Criticizing Critics
| Share |
This ought to be an interesting review that was ordered by Sitecritic.net! These guys are professional site reviewers so we’d better try our hardest to get them a review that’s up to their standards. They provide inspiration for the creative according to their tagline.
First off, what is sitecritic dot net all about? Yeah thats right, they do website reviews. (duh!) Raise your hands if you were smart enough to figure that one out.
Sitecritic.net is a non-profit organization formed by a group of experienced web designers and developers. Our goal is to provide the web community accurate information in creating effective websites.
They’re giving back power to the people.
One of the main reasons they have created the site for is to try and help real people with real websites that deserve to be noticed. Current SEO techniques are often so effective that just about anybody with a crap site and enough money can “buy” a spot on Google’s first result page. Usually packed with ads, these sites drown out the truly creative and worth to watch sites. One thing that struck us as odd though; It seems the webmaster himself isn’t shy when it comes to SEO manipulation. We’ve seen him buying high pagerank links, social bookmark services and batches of blog back links on a well known webmasters forum.
Or are they?
Agreed, the site has a lot of good content and all the articles seem to be handwritten by real people. They’ll teach you how to create a website with a detailed series of articles or give you some art design ideas. And they can point you to all the right resources since they are also running a (paid) web directory. This appears to be one of the ways they are earning their money. Selling links in the directory and articles. It seems decent value for your money since site itself has a PR7 and loads of inner pages are quite highly ranked too.
If they’re doing what we think they are, they’re pretty smart.
The site gets updated with articles because site owners love to get free reviews of their site(s). Enthusiastic writers can join sitecritic dot net and produce as many articles as they like in return for “free exposure across the web especially when your work is re-published else where”. It’s a win win for everyone really. The webmaster gets free, unique content. Other sites get free reviews (While they provide new content to write about). And of course, the people who actually write the articles are probably having fun in doing so and get some exposure for their writing skills.
Aha, so that’s how they make money.
Unique content that’s frequently updated is exactly what you need to get noticed by the search engines. And once they notice you, the traffic will start to flow in. The bigger your site grows, the more links you’re likely to get and the higher the page rank will climb. We’ve explained before that link sales are big business. With the web directory they have going, the high page rank is ideal as many a webmaster will fork out a nice sum of money just to get listed. Also the articles themselves are used to sell links. Paragraphs can be added to them for the right price.
We might be wrong, but..
We might be completely wrong about the webmaster’s true intentions but to us it looks like a slick operation. The site looks good, the content is genuine and real, but the underlying reason is simply to cash in on link sales. Nonetheless they do have some great articles to offer for free and they have worked hard to make the site valuable. Just one thing we’d like to advise is they should really consider using a larger font. We’ve got a headache after reading the site when we were researching it for this review!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Who Needs An iPhoney When You’ve Got a PS3! Free Beer! We Won An iPhoneyCriticizing CriticsThe Numbers For August Are In!
Is he milking the cow too hard ? 0 AGLOCO Sign UpsViva Las Vegas!20 Ways to Increase Your Blog TrafficGet SeriousA Brisket Case Study Of Buzz MarketingWho Won The $500?The Big BooHoosOur First Evil Money Making Post!Criticizing CriticsMake Moo Famous – Batch 6Dear Person Who Just Stole Our BikeMake MooneyIs Google Giving Away Free PR8 Links?The Big Day Is TodayAre You Cow Enough?Eight Things You Didn’t Know About John CowHow Long Before Your Blog Will Start Making Money?
Hey are you gonna change your layout like john chow
He already mention he is changing the layout, whether or not it’s going to be like John Chow’s is yet to be seen. He doesn’t want to let anyone know about it yet until he is ready to show it.
That’s right Steven, you tell him!
Good review by the way.
Yeah Cow did mention it last post or two ago, also I wouldn’t think it bee too hard to copy his theme if you knew photoshop and php since it looks like John Chow’s “unique” them is just a heavily modified Misty theme, since it has the basic pics and what not on it still.
Not a frequent reader here, now are ya?
Great review. It sounds like an excellent system. And I don’t see any problesm. If they’re providing great content, and they’re making money from it that’s cool. Even non profit organisations need to make money. Making sales does not equal making profits.
