Update: The sale for the Active Ad Feed plugin is now live at just $10.00 but will be rising shortly and then the offer will close altogether.
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This plugin takes another step towards fixing a long time problem that we all have.
Sometimes they bother to rewrite one of your blog posts, but often they don’t.
There’s a comic on The Dog House Diaries that illustrates this perfectly.
http://thedoghousediaries.com/4786
In other words, new and unique content that’s been written by you ends up on splogs (spam blogs) that get some attention by the search engines because of the clever methods in which the owners of these sites put them together.
One of the cunning ways that’s been used by spammers for a long time is the “RSS Mashup Method.” These splogs are often created with a set of tools that allow the owners to capture content from RSS feed aggregators on the subject they desire and then automatically display this RSS content on their blogs without them having to do anything.
In fact, the last thing they want to do is spend any time on their splogs whatsoever, and that’s why most of the splogs are totally automated once set up. The owners then make their money from running related ads from one of the ad networks interspersed between your content and that created by other people.
From a technical point of view it’s clever and you have to admire whoever it was that thought this up in the first place. But to the rest of us it’s (at best) annoying.
My new plugin – Active Ad Feeds – turns the tables on these splogs and allows us to hijack at least part of them and present our own ads on their sites. 😉
It does this by allowing you to include a hidden image ad on each of your posts, and it then inserts these ads into your RSS feed. To anyone looking at your site, all they see is the new post you’ve made. But if they view the RSS feed, then they will see the hyperlinked image ads.
Aha!
So when these splog sites now use the RSS aggregators to pick up your new and unique content and show it on their sites, they’re also showing your image ads too. 😉
Cool eh?
Here’s another use for this plugin I thought of while discussing it with a friend.
In the past when I’ve built sites for clients, I’ve had three of them say they didn’t want to display links back to my consultancy site, with one of them saying it was because he didn’t want his competitors to know that he’d hired someone to do SEO work for him.
Now that’s an annoyance to me and I guess it would be to you too, because we rely on backlinks as one of the methods that we pick up work. In the end I eventually made the decision that part of my agreement to do work for new clients, stated that I always get a backlink from at least one page on the site.
If I’d had this plugin then, I could have built the site without a single backlink showing, but I could have (would have!) had a link back to my site through the RSS feed. The search engines would see the link in the RSS feed and it would count as a backlink to my site.
The client would be happy because no backlinks are displayed as requested, while I would be happy because I’d be getting the backlink love through the RSS feed.
I’ll have more information about this plugin for you tomorrow before the sale starts, including a short video showing exactly how it works.
-Frank Haywood
