lots of copies of Portal Feeder, bearing in mind they originally said they only wanted to sell 375 copies why do they have 832 people on a waiting list.

3. If they already have 832 people on a waiting list why tell other people in an email that you can still sign up to join the waiting list.




4. If they have 832 people on a list still waiting to buy Portal Feeder, do they really expect this many people to ask for a refund, before any of the 832 can buy it.




5. If they have 832 people waiting to buy why would they expect to notify the general public as it says on the waiting list form on the sales page. And why do this, when they were adamant Portal Feeder would not be offered for sale again after the 24 hours was up.

One of two things has to be true

a) Jason Potash is not the squeaky clean guy he makes himself out to be on his sales page and is just another marketer like so many others who tries to play clever "tricks."

OR

b) The marketing plan backfired, the scarcity angle was overdone and people stayed away from Portal Feeder.

Tony Simpson
web page optimization
Making Your Website Work for You

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 10:55 AM | web page link

Until recently I thought I’d cracked a problem that has bugged me on and off for 15 years, and that’s taking backups of files and directories on my PC.

There’s certainly no shortage of software available to take backups, but finding backup software that actually works as advertised is something I’m yet to achieve.

You see I’m old enough to remember and have used tape drives, which at the time I thought was the answer to being able to take large drive backups of up to 4GB wow!

One of many problems I found with my quality HP drive and driver software was that it couldn’t take backups of files in use.

That meant it was useless for taking backups of the Windows operating system which was the main reason I bought it. Could I find anywhere it said that in the instructions – nope.

Fast forward 10 years and many backup solutions later I thought I had found the one solution I needed – Norton Ghost. I could even take and restore backups over a network, just what I needed.

A word from the wise here, no matter what backup solution you’re using always test to see if you can restore a backup before you need to do it for real. It’s surprising what little things you find.

Norton Ghost for instance allows you to take complete drive backups from a partitioned disk, but when you restore that drive it wipes the whole disk first. So if you’ve got other drive partitions on the disk their history. I found that out once and where did I find the warning about this, there wasn’t one.

To be fair to Norton they did add a warning about this to a later version of the software but that didn’t do me much good at the time.

Another word from the wise, don’t rely upon one method of backup, you need at least two and more likely three. If you think I’m paranoid about backups you’d be right, but then I’ve had too many experiences of backup methods failing.

Fast forward again to the past 12 months and I added a new backup software aptly named Stuffit. After several months of problems that the developer was not interested in fixing I finally did Stuffit – in the bin.

Next came Turbobackup, similar to Stuffit it enabled me to schedule backups of selected files and directories, zip them up and save them to another drive. Now there shouldn’t really be anything difficult in that you would think – well no maybe, unless your using ResourceEater, I mean Turbobackup.

All was going so well, it took the backups usually as scheduled, but not always, until one day I noticed my PC was getting slower and slower each time Turboeater ran. Anyone spotted the clue yet, I’m sure you PC buff’s have, it was eating computer resources faster than PacMan. I have 1000MB of fixed RAM memory and it was at its peak consuming about 750MB of it.

Complaints to the developer soon revealed they had a problem, yet another undisclosed bug. There was a workround but not a very satisfactory one and despite continuing to use it Turbobackup bit the dust a few days ago.

It had developed a will of its own, not taking backups when it should, creating double backups of the same directories and throwing up warning pop-ups all over the place. It had to go.

Never believe what it says on the packet or the software website. It’s not what they tell you, it’s what they don’t tell you.

I still need to do these backups, so after wading through backup software’s that I researched and dismissed without trying, I’m left with a software called SyncBack. I’m hoping this will be 3rd time lucky or else in a few weeks or months I’ll have a new name for this backup software, maybe I could call it …… SickBag or ……… SinkBuck.

As an update to this entry I can report SyncBack failed. You can find the followup entry at Windows Backup Software - Handy Backup Saves the Day

Tony Simpson
web page optimization
Making Your Website Work for You

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 11:47 AM | web page link

Have you ever been lured by the promise of tons of traffic from software programs that create 100’s and 1000’s of web pages at the push of a button ?

Programs like Directory Generator, Smart Pages, Traffic Hurricane, Traffic Equalizer and the latest to hit the scene Traffic Booster.

But do they really work and if they're so good, do the promoters of such products actually use them on their own web sites ?

