Edition #81 – 9/6/2006
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UPDATE: I wrote this review yesterday, before the product actually launched (based on the preview sample sites, and sales page). Today I ordered and paid for the full product and my review still stands. I am also adding some additional notes to the bottom of this review, now that I’ve had a chance to see the full product.
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Tomorrow Cody Moya launches his AdSense Templates product. It is a monthly membership site, which provides templates and pre-built sites for AdSense.
Unfortunately, I have to recommend that you do NOT buy Cody Moya’s AdSense Templates, and I’ll tell you exactly why.
First of all, you may already know that I’m looking at this through a somewhat biased lens, because I happen to be Joel Comm’s partner for his Instant AdSense Templates product.
However, I’m going to IGNORE the fact that Cody “borrowed” several key elements, design concepts, and parts of the sales letter from our product… (He even went so far as to put Joel Comm’s name and image on his squeeze page until Joel told him to take it down…)
Competition is a part of the business, and I don’t blame Cody for competing… unfortunately he just went about it the wrong way at first (and in talking to my marketing friends, it sounds like he may have a track record of doing that kind of thing). But like I said, I’m going to completely overlook that side of it and focus on the product itself to bring you as accurate and objective review as possible.
First of all, let’s look at the templates themselves. Here are the three sample templates he provided (with pre-built sites):
(Links removed – no longer available)
Let’s talk about the design first. It’s OK but could be better. He is using one of the basic designs that we used in the first edition of Instant AdSense Templates. The navigation is on the left side, and he’s got either an AdSense leaderboard with thumbnails above it, or an AdSense large rectangle with thumbnails to the left of it.
If the illustrations on the sales page are any indication are any indication, then ALL of Cody’s templates are based on these two variations. For the kind of volume he’s providing, it’s understandable that not every template would be a unique design, but I would have expected more than two.
Another thing I don’t like about the structure, is that it’s so graphically-based. Even the borders are images, so if you wanted to change the look of the template you’d pretty much have to be a graphic designer.
Since Cody is not an AdSense expert, he repeatedly talks about being an SEO expert throughout the sales letter. This makes it somewhat surprising that the sites are poorly optimized.
The same TITLE tag is used for each page (the most important tag for SEO). This almost ensures that not many of the pages will be indexed by the search engines. Also, he uses graphics in place of the article titles. In general, the article title is one of the most important key phrases on a page, and should be bold or even in a header tag (like H3). However, he’s got nothing, and since he doesn’t use ALT tags on his images, the search engines see nothing. This is from Google’s webmaster guidelines…
“Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.”
OK, so let’s talk about the AdSense implementation. This is one area where Cody’s lack of expertise really shows. He’s got ONE AdSense block per page. This could be OK if AdSense is just one of several strategies you’re implementing on your page, but if your main objective is to get AdSense clicks, then more AdSense blocks is almost always better (compare to Instant AdSense Templates, which utilize the maximum allowable three blocks per page).
Another thing you’ll notice is that he’s got a link back to his own site at the bottom of every page. Obviously that’s not helpful to you as the user, as it would only serve to take visitors away from your site. It also creates a nice footprint for the search engines to find all of these sites and drop them from their indexes.
So those are some things I noticed about the templates… now let’s look at a couple other things that he’s including.
I’d say his implied unique selling point (USP) is his inclusion of what he calls the “White Hut Template HTML Code Randomizer“.
No that’s not a typo… he actually calls it “White Hut” about 10 times in the sales letter. I’m guessing someone may point that out to him before he launches it tomorrow.
Closer inspection of the concept reveals that indeed, it is NOT a “white hat” tactic. In fact, it is a very BLACK HAT technique.
Here is what the sales letter says about it…
Each of my AdSense Templates members will receive proprietary “White Hut template randomizer/content wizard” software.
This incredible software makes random changes to a template’s HTML page code. These changes don’t make the page look any different to human eyes but do make it appear different to the search engines. This is NOT so called cloaking which show different page to search engine and different to user. This software produces your own unique to you static html page each time. Therefore this unique page code is the same to search engine and to viewer which is white hut technique.
Just to reiterate… the program does not make any visible changes, it ONLY changes what the search engine sees. In other words, it is designed to trick the search engines into thinking the content is unique.
Why do you need to be VERY concerned about using this technique? Because it could cause you to get completely dropped from Google’s index. Here are some key points from Google’s webmaster guidelines…
“Make pages for users, not for search engines.”
“Another useful test is to ask, ‘Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?'”
By the way, perhaps you’re wondering about the technical side of how someone would make their code unique without changing the look of the page. There are several ways it could be done, including…
Cody says his program is the ONLY place you can do this, but there are other places. I just listed a bunch of methods, but the point is that you shouldn’t use ANY of them.
There are other inconsistencies, and I’m not going to take the time to point them out, but one particular irony that I noticed is his bonus #2 (277,000 Article Database Plus Article Directory Script). In the sales letter he goes to great lengths to diminish the value of free distribution articles (while building up the value of PLR content), and then he includes a monster sized directory of what? Free distribution articles!
He says this about it…
“…so you will immediately have all the important content you need for your AdSense pages. You should not need to search for any other content for a very, very long time!”
This is after he specifically warned that free distribution articles should be avoided due to their duplicate content and outbound links. Hmmm…
His bonus #3 (Cookie Stuffer Software), which is another black hat technique, almost inspired me to do a little cookie stuffing of my own, LOL. I thought it might be interesting to drop an affiliate cookie for Cody’s product on all my readers just to see who buys it in spite of my warning. But I’m not going to stoop to his level. I’m not cookie-ing you for his product, so just don’t buy it, OK?
If you’ve been reading my newsletter for awhile, you know that I do not make a habit of badmouthing people, or bashing their products without warrant. Look, I’m going to see Cody in about a week at the seminar in Baltimore, and then I’m going to be hanging out with him and some other marketers later this year. I’m OK with that, because I feel that I’ve given an honest review, and I value my readers.
I’m probably burning a bridge or two with this review, and that’s OK. I hope you’ve gleaned something from it, and I wish you the best.
As always, you can leave your comments here in the blog.
Have a great day!
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Additional notes added 09/05/06, now that I’ve bought and seen the full product:
After reviewing the full product, I’m sticking by my review. One positive thing I will add, is that the graphics are excellent (particularly the first 25 templates).
One thing I was surprised about, was that there were not 100 topics covered by the 100 templates. There are exactly 51 topics covered by my count, with the rest of the templates being alternative templates about those topics. So that’s not really too big of a deal, but I thought I’d mention it because I think a lot of people would be a little surprised by it.
Also I should let you know that I’ve been dialoging with Cody, and one thing he was concerned about is that I reviewed the software as being “black hat” without having actually tried it yet.
I have now tested it, so rather than adding further comments about it, I’ll post my results and let you draw your own conclusions as to whether the software improves the site, or simply games the search engines…
I used the “chocolate” template from the sample sites: