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Postrunner Review: The “Quality” Debate

UPDATE: April 2012 – Postrunner V2 Review

If your response to my title was WTF is Postrunner – then check out my earlier post. If you are a member of The Keyword Academy you will know  that Postrunner is system used with TKA in order to create keyword anchored links for your sites.

I’ve compared to BuildMyRank to Postrunner – and Mark is now trying to differentiate Postrunner from BuildMyRank and similar schemes.

His argument is that Postrunner needs to evolve:

  • needs “better quality” sites in Postrunner.
  • the reason more “quality” sites aren’t in Postrunner is because of the “quality” of the articles being sent to them.
  • his proposed solution is an author scoring system which will reward the writers (or buyers) of superior articles.

The Argument About “Quality” Articles

As soon as the thread started in the forum the predictable grammar Nazi’s (Nazis’? Nazis’s ??) were out in force. Too many trailing commas – FAIL. Use of nonstandard spellings FAIL. To be fair to Mark, in the seminar he specifically mentioned that he wasn’t concerned about grammar and spelling problems, he was more worried about the articles being relevant and having a point.

Its all looking like this will be seen, by many, most of whom haven’t hit the $10/month income level yet, in the community, as an opportunity to FAIL all of those authors who use too many commas in a sentence…

I have two sites in Postrunner at the moment – one is a niche, passion quality site, the other one is a general site full of trashy Postrunner articles, which I just put back in during the webinar yesterday – inside 12 hours I have received over 7 articles.

These cars aren't Quality - but tourists now pay a premium to hire them in Berlin!

What I Look For When I Get Postrunner Articles on My Quality Postrunner Site

I put my Independent Travel site into Postrunner – basically to get content when I couldn’t be arsed writing, and to see what keywords people were trying to rank for in the travel niche – a niche that is my passion but pays me very, very poorly. Now it gets about 2/3 posts a week – which is a nice number. I reject at least a third of those. So this is how to get your well-written, gramatically perfect article declined from my site.

  1. The site linked out to – only consists of a “hello world” post (seriously its happened).
  2. If the site linked to is a general postrunner site, or similar article directory – this is a new automatic DECLINE  I picked up from Build My Rank.
  3. The 2 anchored links are in the the last words in the article – normally on separate lines -I don’t know who the hell is teaching this – its certainly not TKA – but please stop it – it looks stupid and its a loser for SEO duh!
  4. The two links are to the exact same page on the site being promoted (less of this seems to be happening these days).
  5. Write about all-inclusive vacations – like duh! The site’s main keyword is not a secret! If you have glanced at the front-page you know I, and my readers, are not interested in all-inclusive vacations!
  6. Write about timeshares – timeshares are IMHO (and its my site so my opinion rules) – an investment scam – not a holiday option.  (Note to Mark – I would explain this to the timeshare peddlers if I could have a longer site requirements description).

Hmm note how I haven’t actually read the article yet -all I looked for was the links and followed them. If I have to actually rate the article for the author score you are adding work for no good purpose here…

Now the following points – won’t get you automatically declined – but a number of them together will:

  1. The article is 301 words with 2 outbound links (doesn’t apply if there is only one link).
  2. Site still has the default header image from the default WordPress theme.
  3. If the site is selling a product but has only Adsense I am likely to reject the article.
  4. If the site is using one of Court’s old SEO themes  that have been done to death and are probably on G’s watch list.
  5. The title and sometimes the entire article is only loosely related to the anchored text of the links. Let’s get real here people – I want to rank your article – its good for you, its good for me! After all I thought you WANTED an authorative link! So don’t give me an article about packing tips and then link to fashion bags for ladies! This is probably the hardest judgement call sometimes I will get an excellent article – but with a bland generic title – frankly I rewrite the title – so we can both benefit.
  6. I rarely reject for grammar and/or spelling – sometimes I lightly edit.  If its embarrassingly bad language which is hard to read I will reject – but I do it very rarely.  Any automated grammar and spelling check would fail many of the perfectly good posts on the site – because some are written by native Englishmen, in fluent English,  some in fluent American, some in fluent English written by non-native speakers – all of the English is acceptable – and the quality can be great – but no automated system will ever deal with the complexity and depth that is English – certainly not Google.

