There is an easy solution:

I use the form on this page:

http://www.felgall.com/htmlt47.htm

To convert regular html code into something that will display but not execute.

Links on group pages are no-followed.

Links on discussions use a redirect from Google. While there is no ‘no-follow’, I would question whether Google follows the link or not. Although other search robots might, and give it weight. In other words, if my site is google.com, and I have a link to yahoo.com using a redirect such as http://google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://yahoo.com, is this a do-follow or a no-follow link?

Perhaps of most concern is the potential email problem. User profiles, and information listed for discussion posts, includes the email address used to sign up for Google Groups. While there is some spam control, certainly not enough for my liking. There is no reason for an actual email address to appear. Period. Otherwise, that is inviting trouble.

Especially when a simply captcha – easily and quickly worked around by spammers – shows a naked email address.

It may be prudent to use a throw-away email to sign up for Google Groups, which is confirmed, and then discarded. That may have some negative consequences in getting group communications, but we’ll see how the spam issue goes.

But it certainly appears that Google does not have a high concern for it’s user’s email privacy.

I suppose if someone just wanted a platform to write some pages and have limited discussions, with no monetization, then Google Groups may be enticing. You may get some group members from other non-techie people, which may be find for your purposes.

But given alternative options, especially having your own website, go with your own site.

Testing of the plugin with new WordPress 3.0 (using the Flexibility theme), shows that the plugin is now causing RSS feeds to not validate. Once the plugin is deactivated, the RSS feed validates. Validation was done with FeedValidator.org.

Unique Article Wizard – $67 per month – UniqueArticleWizard.com promotes that it has a ’secret sauce’ to create unique versions of your article which are then distributed to thousands of websites. Many article directories can quickly and easily signup to automatically receive articles from Unique Article Wizard. However, a common theme of late in many comments online is that the quality of sites is poor and Google can quickly identify the UAW attempt to make articles unique. Overall, I wouldn’t worry about many new (low PR) article directories picking up your article. The duplicate content issue is another matter – assuming you are in the camp that believes there is no duplicate content penalty. (We’re not going to get into that debate here!)

Submit Your Article – $47 per month – SubmitYourArticle.com is very similar to Unique Article Wizard, except that it has done a better job of managing the quality of articles submitted through its service. As a result, Submit Your Article is possibly the only mass submission service that lets you submit to the top article directories, such as Ezine Articles. It has options to try and create unique article versions. You can also control the rate at which your article is distributed to other sites. SYA also makes it easy for article directories to automatically accept article submissions.

Article Marketing Automation (”AMA”) – $47 per month – ArticleMarketingAutomation.com is free if you just want to receive article submissions to display on your website. There is, however, no option to even try and make your articles unique.

My Article Network – $47 per month – MyArticleNetwork.com is the newest service. It doesn’t offer the options available elsewhere and only submits to blogs. No article directories. The service has a spinning function.

Syndicate Kahuna – closed – SyndicateKahuna.com is similar to MyArticleNetwork. Even though it is currently closed to new members, I mention it here because it is a decent service. This submits to blogs – not article directories.

SubmitEaze – $78.95 one-time fee – SubmitEaze.com is software you download to your computer that is automatically updated with new directories and article directories to submit to. It has a quick submission feature which makes article submissions fast, but not hands-off like the prior services. It allows for unique article titles and anchor texts, but not article text. (Although from the software it seems like this would work, it is not mentioned in the brief manual and I have not tested the possibility.)

ArticleBot – $24.95 one-time free – from Incansoft.com, ArticleBot is also downloadable software that you can use to submit to article directories. Not as automated as the online services. It’s also a lot cheaper. While many Incansoft products have received rave reviews, to-date this is not one of them. Supports spinning of article titles and resource boxes, but not the main article text.

Article Post Robot – $127 – ArticlePostRobot.com is more downloadable software. I almost didn’t include them here (and may not as for some reason this is the 4th time I’m made this update, but Firefox keeps mysteriously crashing) because Article Post Robot has not been updated since July 2009. Ouch. However, if you really want a unique article sent to each directory APR cannot be beat. Not only can you spin article titles and resource boxes, but if you use another problem (eg, thebestspinner.com) to create many different spun versions of your article, just put the versions in a directory and ArticlePostRobot will randomly pick one to send to each article directory. Very, very nice.

Overall recommendation – this partly depends on your budget, and you have a number of options to choose from. Even if you don’t think there is a duplicate content ‘penalty’ – it never hurts to have unique content! If you can afford it, check out SubmitYourArticle.

Article Post Robot remains a viable choice, if you’re willing to risk that the software suddenly won’t stop working. You have to login to your online account from the software to submit articles. With the software not being updated, you should not be confident about this.

Let me just get this out of the way – SocialBot is the clear, hands-down winner.

So let me start with the Bookmarking Demon review.

Bookmarking Demon comes with 100 social bookmarking sites. The concept is that you can grab all the urls from your domains, add in bogus urls to make your booking appear more ‘natural’, spin the content of your submissions so they are not all the same, and randomly submit to various accounts you create.

All done automatically.

Sounds great.

Used to work.

I’d say through version 4 Bookmarking Demon was useful.

Now in Version 5.1 it’s a complete mess. The interface is near impossible to manage. It is broken up into different areas ridiculous to decipher and effectively use. Maybe if this is the only program you used, and you used it every day, you would learn the ins and outs and it would be second nature. But unless you created this monstrosity, good luck.

