Previously, I announced the launch of Niki Scevak’s www.homethinking.com site.

I have been keeping an eye on the site’s progress and how quickly it has been gaining ground in the major search engines including Google. In terms of the URL showing up in general search engine results, it has been a pretty standard gradual growth - mostly due to bloggers and respected sites writing about the launch. However, one thing has really impressed me about the way the site has been structured underneath. And its such a simple thing.

The site contains masses of content, but its all mostly either centered around a couple of main entities:

1. Real Estate Agent
2. City, Town etc.

I noticed quite early on, that even though the site’s home page was still not registering a pagerank value, that certain key topic pages within the site had very quickly rocketed to respectable 5/10 pagerank values. These were pages such as San Francisco and Leslie Pappas. I.e. a whole page about a massive city, or a page dedicated to a particular professional working in the industry.

The beauty of this type of information architecture, is that you are creating really valuable pages that people will just love to link to. If Leslie Pappas was receiving great reviews, he would be proud to link to his own dedicated page on homethinking. Likewise, any number of web sites in the San Francisco area might find it valuable to link directly to a page purely devoted to summarising real estate agent performance in the San Francisco area. And this is exactly what has happened.

You get your fair share of people saying “Hey check out homethinking.com”, however people are far more interested in the content, if it is in some way directly relevant to them. The physical URLs of these target pages show the simple heirarchy being employed.

This kind of thinking is a very important step when setting up any kind of new web service. If you were to overlook this and for example simply provide a search tool that always supplied dynamic results and didn’t divulge a tidy, permanent URL for people to pass around, then you are probably missing out on a huge kickstart to your site’s pagerank - and that’s traffic and exposure.

If you run a site and people are linking a lot more to the structured pages within rather than the home page itself, its a sign that you have a good, practical content base.

It always used to be about the web developer. The hardcore coder with a technical background who could apply those skills to coding up any clever web site backend and getting things to work - wow what a guy. That is still such a highly respectable skillset for someone who is really really good at that job. But also, I really feel that now is the time of the modern web integrator.

This is someone who has the server-side or nerd background capable of coding up a storm, but who has the foresight to not jump straight in and use it wastefully. I mean why would you code up a mini content management system, when you can simply bang out a copy of wordpress for a client and it does everything and more for a basic content-driven site - everyone wins. The site owner can ever-so-simply publish new and maintain existing content without needing to know HTML, you as the creator gets off with less upfront development time and that’s also passed on via reduced costs to the customer.

The web integrator also has the ability to knock up some reasonable graphics files in a range of formats using any of the main programs. They are a mix between a web-specific graphic artist, nerd coder, general logical thinker and people person. They also understand hosting, security and any other internet related issues.

This kind of web integrator can be smart at their job and for the most common web development tasks thesedays select existing off-the-shelf systems to plugin to suit the customers’ needs. Again, take wordpress as an example. When some new buzzword technology comes out like the next RSS, you just go grab the Wordpress plugin for it. You aren’t coding anything yourself, you’re just integrating. If you had’ve coded up the main site from scratch, you wouldn’t be downloading any nifty plugins - you would be Neville stand-alone.

Really, I know your coding skills are just top knotch, but your time is so much more well spent “integrating” rather than re-inventing the wheel like some big gun developer. Its been the same case with any form of software development for a very long time. You won’t make money unless you are re-using existing stuff. Otherwise, no customer is willing to pay for the time spent, and actually, its the dumb way of doing things. Of course there are always the exceptions, such as coding up a custom radar system for the Australian Navy - however on the web, we’re all basically just publishing information and collecting input aren’t we..?

Its getting to the point where if you were some kid applying for a web developer role, its becoming better to say “Hey, I know 20 freely available web systems that I can easily integrate and customise with minimal effort because of my coding skills in a couple of languages” rather than saying “Hey I know ASP absolutely backwards and can code anything in it”.

Time better spent.

What is a scraper site?

A scraper site is a web site that pulls content from another web site, almost always in an attempt to increase the value or relevance of the scraper site.

The vast majority of scraper sites do not have any original content of their own, i.e. 100% of what they display may be pulled from other web sites.

Adsense Scrapers

And as if this was not a bad enough moral crime to begin with, enter Adsense Scrapers.

Adsense Scrapers use traditional scraping techniques to fraudulently take a margin out of Google’s Adsense program. The common approach seems to be:

1. The scraper site throws a range of popular search phrases (easily found from tools like Wordtracker) at the Google API.
2. The Google API returns the highest ranking and most relevant web sites.
3. The scraper then scrapes content from the highest ranking site(s) to craft up its own targeted scraper web page.
4. The scraper then places low paying bid amounts for the newly crafted scraper page to display in the Adsense/Adwords network.
5. Uninformed, trusting users click on the low paying scraper ad (which costs the scraper site a small amount), taking the user to the crafted scraper site.
6. The user may then be likely to click on a relevant looking (and higher paying) Adsense ad.
7. The scraper then profits the margin between their income from the high paying ad they displayed and the low paying bid that brought them the user.

There is a reasonable chance that the user may still end up with the information they were looking for, but the path the user has taken has been at the expense of two parties:

• The webmaster or company who’s content was scraped, as this was traffic they may have otherwise received.
• The Adsense ad publishers who have paid for a clickthrough from what could not be classed as the most reliable and legitimate of referers. Many of these clicks could be from confused users looking for the most relevant way out of the cluttered or poorly structured scraper page.

Part of managing a strong internet marketing campaign is to do regular detective work and ensure that you aren’t in either of these boats. It could be costing you quite a large sum of money if you invest a reasonable amount in your Adsense campaign. And if you are new to Adsense, it could be robbing you of the decent results that you were hoping for and probably should be achieving.