What I Look For On My General Postrunner Site

Within 10 hours of reinstating this site into Postrunner during yesterday’s webinar, I had 8 articles! Hand on heart I do NOT read every article. I scan – if its appears to make some sense, is not badly spun and relates to the anchored text I’ll take it.

I do however check every link – and reject any article whose site fails the first 4 points above! In other words – what the article links to is FAR more important to me  than whether the nouns and adjectives are in agreement. I also reject any site promoting anything to do with owning or using firearms.

I will probably move this site to some other category – its starting to make money and I will focus on the niches that its ranking for.

Which is the Quality Site of These Two.

Well if you want passion and love and age – then midlifetravel.com is it – its my original site – its started off as an html site developed in Dreamweaver in 2007. Its been up in several forms over the years. It ranks #1 for my original keywords “travel over 30s” – unfortunately no one actually searches for the term LOL.  Its a PR0. I keep it, I love it, I post to it and I link to it. However this is a hobby site not a real money making venture.  Most of the content on it was written by me, a genuine expert, and has no outbound links.

The site that accepts practicably everything? Is just over a year old, has had very little link building to it (by me). Well its a PR2 and in the last month (when I published nothing new on it) made about $1/day – its on its way. I’ll start building out the content for which its already ranking for and adding more posts without outbound links on similar topics. In other words I will make it legitimate! Will I go back and fix the grammar and spelling -nope!

Still reading – you must be bored …

I have gotten a little fond of amplify. I started using it – because Griz did but I’ve found a use for it.  I use it to share the stuff I find genuinely interesting (or funny) in the weird and evolving world of making an online income – if you already follow this blog on Facebook (like in the footer) you will get my amplified updates – but otherwise follow Lis Sowerbutts on amplify directly. It also allows me to tweet without ever going anywhere near twitter – all good!

 

14 replies on “Postrunner Review: The “Quality” Debate”

Hey Liz, thanks for your rundown of this topic – I stay away from the TKA forums and haven’t followed along the “quality debate” they are having over there. I’ve been thinking about how to go forward with my PR blog as it is starting to rank for a few things and starting to make a few dollars here and there. I may start enforcing some stricter QA on submissions I accept but mostly I want to get the site formatted a bit better for the long-term and for the visual inspection – quality is something I haven’t yet defined for myself yet.

The second PR blog I have yet to add to the system I intend on making very legit just haven’t got my reseller hosting account yet. I’m sure my QA eyes will be working much harder on that site when it goes live.

I thought about creating a competitor to Postrunner, Build My Rank, and similar sites. Once the fuzz cleared from my head, I realized it wasn’t worth it. I would only build it as a project kind of thing and then would probably end up passing it on to someone else anyway.

Having wasted my fingertips on all that, I don’t need to participate in article building schemes. I have too much time on my hands as it is and if I don’t feel like writing anything for a week, I won’t.

You shouldn’t have let CC go to TKA. They killed something awesome and replaced it with a weaker BMR.

I just woke up lis. I thought I clicked reply on the right name haha. meant for RT. I seriously miss CC.

Mike RT made a commercial decision for his business- none of us get the right to question that unless we happened to be shareholders. And BMR is completely unrelated to both CC and TKA – and BMR works awesomely well in my experience

Great. Now I have to put away my firearms, too, Lis? I love my 2nd Amendment (and my open-carry state – Idaho allows the actual practice of carrying a sidearm with not permit – and I love that).

Anyway,,,

Not to bugg yew…

Just sayin’. 🙂

Thanks for a look into the TKA world. Pretty interesting.

James – it makes me very, very nervous seeing firearms even on police and army people – our cops do not carry firearms on normal duties. Australian cops do and I would not be nearly as comfortable approaching them as I am a NZ cop. Americans confuse the hell out of me – you think its OK to walk around armed? Why? I couldn’t live with that much fear of my fellow humans to be honest. The one time I would have been happy to have been near firearms were in remote fly-supported camps in Canada – in Grizzly country!

That’s odd to me – but only because it’s one of our rights and a biggie here in the US. In Idaho, it’s more due to the ranchers, etc.

You’ll walk around town and see some old farmer with a 6-shooter, or someone on horseback with a shotgun – it’s as right as rain.

