Previously, I wrote a post pointing out several suspicious sites that were offering natural cures for shingles, GERD, ulcers and genital warts, all written by the same person. It was ranking pretty well on Google for about a week or so, and then suddenly my rankings vanished. I couldn’t find it anywhere on Google, no matter how many different combinations of relevant keywords I used. Meanwhile this motherf-, excuse me, this dude continues to litter the first page search results for the same keywords.

Ahhh, Google, that ever eternal gatekeeper for quality content on the Internet.

I’m just trying to do a good thing here, trying to help people avoid getting ripped off, and then these anal Googlie Wooglie fartbags had to go breaking my blogging balls.

Ironically enough I stumbled across yet another version of those “natural cure for shingles” sites, this one on the same simpleshinglescure domain, but with the page title saying “Natural Cure for Acid Reflux,” and the author here is an Aaron D. Smith, rather than the Aaron E. Smith shown on the other sites. Different picture too. So there are two Aaron Smiths now? Both hawking cures for shingles?

I have a headache.

Internet dating sites have now become a huge industry, with thousands of sites dedicated to either providing dating advice or dating related services. This particular industry though seems to be HIGHLY plagued by online dating sites that may in fact be craftily designed splogs (automated blogs created for the primary purpose of spamming visitors), and crooksters looking to score off your dating misery.

These type of sites can be very hard to detect sometimes, but if you have pretty good intuition, maybe you’ll get a feeling like I do that something just seems to be a little bit… off here.

That’s how I felt about the site Online Dating Tips. Upon my first visit it seemed innocent enough, tightly coded, aesthetic design, speedy load, etc.. However, it also seemed light on the content, and heavy on the affiliate links. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that apparently EVERY external link on that site was in fact a cloaked affiliate link to some of the biggest dating services on the Internet.

Hmmmm….

The content itself is split into several categories containing very short articles, which is easy to read and to be fair, really does offer some sound advice, BUT… you get the strange sense that you’ve already read it all before. Additionally, for a site that purports to be an authority on how to use online personals, it certainly comes across as a bit… impersonal. There are no personal testimonies, and no heart warming anecdotes to encourage the reader with. It all seems very bland and emotionless.

There’s a reason for this though: the content is not original. At all. My suspicions were confirmed when I copied and pasted a particular phrase from an article here and did a Google search with it. The phrase I copied was:

“Is it possible to find a soul mate online through a dating service? You bet it is…”

And lookie see here, I found another article that starts the same way. In fact, it’s the very same article. But wait! Here’s another copy of the same article. And another one here, and here, and here and…

Hmmmmmmmmm….

Could be this “dating tips” site isn’t interested in the slightest bit about helping you find your loved one, but it does seem very interested in liberating you of your money through affiliate profits. Look, I don’t begrudge anyone who does affiliate marketing since I do it too, but if that’s their only purpose and they have no intention of offering anything of value in return, then they need to get their boonie boons spanked silly.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m devastated. And here I thought I found a place where people cared. Where people truly understood my sad plight and heartfelt desire to find a snuggly tookie tums butter pot cuddle pie to call my own.

Alas, alas, it appears that such is not the case here, and I shall have to continue my search elsewhere.

Using the awesome and very promising OIOPublisher Direct plugin, I can now sell ads and other services directly to potential advertisers without the need for a middle-man, which means I’ll keep 100 percent of the profits I make. WOOOOO!!! I’m gonna be rich! Filthy, stinking, disgustingly rich out of my greedy butt, depraved mind! BOOYAH!!!!

Well maybe.

It’ll be interesting to see how I fare with this, but at the very least I’ll finally have total control over what gets placed on this blog. There’s a lot of bad hojos and jojos out there looking to bam-bam your jam-jams with their scam-scams, and advertising networks like Google’s Adsense have done very little to stop them. With this solution I’m hoping the quality of the ads and goods that get served here will be far better than what most readers and visitors usually see elsewhere, and will help to complement this site rather than detract from it.

Well, I can dream anyway.

If you’re interested, I’m offering rock bottom prices right now since my traffic and readership is um, *ahem*, not quite where I’d like them to be right now. You can choose from link ads to paid posting to video ads, and more.

Click here for details, and if you’re interested in installing OIOPublisher on your own blog, let me know and I’ll give you some pointers. Initially it was designed for WordPress 2.1 or better due to its native cron support, but after working with the developer for a few days, he was able to come up with a solution to run cron jobs on Wordpress 2.0.X blogs by using the WP-Cron plugin. Muy coolio.

Oooooooooo, me likey! Scroogle allows you to use Google while at the same time preventing them from tracking your searching habits. A great solution for people who want to stop Google from sniffing their cookies.

Looks like Google’s PageRank is being replaced.

Romance Tracker recently grabbed my attention with their list of three simple ways you can use your blog to get a date:

Hey, being addicted to blogging is a lot like being in love, which we’ve covered on Romance Tracker before. But regardless of how great a relationship you have with your blog, it will never hold your hand or snuggle with you at night . . . and while you could try kissing your computer screen if you want, we sure don’t recommend it.

NOW you tell me? *sigh*

Anyway, the three suggestions were 1) using the blog to meet other people interested in my niche, 2) improving my communication skills by interacting with my readers, and 3) monetizing my blog so I could buy the lovely dinner.

I actually made enough now to accomplish #3… assuming we go to McDonalds that is… but what’s ironic about this whole thing is that when I first started blogging, I did it almost solely for the purpose of finding the girl of my dreams. I had hoped that by writing in the quirky manner that I did, it would draw attention to myself, and maybe one day soon some hot Christian girl would stumble across my site after doing a Google search, post a comment, and 3 months later we would be in love and planning a wedding in Bora Bora.

What I’ve learned however in those sad, pitiful days, was that such magic only happened to other people. Cuz you know what? One day a hot, Christian girl DID come across my site after doing a Google search, and just like I hoped, she began commenting and regularly following my blog too.

So what happens? She meets the man of her dreams through HER blog, and the two get married and run off to live happily ever after.

I’m not bitter about it though. Being the strong, brave man that I am, I was able to easily recover and move on from that heart wrenching devastation… especially after I started spreading rumors around the web saying her husband was gay and was secretly having an affair with a Latin lover named Juan San Pablo. After seeing that marriage subsequently go down in flames, I finally started to feel better about myself again.

This second go around is proving to be a more daunting task for me though. For one, I still don’t know what my niche really is or should be, and two, all the readers on my blog seem to be either male or married. Really, why would I want to interact with you people? Get the @#$% off my blog and find me some girls for crying out loud. I mean if you’re gonna stick around, then make yourself useful for pete’s sake.

And that’s all I have to say about that.