I received a copy of Content Desk’s Authority Site Guide. It’s a good read, for the first 14 pages, but the ass-end of the report is mostly an ad for Content Desk. I was a member of CD when it first started out but couldn’t justify paying $97 to read a forum, among other issues, so I bailed. Anyway, right at the beginning of the report, in bold red letters is this statement:

“Article Site Building for Adsense and Search Engine Optimization is DEAD!”

Yikes! The gurus must just be beside themselves with grief.

So I later get another email from CD. It was in regards to a teleseminar with Jack Humphrey from CD and Rick Butts. They were discussing authority sites. Anyway, the email had this to say:

“News flash: Article Marketing is dead… SEO is dead… Cookie-cutter templates are dead…”

Run for cover! Bet you’re wishing you didn’t fall victim to the Article Underground hype machine now, huh? I mean just when the gurus tell me I have to quit building keyword portal spam sites in favor of real article sites, they tell me article marketing is dead. WTF?

So let’s look at what is going on here. A membership to CD includes a groovy copy of the WordPress theme, Semiologic, that was branded just for the members of CD. Semiologic is pretty nice actually but everyone is using it now. Look around. You’ll see the same theme everywhere.

Granted, CD’s WordPress Master comes with other themes, but isn’t this just building cookie-cutter sites…without saying as much? I mean they did mention it should be called “How to Create a Blog on Steroids in Five Minutes or Less”. Sounds like they are promoting speed. When I think of website building speed I’m thinking how many I can post up on the web.

Used in conjunction with another piece of software called, Content Press, you can begin creating your site by pulling articles from the CD article database, adding a few snippets to avoid the dreaded duplicate content nightmare, and add them to WP.

Is that not article marketing? Marketing a site with articles. That you didn’t even have to write. Isn’t that another no-no?

So I’m listening to this teleseminar and I’m trying to remember where I heard the name Rick Butt’s recently. Tool for helping with dead SEO? Nope. Alternative to dead article marketing? No. Ah, got it! It was for a little program called WordPress Cloner.

So here we have a guy marketing a tool that is obviously for, um, cloning WordPress installs, which in my mind could be just another phrase for cookie-cutter. And yet he is talking about, and promoting a world of, authority sites where 1 site will get you 500.

“These days in internet marketing if you build 1 great site, it will generate the income of 500 lousy sites.”

The underlying message is very confusing. Build authority sites which will be the one stop shop for all information on that topic. But use our software which enables you to build alot of blogs really fast. I mean why would you buy a cloner if all you are doing is building a few authority sites? Why would you need to promote that you can create blogs in five minutes or less? Authority sites are supposed to be more than just spam, right?

I’m not against authority sites as I would rather have 10 substantial sites than 150 that I don’t have time to update. Just don’t tell me about authority sites while you are pimping some product to enable what you are telling us is dead.

It’s just more hype to get you to buy memberships and stuff. The idea is sound. I’m just tired of the gurus talking out the side of their neck.

I do not know how you can have more than 8-10 true authority sites in your arsenal. If you built 70 so-called authority sites you wouldn’t have time to feed them and therefore it would not remain an authority on anything but stale URLs.

I am personally trying to build so-called authority sites. I think it makes good sense, assuming you can build them with a topic you care about. I think you would have to be willing to update them periodically with your own personality and not just scrapes from articles directories and PLR rewrites though.

I am still using PLR to build mini sites that may not ever become what a guru would classify an authority site. I’ll add 20-30 pages to WP and drip the remaining articles over the course of 3-4 months. I may even scrape a few articles and add them to the drip. Sometimes this works out. Sometimes not. Maybe it adds value. Maybe it doesn’t.

I’ve seen their example authority sites and they are no better than any article site you or I will build with XSP or WP. The Semiologic theme makes it seem more pretentious I suppose, but they are certainly no About.com.

I think it is all boils down to whether you add value/knowledge/entertainment to the web with your site or not. Internet marketer’s can coin fancy names for the type of sites we build. But the bottom line is whether your site is crap or good. It’s not hard to figure out a website’s angle regardless if you have Adsense above the fold or not.