I have one word to describe today’s “500 words” fad. Huh?
500Words.com is both incredibly genius and absolutely stupid. The idea is you can buy a word, like those seen in Technorati’s cloud, that links to your site. You get to choose your word, add a link to your site and configure the font and style.
This site is already ranked like 12 in Alexa’s ranking. OK, I exaggerate. But it’s ridiculously high. It will be interesting to watch Google give it a Page Rank. My money is on 6.
Google is supposedly all about ranking websites on usefulness. This is not useful. This is tasty spam. Pretty spam. Chocolate spam. But it’s still spam. It’s a page of links. But I bet it will still get a 6. At worst a 5.
And how much software will be sold, how many purchased and how many of these stupid little sites will pop up all over the web?
Supposedly 500words is getting tons of traffic. People are saying their traffic is increasing to their own sites. How long do you think that will last? The curiosity factor will die out just like it did with the pixel maps. How annoying was that?
So the owner gets a quick blast of cash (genius). The word owners hope to get a week, maybe two, of traffic. And they all hope that in the two years it’s live Google gives it a stellar pagerank which they can suck off of.
This is one train that I think I’ll let pass me by…wait, is that “lost” I see in the word cloud?
[tags]500words, spam[/tags]
7 responses so far ↓
Splork // Jun 30, 2006 at 2:56 pm
Good news everyone. You too can now have a copy of this fabulous piece of software. You need to go ahead a pre-order because every day you wait the price goes up. And we wouldn’t want that. sigh
The power displayed here is not with the software. It’s with a massive email list he employed to get people to buy into this thing. Every email talked about the Alexa ratings going up. And how your keyword could be gone. And how people are seeing increases in traffic from buying the keyword.
It’s the email list.
Abhishek Rungta // Jul 1, 2006 at 9:53 am
We have built a script to launch a site like 500words.com. It can be seen at http://www.97tags.com and people can order it from us! We are ready for implementation.
Splork // Jul 1, 2006 at 7:43 pm
And so it goes. That didn’t take long.
Splork // Jul 9, 2006 at 1:56 am
I have been pimped no less than four “500 word” clones in the last two days. How much have I spent on the offers? Zero. Nada.
Hock // Jul 11, 2006 at 12:02 am
500words doesn’t make sense to me. I think the original fad that started with the million pixels thingy is over with. Who wants to read a website that’s just filled with a bunch of words? You can get a high Alexa ranking if you have a huge list and also JV with other list owners and send lots of traffic to the site in a short amount of time. The ranking doesn’t mean squat. What matters is if the traffic really converts. People get sold on hype and don’t stop to think about what works and what doesn’t.
Mike // Jul 14, 2006 at 2:14 am
I want to know how it got to 19,000 alexa ranking already.
Splork // Jul 14, 2006 at 3:56 am
I’m sure the owners have some of their other high ranking sites pointing to it. Plus JC has a huge email list. Think about how much traffic the dude generated just from his typical hype.
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