Is FREEBIE bookshop a scam?

Up till the most recent release, the links to all your pages were using NOINDEX tags. This however only affected you, the authors links back were fine. He had a link to himself on all of your book page, sometimes thousands of pages. You got none. Mistake?

Ok so ya fixed that and take it on the chin, after all, you're getting hundreds of pages, if not more.

But, have you really looked closely at your links and keywords? Almost every one of your keywords are discounted by being enclosed in quotes. For instance, instead of widgets, you will see "widgets" for all kewords and anchors. Sonetimes a bullet is prepended to the keyword to change it.

Who searchs with quotes and bullets? Can this be good?

Well if this is good, why are the authors links, on your hundreds, if not thousands of pages, not in quotes? Think real hard before you defend it please.

Further more, the install files are a DDOS threat. I can go to any of your bookstores and run your install proceedures. I can start many instances of it and bring your site to it's knees. Don't delete it and think you are safe, there are more then one copy of the install files you probably missed that we can play with too.

I could go on and tell ya more, but you are smart, take a look at your "bookshop" and and ask, what has it done for "you" lately.

These things can be fixed with alot of effort, but I submit the author should step up and make the playing field level for you the publisher as well as him the author. In fact you should get more of the benefit.

 

hmmm interesting... i actually havent tried it out yet myself but i have only heard good things... up till now... i will take a better look through it.

interesting as I thought it was good on his part to provide it for free but who knows...

actually i prefer using the other amazon product feed script instead as i think it is better since we get the full commish and very customizable to match up with the look of our sites. ;-)

 

http://www.visitdevonandcornwall.com/freebie/bookshop.php?in=uk

Please tell me where these "" links are.

Funny, seems I have added my own none "" links to the footer of every page I have formatted so far (not finished yet)

 

Always supicious when a person with one post comes to a forum and says "beware!"
Maybe jealously is at play here. Why did you pick this forum to warn everybody of the program? If you can take advantage of the install files and bring down a server sounds like you are pretty shady. And for hidden install files; I had the bookstore running on my site. I have since removed it, only because I didn't need it anymore. I searched throughout the root file of my host and there were no files left over. Please elaborate and give up some evidence of your claims.

 

There was a heated discussion over at seo guy's forum which I participated in about this freebie package. A couple of members indicated that they received lots of hits but never made a penny out of it. Someone offered some code which altered the way in which the affiliate links were displated and immediately started earning money from it. Here is the link - http://www.seo-guy.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6815&page=1&pp=10

 

I was under the impression the point of the bookstore was create lots of pages

if you want to sell books why not join AWS get get mr rats product feed

http://www.mrrat.com/scripts.html, then you don't have split the commissions at all

 

Well said Ferret!!

 

Owlcroft was upfront and stated in his original post that it was for adding pages and would generate few if any sales. He also said we could split the income if we wanted too.
If it works as planned I have no problem with him making a couple of dollars from it, thats not what it is on my sites for.

The only niggle I have is that no pages have shown up yet and I haven't seen any of them being spidered......but I guess I am toooo impatient

 

Cyclops, how long have you had it running on your site?

Owlcraft told me to create a link to all the area pages ie uk, ca, fr etc in order to get it fully spidered, however mine has been up for over a month and nothing in google index!

 

About the same time frame as you but on three sites, more pages have been indexed by Google in that time on my forum but they are not the Amazon pages. I guess it's a waiting game although I am surprised MSN and Yahoo don't seem to have picked up on them yet as they spider my site constantly.

I only put one link across to the bookshop to the default page as it was not my intention to sell books anyway. I'm only after the pages but I hope Owlcroft makes a bit out of it to compensate for the time and effort he has put into it.

As to the article on the SEO forum, Owlcroft answered every question put to him but the guy just kept attacking anyway, and in my opinion lost all credibility in the process.
I think Linkbacker is the same person, some people just don't know when to back off.

 

any of you guys running freebie

have you tried looking at the amazon id , then refresh the page and check it again,

 

I must say Owlcraft has supported me fully with an issue with my hosting and freebie. I would be delighted to reccommend both Owlcrafts' script for increasing site size. Which is what it is designed for!

 

Ferret 77 - No I have not, what happens?

 

I never said it didnt increase page count, my concern was based on the random 50:50 displaying of affiliate links to amazon. 3 members had earnt nothing in 7-8 months of using it, one of them decided to edit the script and as soon as they did that earnt over $1000.

 

I appreciate what you are saying, I do not expect to get any earnings from it and am running it more as a resource for my guests and of course page count

 

I understand what you say Jim bob 9 pants, I just get upset when things are advertised as free when they are not. Surely if you knew your amazon pages were generating $1000 a month you would like a big slice of it.

 

<form method="post" action="http://www.amazon.com/o/dt/assoc/handle-buy-box=0105403849">
       <input type="hidden" name="asin.0105403849" value="1" />
       <input type="hidden" name="tag-value" value="owlcroft-20" />
       <input type="hidden" name="tag_value" value="owlcroft-20" />
       <input type="hidden" name="dev-tag-value" value="DC71ECP3CJYY9" />

       &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
       <input type="submit" name="submit.add-to-cart" value="Buy From Amazon.com" />
     </form>

PHP:

Look for this code, I beleive this is the code that tell amazon what the affilate ID is.

Theoretically 50% of the time instead of saying "owlcroft-20" it should say your amazon id, if you have one

I was just curious if yours shows it 50% of the time.

 

I too think FREEBIE is a rip off. It does not work, period, there is not one good example cited yet.

So I coded my own last night. It uses a database, it's about one tenth the code and all the profit and leads go back to me!

The XML is pulled and parsed with a proper XML parser and the speed at which it pulls items and the number of good items pulled is much faster and higher then FREEBIE.

Good luck with using FREEBIE, but I've spent over a week editing the code, I've seen every line of code, the app is not very good, it does not work SEO wise and it's slow. It's a DDOS threat as pointed out and the only one that benefits is the author. It phones home so the author can police you. If that's how you want to help someone fine, but FREEBIE is no freebie.

Good Luck!

 

It would help pay server costs i guess!!!!

I will leave this now, just sufice to say I am a happy user of the script

 

I think I found the bug in the code, that makes owlcrofts id appear all the time

  if ($dice=1) $myid=$owlcroft;

PHP:

it shoudl be $dice==1, which is a comparision $dice=1 will always be true because that sets the value of $dice equal to 1