Basically, it tries to do much and has a disorganized interface.

The latest upgrade, from 5 to 5.1, now includes a requirement that your license be entered. That would be fine, unless you bought the original software years ago. Think that license number would be easy to find? Guess again. Nowhere to be found in the software.

Ironically, the software appears to have a license number embedded in it, which checks a server to determine that new version is available. But then it ignores the number and wants it manually entered again – but it won’t tell you what it is. Utterly stupid.

Needless to say, this appears to be the top support request to the support manager – which is in Singapore. Type in your purchase email and get your license key. Except it doesn’t work. Simple as that … does not work.

Bookmarking Demon is basically dead man walking software.

SocialBot, on the other hand, is one of many titles from the well-respected Incansoft software collection.

Easy to use interface.

Not just a hundred bookmarking sites, but try 1200. Yes 1200. 12x as many as Bookmarking Demon.

You can start using it right away. Create multiple accounts. Spider your domains for urls to submit. Using spinning syntax to create unique submissions to each site.

And it costs less than a quarter of what Bookmarking Demon costs.

The one place I give BMD the edge is the ability to randomly select accounts to post to.

But in every other respect, this is a no-brainer decision.

Go with SocialBot – available at the Incansoft.com website.

1. Within your cpanel click to add a new subdomain.

2. Call the subdomain * (yes, just an asterisk).

3. For the document root use the root domain (public_html). If the dynamic subdomains are for an add-on domain, then the document root will be public_html/youraddondomain.com.

That’s it.

Now, you can refer to a subdomain and it is automatically created on the fly. Such as using the WordPress WP subdomains plugin to create subdomains out of pages.

Bottom line: you pay someone else to do all your work for you.

So what is Reese offering – to spend his PERSONAL TIME not doing ANYTHING SPECIFIC, but to be available to answer your questions.

A coaching program is simply an amorphous excuse to offer time for money for nothing in particular. Really? How many prior products has Reese followed-through with long-term? Exactly. None.

About outsourcing? Maybe. Maybe John Reese will be outsourcing himself. Who knows – but have you ever seen such a contradictory product or service?

———-

Update: Income.com just bit the dust per an email from John. In it he calls himself the worst guru ever and he never wanted the label. He just likes doing things and following ideas.

Let’s be honest. Reese has made a lot of money. As he admits, he has also left even more money on the table. Is there a company, or a project of his, that has not been a one-shot deal which ultimately collapsed?

Perhaps John is finally realizing his strengths – and weaknesses. The latter of which are difficult for most people to accept.

Obtaining personal introspection has nothing to do with how much money one has made.

Here is what I would like to see from JR:

- No more emails pimping products just to get an affiliate commission.
- Focus on ideas and projects which John is great at coming up with.
- If Reese wants to market to the IM community and send emails talking about himself as though he were a guru, ‘outsource’ it to Andy Jenkins or someone else.
- Get a personal life coach.

But who knows. The email referenced various projects and interests, but last I heard Reese had sold literally everything he owns and was backpacking in the wilderness. Seems to me he is still lost in the woods, not knowing exactly what he wants to do.

Here’s a radical idea: turn off the computer and get a family. Amazing what that can do for a person. Responsibility. Stability. Focus. Long-term planning. IMHO, the sort of things he needs.

Bottom line: Offline Detox will not make you a dime. I have already deleted it off my hard drive. Of course, Imran Naseem never says he has actually tried any of this. He never says he has made a penny doing this. And the short guide has awesome statements such as “This is what I would do ….” if one were to such tactics.

Don’t bother wasting your time on Offline Detox. Your time is worth more than this, even for free.

Just another reminder to use throw-away email addresses so when you come across a bad company like this you can simply discard the email, or delete a redirect to your real email, so you don’t have to hear from them again.

For that reason ‘just a PHPBay’ site can be hit or miss in Google. But there are some code customizations you can do to avoid being quickly fingerprinted as having another thin affiliate site:

1. Change up the default template. You don’t need everything created by PHPBay to be a link. All link and no text? Change it so only the graphics are linked. Or maybe just the text. And change the default text while you’re at it.

2. Randomize the number of auction listings. Instead of 10 listings per page, as everyone has, use php to get a random number, say between 5 and 15, then use that variable to control how many listings are shown on a page. It size of the content and number of links will thus be different each time the Googlebot comes by.

Within your config.php file, do something like this:

# MAXIMUM ITEMS PER PAGE
$randomnum = mt_rand (5,15);
$config['paging_num'] = $randomnum;

3. Change the default image url used for seo links. PHPBay by default makes the urls for images to be your domains/images/e/number.jpg. That ‘/images/e/’ is called a footprint. Within your ebay.php file find this line:

var $image_replace = "images/e/";

and change it to something else, such as good keyword.

Then, in your .htaccess file change all references to ‘^images/e/’ to your new location.

4. Change the default item listing for seo links. PHP by default makes each product link ‘item-’ followed by the product name. That, again, is a footprint. Within config.php, under Basic Options, find this line:

$config['url_prefix'] = "item-";

and change it to some other word, such as keyword, followed by the hyphen.

Then, in your .htaccess file, change the references to ‘^item’ to your keyword.

There you have it, 4 easy ways to change your PHPBay footprint so you don’t automatically scream to Google – hey, eBay affiliate site here. There are already enough stories of how Google hates eBay affiliate sites without adding yours to the collection.