News Aggregator - Muse Up and Running

[overseasplease]

Take a look and tell me what you think. I think at the moment the site is a bit plain, but I can mess around with it later.

www.MyAutomatedNews.com (http://www.MyAutomatedNews.com)

[blackhatontherocks]

I would change layout and design at least a little, but ASAP - even if it just means adding some gradients and stockphotos to it. Why? Because right now your site looks extremly similar to some of those sites that turn up when you've misstyped a common domain name. Which means, it looks like one of those pages that includes nothing but spam/sellpage-links (mainly conveyed through the 3 different colored headers).

Uh, and doesn't your service produce duplicate content - unless it properly escapes text as flash while hiding the underlying text from google, or uses some similar resourceful way, I don't see how you avoid the issue.

You need to make sure that not everyone who uses your tool looses their hard-earned rankings in search engines, or at least point out that duplicate content shouldn't be used on seo-projects (at least not in any blunt-force-trauma kind of way).

This might sound harsh but take this as a sincere question to help you find better marketing angles: What exactly does your tool do that can't be achieved by 5 minutes of implementing the proper google.news-search-rss-feeds or similar services on your site?

[jonparker83]

Uh, and doesn't your service produce duplicate content - unless it properly escapes text as flash while hiding the underlying text from google, or uses some similar resourceful way, I don't see how you avoid the issue.

Duplicate content + Unique content != Duplicate content

I thought you were an SEO guy...

[blackhatontherocks]

Yes, I am, but I also "retired my seo-career" and focus on SEM atm.

What's this now, back-handed critique with a little insult-icing because I don't happen to know everything? Uh, yeah, now that's a great approach to start a discussion ;).

Seriously, I happen to be more of a SEM guy as of late and never stated otherwise, including the first thread you and I meet, john, which was about your monday project. So thank you, but I've had my fair share of SEO experiences over the course of the last year.

Have you actually looked at the pages this thing generates & are shown as examples? Some of them are 90% automated. Your formula works if you rework at least 20 % of the content carefully selected throught the duplicated stuff, or if the duplicate is less then say 20-50% of the content on the page and carefully mixed with regular unique content.

Any google-Rater visiting pages like this is likely to go "oh well, here are entire pages that are just rss-feeds." Thumbs-down, bye bye first page. What I intended to say was, instead of shoving this under the carpet, make it a feature!

State that your pages are great to generate unique content for seo-pages quickly and pre-create some low-key templates where they are forced to sparcle the neccessary amounts of unique content throughout the text to make this happen.

Of course, if you only put 3-5 headlines and a ticker somewhere on your content pages, or if you work it into the site as a unique feature, no biggy at all, but you put up a "news" page looking like that on your site, even just linking through from your home-page might hurt your ranking.

[jonparker83]

back-handed critique with a little insult-icing
Hardly...but I apologise if that's how it seemed

[overseasplease]

Blackhat - Thanks for the thorough and honest review that brings up a few issues I need to address.