Googles spam team doesn't listen or take action on complaints even when served on a silver platter. I have sent them full reports with thousands of spam sites multiple times. I did all the hard work for them basically. Never hear back from them. Bing got back to me.

I have been considering doing the same thing as those spammers since it goes unpunished but I'm such a angel at heart that I probably won't.

What you need to understand about the Google link spam reports is that they aren't interested at all, for the most part, in penalising individual sites.

They are interested in collecting as many of the common methods that people are using successfully and making changes to the algorithm as a whole. Reporting sites for link spam doesn't achieve a whole lot, in the grand scheme of things.

Anyway, blog comment spam/forum spam has been working for SEO since the beginning of SEO and it still does today and it will continue to work for the foreseeable future.

I have paid links pointing at some of my sites. Hell, I even have a network of PR2-4 domains hosted on different C Class IP's that I use specifically for selling links on.

I prefer AdSense because it's the easiest. I sell a few random things from Amazon and have a site that acts as a decent sized referral for a paid survey program that makes $50-$80 a month that I don't do anything to anymore. Not a lot of money, obv, but it's cool getting a bank deposit for at the end of the month for doing nothing though. I can't wait til my passive income can cover my rent. I also work 2 other jobs, one of which is doing SEO work for a friend's website which is a pretty big drop shipper.

Phresh, when I said run other networks, I meant in addition to adsense, not in place of. It doesn't hurt to throw a CPM network in an out of the way place on your site.

I just started this website called www.webtop30.com, it's a site that provides 30 links to videos/pics/threads/news stories that I find cool and interesting and I update all of the links every 24 hours. I have plans on keeping it ad free for the first month while I try to promote it through the interwebs. Once the month is over I'd like to put in around 3 banner ads and maybe 3 text ads (for those people that use ad blocker). What do you think? Do you guys think that it has potential?

I like the idea, but it's a big ole wall of text and stuff it seems.

^ That's the whole point of it, it's a very simple page that gets updated every 24 hours. One page, 30 links.

Like a Drudge report of internet memes. I kinda like it.

One thing: it's too tall. Everything. I know you probably designed on/for 1600x1200 monitors and that the whole "below the fold" thing isn't that huge a deal in the web since people have learned to scroll, but I'd still consider taking 50-100 pixels off the header and maybe shrinking the font size 10-15%.

dude design it nicer and it has potential. look at sites like twitter and vimeo and just copy their design scheme.
use similar sized fonts, not too high saturated colors ect. i understand what your going for with the one page thing but it needs to look good also.

I like it but I agree that you should shrink it down some.

btw, I co-founded the website with other 2+2 peeps, we're going to update the website so stay tuned in a couple of hours with 30 more links.

How are you getting your links? That's going to be the big problem, keeping up your motivation to find/add 30 new stories every 24 hours on a site that's bringing in maybe $50/month for a while.

I would use every API out there to try and source stuff. See if you can find a way to get the most shared links of the past 24 hours from twitter, the top X stories from digg, latest post(s) from various blogs that have the kind of content you're looking for. Find a twitter account the equivalent of www.twitter.com/newsycombinator that does nothing but push popular stories in a niche. Follow that (it will be cool anyway, trust me) and make note of the couple links a day that may match up.

As someone who does content creation on his own, even just for no-money-involved blogs I like to write, stuff like that is going to make a big difference for you. It's hard to be motivated all the time.

Have you thought about rolling out links more often, such as maybe 5 links every 4 hours or something along those lines (could even be somewhat random). If you have a list of links ahead of time you could just queue them up to post every soften automatically, might cause more repeat traffic with people coming back multiple times per day to check for new links, while the people that check only once per day wouldn't notice a difference.

This website is fine and could work since so many other news aggregators work, but that is also the problem. You have a TON of competition. Further this type of site is going to be really hard to monetize.

You'll do better if you incentivize submissions in some way and it will save you some work. I have a site that gets a lot of submissions just because people want a link back from a PR5 site.

I guess what I mean to say is that if you get your pagerank up, and automate a submission system where you can approve submissions to be published you could turn this into a viable site.

btw, clearly you see your biggest competitor as http://popurls.com/ right?

He's providing links to cool stuff.

The site will thrive or fail based on how cool and how early he posts stuff. (no one cares about 2 week old memes.)

Aggregating crap from other sites gives people absolutely no reason to go to his site. And posting stuff all the time is probably a good idea, but then, how is it any different from any other links blog?

Just updated the site with smaller fonts at www.webtop30.com.

I just checked out popurls, it's a nice site and very comprehensive, almost too comprehensive. I personally do not agree of their selection of featured posts in the reddit and youtube sections but that's just my taste. It's a very ambitious site.

New fonts are much better, imo.

Thanks! I agree.

Having the header logo as an image is okay but your tag line should be text so the spiders can read it. The title on your front page should describe your site. As it stands now it just says Webtop30 - Main page. Instead of having it say main page put in a short description of your site or something clever.

http://www.seo-browser.com

If you enter your site url on that site you can see how your site looks in plain text as the bots see it.

There are no social aspect to your site so it's going to be hard to for you to get people to come back and check you out. To be honest you would probably do better just with a Twitter account that posts funny/interesting stuff that way people get to follow you and become more attached. You could create a youtube page and repost stuff or even better, start a Facebook page and post stuff there. Just a couple of cents.

This + an autoposter would be the ideal thing

Queue up your links in an admin section, have it automatically update your mainpage at whatever time (preferably early in the morning, to catch the people who browse before they start work) and have it pull out the links during the day and post them on twitter, probably every half hour or so until they're gone. It gives you constant exposure throughout the day, and easily lets people share your content.

I'm currently developing www.pokergameratings.com. There is still tons of work to be done, adding content, finding bloggers, etc before the site is ready to launch. My goal is to concentrate exclusively on live cash games, providing info on stakes, rake, number of tables, etc and mix it with big news stories and live pro blogs / strategy articles.

I would very much appreciate any comments / suggestions you guys have.

One small suggestion is that I would consider using google maps or something to assist in making searches relevant. I live in Ontario Canada and wanted to search for Pot Limit Omaha games within a days drive. Your current search results show poker rooms in AC, Florida, Vegas and Macau

I'm mostly be interested in games close by and don't care about casinos in Florida. If you showed the results on a map I could easily zoom in to the region I was actually interested in. Even better would be to detect where I am located in the world (pretty easy to do) and tailor the results to my current location (e.g. sorting the results by distance).

Nice looking site. Good luck.

I wrote a post with suggestions about your site but that thread got deleted. The gist of it was to try and get users to create content for you. It's impossible to cover all the casino locations by yourself.

Your posts look okay now, you have the basic info about the different casinos but they are very sterile if you know what I mean. I would like to see a couple of videos from the inside maybe talking with some managers and players. Have them give you a short tour around the place. Post pictures of the food, bars etc. You also need more interesting articles about the places.

You should ofc give your own opinion about the places but also let users rate the different casinos and card rooms.

Is there a dedicated review site like yelp site but for casinos and card rooms?

Oh and +1 on the google maps suggestion.

I've been working on a card room directory as a side project over the last six months. It's still in its infancy but features Google Maps, user reviews and currently 350+ listings. There is also a community portion of the site that similar to Facebook.

I posted the address a few pages back in this same thread so as not to spam this thread you can check out the site via a link in my profile if you like.