In 2005, the online marketing world got excited when a new article directory came onto the marketplace. The software was free, and it offered the webmasters a certain amount of control over the visual display and management of the website. But alas, anything that is free is bound to have problems. And yes, the free Article Dashboard software had loads of problems.
Of course, most people who operated Article Dashboard directories had no idea about the scope of the problems until later, when hackers figured out how to make mince-meat of the application, through all of Article Dashboard’s myriad of security holes.
Even coders like me were unable to make these applications totally secure. Customization was the pits with Article Dashboard, because the programmers had chosen to hide all of the actual coding for the directory. Coders, like myself, were able to figure out how to tweak the software to make it do things that it was not designed to do, by tricking the software to run our scripts in front of the real scripts. But many of the tweaks we wanted to do were simply not tweaks that could be accomplished, without throwing out the whole package and starting over.
Like myself, there was another PHP coder who decided to replace Article Dashboard with his own article directory software, which is actually a pretty good application. His software is called Article Friendly and sells for $49.99.
We cannot bring ourselves to knock Jan’s article directory software, but we needed to make our own article directory software, to service our own goals and our own customers.
We are hard-at-work behind the scenes right now, putting the finishing touches on our article directory software.
We operate four article directories, two of which are custom-built article directories. Our original article directory is one whose name you would recognize. We built it from the ground up, with hundreds of man hours invested in its development. We do just fine with SEO on our custom-built article directories. In fact, our original article directory ranks well in Google for thousands of keyword phrases (Top 5, Top 10 and Top 20). We have also done pretty well with SEO, when tweaking existing directories like the Article Dashboard directory.
But, we have to be honest. It has been our experience and observation that most prepackaged article directories never really gain a foothold in Google or any other search engine. It is our belief that the number one criteria for Google to devalue a website is that little piece of text at the bottom of the page that says, “Powered by Article Dashboard” or “Powered by…” whatever. It is our belief that those four words at the bottom of the page signal to Google that the site is driven by a junk software package.
We believe that any website designed to be successful in the search engines needs to appear to be unique and different from every other website in the same niche. Sure, it is okay to have some similarities with a competitor, but if Google or any other search engine can see too many similarities between two websites, then why should Google document the second website, when they have already documented the first.
It is simple. We have already invested a lot into this project, but we have more to do. As with anything worthwhile, changes are made to the project, before the project even reaches its conclusion.
We want you to know that we are anticipating the completion of this software in the summer of 2010. When ready for public release, we will be notifying you here, as well as on a number of additional websites.
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