One of my best friends and I go shooting at the shooting range as often as we can – there’s a ton of assault rifles, military-grade guns – good times.

Nothing violent – we have one of the lowest instances of violence in the country in our parts (likely because you don’t mess with armed citizens, methinks). On that note, I actually feel a lot safer than living in areas like California with strict gun control.

In those places – it’s the “good guys” that abide by the law, the scoundrels keep their guns on them. Interesting conversation, Lis – definitely explains why you never approved my articles…

🙂

Hi LIz,
Great post as always. I actually have been confused about this quality problem for some time. Apparently, I really missed the boat as far as quality goes. Even when I outsource articles I read them and edit to make sure they say something useful before I send them to a post runner site. I remember reading Griz and he talked about writing posts that were long and made people look for a link to click on. I just thought he meant writing with information because that is all I saw from him. Not just using filler. I tried to bore people with facts.

Apparently I was comletely wrong considering how many people are just publising cr*p that doesn’t say anything. They think this is the way to a big payout I guess. But you know what, the quality route has worked well for me. I got another badge in March by posting informative articles to Post runner and BMR. So, the quality route does work too.

I think the winds are changing in that cr*ppy links are not goint to work as well longer term. The basic idea of getting links to rank sites is still important, and I think will continue to be important, but you have to think about where those links come from. It is really a mind set change from “I am going to game Google to make money this month” to “I want an Internet business that will still pay me in ten years.”

Now I am going to go kick myself again for not posting alot of junk to the web, but first I have to cash my Google check. 🙂

Take care Lis, I always appreciate your insights.

Hey Lis,

The issue that I have always had with content collective farms is that the quality of the websites are typically not great, they have no readership (nor do they try) and they typically are easy to dissect if you wanted.

Plus, the barrier to entry is fairly low because the website getting the content typically doesn’t have a built in audience to impress (and although I don’t think that a social audience is that important, I do know that they could affect a webmaster’s judgement as to what to publish).

So, my question to everyone who is paying for links (which is kind of what you are doing) solely for the links is, why not simply go on a guest post hunt and write real articles that real people would enjoy within your market, leech existing traffic and brand your business all in one?

There would be no footprint to this method, your chances of an occasional free link will occur and you are still getting link juice for ranking. It would seem to me that that would be the more rational option rather than blindly building “okay” 300 word snippets that is exclusively reserved for the search engines and not people…

Hi Lis,

I quit TKA last year because I just got sick of PR and the way many blog owners (not all I might add) liked to screw with my articles and add their own links. Plus the guzillion blogroll links leaking precious juice that many of them had. All added up to very weak link juice for me and a free article for the blog owner to hi-jack. I thought they would know better, but it seems many still have that “blogger” mentality and not a SEO mentality, as SEO is what it is supposed to be for.

I’m not getting into arguments about it. It just never sat right with the way I work and that’s all there is to it.

BMR gives better service in that I choose the length of my articles (mostly 250+) and only ever place a single link. I write pretty fair articles and of the many hundreds I’ve ploughed in there so far, I’ve have never had one declined. The articles are never messed with, no extra links are ever added and the blogs do NOT have blogrolls leeching juice. 1 post-page = 1 outbound link.

Funny that so few people really understand how that works. I know you do – especially the part where a single link in a post is infinitely better than two or more.

Leo just made a good point that going guest-blog hunting is a good idea for getting a wider spread of links and sometimes you get the bonus of some free traffic and branding if you want it. I’m doing this primarily for links because I want to rank in the SE’s, but any extra traffic from the guest post is nice gravy.

Great post from the POV of a person accepting articles and certainly a fair bit of points to keep in mind when writing and submitting a article to a Postrunner kinda site. ‘Quality’ can be subjective sometimes especially when it comes to written material, unless the article violates some of the very basic parameters which u have pointed out. I have had to deal with a fair amount of people messing with my articles and then posting a bastardized version of it with changes I myself wouldn’t approve of !! Hope to possibly get you to post some of my travel niche related articles 🙂

Hey Lis… I’m inspired by your post and a couple of others saying they’ve made money off PR. I’ll be adding a bunch of my sites into PR soon (fingers crossed that I have time to do everything I want to!). I’ll let you know how it went… 🙂

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