Exactly, if it did then it would be a page with a big PayPal donate button.
I think the big PayPal donation button should be there for a non-profit organization.
I thought it was suppose to be non-profit… LOL, sounds like its going to be for profit, although I could be wrong on that one.
Haha I didn’t even realize he said non profit then sells links. Maybe the money goes to server costs and what not.
It wouldn’t matter, real non-profit is non-profit, not, ‘oh lets make enough to cover our operation costs.’
If anything, they could receive donations or would take expense out of their own pockets. Any monetization is no longer non-profit. How would we know if they don’t make more than what it costs to operate.
Very interesting, and I do agree too many sites/blogs get 1st page of Google search because they paid for it basically, and those sites have no real content, mostly stolen with no source and theme does not relate at all and nothing matches, and ads everyplace you look, and really annoying pop-ups, along with no full Rss feeds.
the site sucks. lol.
I didn’t even bother looking at it haha
Lol, don’t even bother, theres nothing spectacular.
There site needs a major overhaul, and my favorite critics are still the ladies at italk2much.com
Oo nice site, thanks for sharing. Their site is much easier to submit, found ti right away.
beware the “bitches” will tear your blog or site to shreds
Hey John, I know I didn’t participate in the guest blogging experiment but would it be too late to ask for an account LOL
Two John C. blogs? Too much to read! lol
Not enough actually. I wish they would update more often…
Damn steve you write more on the two blogs than the two “johns”
Two John C. blogs? hey! I don’t even know if they are the same person but what the hell… both sites are great
They’re different people, I assure you that much.
They are different.
This looks like a cool site run by some smooth criminals..
LOL, I am just trying to answer his question haha
Oh, maybe they should revise their statement on their site then.
Well, thats their business, I don’t really care what they plan to do.
I wasn’t planning to.
Its not a heavily modded version of Misty theme, not even close. He just chose to keep the color scheme. I don’t see how you could think that its just a modded version. While the basic layout is still just one sidebar on the right, they are definitely different themes.
If the cow wants to replicate it, its not hard, just pay Nate to provide the source. I am sure while Nate did design the theme for John, there was no mentioning that it would be exclusive just for John. That said, we don’t know if his new theme will or will not be a replicate of John’s site. However I think if Nate is designing it (IF), it’ll probably have the same top 3 rows since Carlocab has the same theme style.
I wasn’t talking about the colors, to me it just looks like misty, but cooler, some of the things off misty are still there, minor things. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing just saying.
I am sure Nate took into consideration John’s old theme when designing this new one. Perhaps that’s why there are slight similarities?
He probably was a regular reader of John Chow, and saw the widely theme elsewhere and made the theme not knowing there was similarities. Even though I see similarities, probably because I see Misty too much he did a great job.
Theres no doubt about it, I definitely like the new theme. While I can understand why someone people may not like the size of the headers and the wider theme, I don’t think its a big deal. I actually think the theme looks better this way.
Yeah, took me a bit too get used to but now I don’t even realize it is bigger, plus I have a higher resolution screen so it is not much of a big deal. Also it doesn’t look cluttered with ads even thought there are more on his new theme.
Yeah, like everything else, you get use to it.
Thanks for the warning, I’ll look at some reviews and work on my blog before I even think about submitting my blog.
LOL what a warning =]
I hate to quote it…
…but like O.J. Simpson said:
“Any publicity is good publicity” lol
Did OJ really say that?
Whether he said it or not, I have to disagree lol
Hmm, doing a google search, I guess I was mistaken. The article refrenced the term with him, but it doesn’t seem to be a direct quote.
source: quillandquire.com/blog/index.php/category/oj-simpson
Sorry.
Hmm, doing a Google search, I guess I was mistaken. The article referenced the term with him, but it doesn’t seem to be a direct quote.
source: quillandquire.com/blog/index.php/category/oj-simpson
Sorry.
LOL no I don’t. I just comment a lot on a bunch of my favorite blogs lol. Same can be said about you since you’re also on the top commentor’s list of both John’s blog as well.
46 comments in 2.5 days! You MUST have something else to do right?
Believe it or not, I do other things besides commenting.