Hello to all my fellow internet publishers, bloggers, White Hat SEO gurus and webmasters. If you’re like me, every once in a while, your brain just starts to go into a virtual meltdown caused by the quagmyie that is known as the internet. Between endless hours spent promoting, social networking, reading, writing and making yourself sick over it all, there’s always that wonderful moment where you just start clicking things you normally wouldn’t just because your looking for an escape key. That’s when the fun begins.
Once again it has happened to me, I’d been up all night handling a press release for one of my new sites. I used several free and paid press release services in an effort to derive a comprehensive series of blog articles regarding these services. So, I was checking Google News to see if my release was getting disseminated as promised by one of the paid press release services I used and something caught my eye. Something so sinister, so disgusting, yet somewhat appealing to my half baked cerebreal system that I did the unthinkable. I clicked on a link to a Time/CNN article entitled 25 Sites We Can’t Live Without.
Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’m opinionated (yeah right), but “Time Magazine” has to be one of the biggest piles of trash ever to be published. Time Magazine exists to occupy coffee table space in waiting rooms and as an alternative to toilet paper in public restrooms. As for CNN, to call their network a credible “news source” would be blasphemous, not unlike it’s counterpart MSNBC, the medium borderlines on regurgitated hype and sensationalism disguised as current events to sell advertising. Why I clicked on that link, I don’t know? Maybe it was a desire to torture myself into fits of writhing agony over poorly written content littered with advertising that is indiscernable from the content that’s meant to sell it. Time/CNN viewers and readers are pathetic junkies on the information streetcorner, looking for a pusher to deal them a quick fix, fully knowing they’ll be right back the next day. They never take the time to check if the “junk” is good, they just boot it into their veins and go off into an escape of reality, blissfully ignorant to the world around them.
This particular article set me on fire. First off because they didn’t list the 25 Sites We Can’t Live Without from an easy to navigate index page. These mindless trolls created the article as a series of 25 individual pages which they expect you to navigate through by clicking a “next” button at the bottom of each page. I made it through the first two pages which were Amazon.com and BBC.co.uk, no comment on either of those two websites. When I saw the next site on the list was the entirely scraped from other sources, unreliable, fountain of mis-information, veritable cornucopia of dead end listings known as Citysearch.com, I immediately hit the link to the 5 Worst Websites because I saw the lead-in stating “MySpace and Second Life get two thumbs down”. By this time, I was already drunk on click happiness, gleefully clicking to see how and why Time/CNN who are owned by TimeWarner were going to humiliate MySpace as one of the worst sites.
Quoted from the article, and I kid you not…
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It seems the community has become infested with marketers and other opportunists who create false profiles and essentially spam other users, all under the guise of “making friends.” Of course, there have always been loads of MySpace profiles of fictional characters, created to help market a movie or promote some other brand. But it’s the bait-and-switch tactics from these leeches (Want to be my friend? Buy a ring tone! Fill out this survey!) that have taken things to a whole new—and sad—level.
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After reading this, I almost had a seizure from laughing so hard. Go figure, opportunists, I guess that doesn’t apply to “baiting” people into a 25 Sites We Can’t Live Without article only to force them to click through each and every article due to the lack of an index. Done on purpose (and they’re not the first to pull this shady trick, the cauldron of crap, pcworld.com beat them to the punch with their similar article). Did I forget to mention, Time/CNN didn’t even put a release date anywhere on the article ? Is this journalism?
Biggest props go to the guy in the comments section, who unlike the rest of the trolls were posting their own website links, posted this…
Posted by Joe Buhler in Wilton, CT
OK, you can include yourself among the worst 5 websites! The sentence above says “You’ve clicked through thru TIME’s picks for the 50 best websites. Well, actually no I haven’t yet. I’m clicking around trying to find the list at one glance rather than the way you present it. Also, at the end of the worst 5 sites, where is the back button that gets me to the starting point? Same from this submit page, how to I get back to the head page for the top 50? No navigation for it……!
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Seems Joe and I think a lot alike. I tip my hat at people with enough common sense to see through the shuffle.
Now, prepare yourself as I ask a favour of you. First, put on your crash helmet and bulletproof vest and get ready to go check this travesty of reckless publishing that rips, rapes, trashes and defiles all that we as independent publishers and bloggers strive for. Take note of how I have linked to it below.
Worst Website Ever
The very search engines we strive to get rankings in only to fall behind entities such as Time/CNN who always get first billing can be used to turn the tables upon them. If each and every blogger who reads this article, passes it along and we all link to Time/CNN’s 25 Sites We Can’t Live Without using the anchor text “Worst Website Ever”, add it to our blogrolls, we can give this dungheap the SERP’s it deserves. As the Nike slogan states “Just do it”, and remember there’s strength in numbers.
Peace Everybody !!
