Home Based
Business The Cheap And Nasty Way
by
Stephen Brennan
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Today I read an article about
‘Splogs’ by Jim Hedger of StepForth Placement Inc., which
prompted me to pen this article so I imagine the credit for its
conception, should go to him.
Splogs are websites that are
principally conceived and built for the purpose of 'earning'
(and I use the term loosely) revenue through such programs as
Google Adsense™. These websites do not exist to sell anything,
instruct in any way or even to inform, although they probably do
in some instances because of the amount of information they
contain. They are simply websites with no purpose or value in
real terms except for the amount of information about a specific
subject, which is found to be in many cases, stolen from other
websites. The content is stolen either manually or by using
'bots'. The latter method makes it possible to produce hundreds
of pages of content with little effort.
As a result, Jim points out,
millions of these Splogs have appeared over a relatively short
time.
Jim's article talks about how
the theft of this information can sometimes adversely affect the
owners of the stolen material and other websites who have
reprinted it with permission. My intention is not to repeat
Jim’s article, so you can read about these aspects yourself
at: Splogs
+ Scraping + AdSense = Fraud.
To my surprise and a little
anger, it turns out that many of these websites are created
using the free hosting and free blog software offered by most of
the major search engines! |
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I've always advised, in person,
when contacted by email and in my writings that first thing ANY
serious home business or online businessperson should do is GET
A DOMAIN and HOSTING. These can be found for as little as $4-95
per year (domain) and $1-99 per month (hosting), with more
facilities than your average Newbie could want. These figures
are hardly 'bank-breakers', in fact, if a budding home business
person doesn't have the $10-91 (or even less) that it would cost
to get started for a quarterly period, they obviously have
other, more important things they should consider using that
money on.
I may be criticized for this
remark however, in my opinion, I believe the free website and
blogging services supplied by any entity should be reserved only
for 'Personal' websites, like those which families or
individuals use to post about their hobbies, likes, loves and
interests. They shouldn't be available for any online 'business'
purpose at all.
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That, of course,
would include banning Adsense and such programs from being added
to them. I actually imagine that's what they were probably
initially intended for anyway.
Anyone who has a serious desire to earn income of any
description through the Internet should be doing so from his or
her own bonafide domain. I acknowledge that I have no right to
declare what should and should not be contained in other's
websites however, when the propensity is there for harm to be done
to other websites and their owners through theft, I will have my
say.
Needless to say, as the subject of these 'Splogs' has become
'hot' recently and obviously, reports of webmasters being
adversely affected have been made, Google has actually gone so far
as to ask website owners to report sites, which appear to be
'Splogs'. This is definitely a move in the right direction, in so
far as something is being done at least to discourage the practice
and root out this type of website.
With Google™ indexing something like 34 billion websites,
there is a lot of rubbish around and much of it is making the
Search Engine results a bit of a mess. These days, when simply
entering an everyday keyword or phrase for search, I generally
find that half of the top ten results are rubbish, rather than
good examples of the kind of website I would like to find.
The practice of 'Splogging' for Adsense and similar programs
is, in itself, a bastardization of home business but to achieve it
through theft of other's content and to present it using free
facilities is really another of those nasty practices we really
don't need on the Internet.
** This
'Author's Resource' must be published intact with links active
when copying or publishing this article **
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