Some people who caught the early boat on programs that create these mammoth directory sites full of meaningless links to pages with no real content of any value, have been reporting good Adsense revenues.

After all what else is there to do when you’re a visitor that’s been lured to one of these sites only to find there’s nothing there, you might as well click on an Adsense Ad. Those visitors that don't click on an Ad are just frustrated, angry and blame the search engine for serving up a bad result.

Many search engines would rather such sites didn't exist and a few are taking steps to make sure they don't, at least not in the results they serve up.

The latest intelligence reports from the last Google shakeout, code name Jagger, suggest that many of these push button sites are being discovered and eliminated from Google’s index.

Google has not got them all, but surely there days are numbered if Google gets its way and it usually does. As well as Google detecting these sites automatically by any footprint they have, it's also employing people to search for these sites manually and have people report such sites directly to Google.

The big issue I've always had with these traffic generator programs is where's the evidence they work, other than a slick sales page that tries to convince you they do.

So do you buy one of these programs to get more traffic or let your site slowly die whilst you're trying. Do you buy and try, or do you pass them by.

It's a case of Do or Die.

Take Traffic Booster one of the latest in a line of similar programs was launched in September 2005 going by when the site domain for this product was first registered. The domain is registered for 1 year so can be regarded as a throw away site, not expected to be around for very long.

The sales page for Traffic Booster boasts:

Learn How I Use This Revolutionary Software To Consistently Average Over 15,000 Visitors To My Websites Per Day - Using Only FREE Search Engine Traffic From Google, Yahoo, And MSN!"

P.S. - I forgot to mention to you that TrafficBooster Professional was a project that we started because we needed an advanced search engine optimization tool of our own with Outstanding Benefits that would help us "STEAL" The TOP 10 Rankings against our competition.

We was in a dilemma if we should make public such a Powerful tool. So TrafficBooster Professional Finally designed with every webmaster in mind. But we had to pay the "price". Even our competitors is using it now against us !!!

Obviously English is not the first language of who ever wrote this sale page, perhaps George Karamesinis, the promoter of this product. With 57 mentions on Google.com, mainly all from affiliates for his product one cannot say George is well known, at least not to Google.

But the big question for me is does this product get used on any site owned by George Karamesinis ?

He say’s it does on the sales page, but if that’s true what site is it ?

The promotional web site does not appear to use Traffic booster or if it does its Alexa Ranking (the amount of traffic it gets) does not show high levels of traffic. The Alexa 3 month average is 1,482,167, so it’s not in the top 100,000 sites for traffic.
Now Alexa can be wrong of course.

The lower the Alexa number the better the ranking, so a site with a ranking of 15,000 would be getting a lot more traffic than one with a ranking of 1,500,000 which is where this product site is ranked.

A video on the site that demo’s the use of the product uses a site at www.free-keywords.com. But that site has only an under construction graphic on the main index page and has an equally poor 3 month average Alexa Ranking at 1,475,770.

Digging below the surface on this demo site I did find that Traffic Booster is installed on the site, but buried where one would not easily find it.

So to judge by Alexa, neither the product site, nor the demo site for this product are getting high levels of traffic. So, this is not a good advert for the effectiveness of Traffic Booster. The demo site which has been around longer than the product domain also has a short 1 year term, due to expire in Mar 2006.

From my short investigation of Traffic Booster, there is no evidence it can get the results claimed or even if the promoter uses his own product. If he does there was no sign of a Traffic Boost to the product or demo sites.

So what does this all say about Traffic Booster. It’s not effectively used on two of George’s sites, the product site or the demo site and the traffic to both sites according to Alexa is poor.

Just to be sure, I sent an email to George Karamesinis, the promoter of Traffic Booster, asking if he could provide the domain of any site of his that uses this product. I’m still awaiting a reply.

Getting more traffic is not the only answer
Many web site owners obsess over getting more and more traffic, in the belief that more traffic equates to more sales or more sign-ups, or whatever visitor action they are expecting. What they don't seem to realize is that chasing after ever more traffic is very often NOT cost effective.

What is more cost effective, is doing more with the traffic you already get. By that I mean turning more visitors into buyers or leads. The process for getting more from your existing traffic is frequently referred to as conversion rate improvement or landing page optimization.

You can learn more about this process at web page optimization to increase conversion rate and landing page optimization guaranteed to increase sales

Tony Simpson
web site optimisation
Making Your Web Site Work for You

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 10:40 AM | web page link