Epik customers will get a free upgrade to full eCommerce stores.
You might think that today would be a dark day for Epik.com customers after a number of Epik Product Portals were de-indexed from Google. But after talking to Epik founder Rob Monster moments ago, it’s not the nightmare scenario you might imagine.
First things first, here’s what happened: a number of Epik-produced “Product Portals”, which include affiliate and CPC links to products, were de-indexed by Google within the past 24 hours. Not all of the sites were cut; I checked my three portals and two of them are still indexed. Traffic to the Epik network has fallen over the past day, but not by catastrophic numbers.
This is obviously bad news for anyone who’s product portal suddenly lost a great source of traffic. It’s unclear if this is temporary and if the portals will be added back into the index. But regardless, owners of these stores are about to get a nice gift: their product portals will be upgraded to full eCommerce stores at no charge. Epik will announce this tomorrow morning.
Epik has already created some of these stores, and planned to roll them out officially next quarter. But today’s events just moved that date up, and anyone who bought a $249 Product Portal may upgrade it to an eCommerce site for free rather than the standard $2500 price tag.
Besides the great features in the eCommerce platform, there are a couple things that will ensure they don’t meet the same fate with Google:
1. The content is richer and adds more value, making it more worthy of Google’s search engine love
2. The economics change. With a full store where you make a high margin on a $20 sale rather than get a small affiliate payment, you can make profitable media buys. You won’t rely just on Google for traffic.
Yes, today couldn’t have been a happy day for Epik. But I get the feeling Rob Monster had planned for the possibility. He planned for ways to depend less on search traffic.
And the company has plenty of capital — meaning something like this won’t bring the company to its knees.
Epik is forging a new path. As always,there will be plenty of doubt and critism for new business models like this one. But I have no doubt they will prevail – Nothing comes easy in this life – adversity makes you stronger and smarter…Epik will come out of this much stronger and smarter.
“But after talking to Epik founder Rob Monster moments ago, it’s not the nightmare scenario you might imagine.”
Uhh… yea, it is. When you have virtually all of your sites either dropped from the rankings or dropped big time in the serps it is a nightmare scenario. Rob smiling about it will not fix it.
“Traffic to the Epik network has fallen over the past day, but not by catastrophic numbers.”
Do you honestly believe this or are you on the payroll like Frager? If this is true let Rob show the numbers, and make sure he does not doctor them. When a substantial number of your sites are deindexed and a majority of the rest are dropped far down in the serps then you naturally are going to see “catastrophic” numbers. Just by saying you aren’t seeing them does not make it true. Trust the numbers, not the smiles.
An upgrade is great… provided they actually fix the problem that caused this in the first place by spreading out sites on different ip’s and actually creating unique content (and I’m not talking about a paragraph on the index page).
The truth of the matter is that Google has shown that they believe Epic sites are not a valuable destination on the internet. I would guess that from this point on any site with “Epik” in the header or footer, or on an ip address that is associated with Epik, is automatically going to be considered as trash to google.
The business has been flawed since day one. Anytime you MASS PRODUCE something with very little effort online it will eventually become worth very, very little.
I wish Rob the best. He is a smart man and I am sure will be fine. I feel really bad for the guys that spent 10,000+ on epik sites. It was a stupid, stupid decsion on their part to commit so much into a business plan that had so many inherent problems and no history of success. I still remember laughing at DNSpeculator.com’s posts regarding his opinion that he was making these great decisions when 90% of his readers were just shaking their heads.
The only good result of this situation will be that hopefully people will realize that Owen Frager is nothing more than just an opinion for hire. Pay him enough and he will plug anything day in and day out.
@ TB –
I’m not a fan of mass-produced, content-light web sites. I learned my lesson on that 8 years ago. So to the extent someone thinks they can sit back, press a button, and get great search rankings, it’s not a panacea. What people need to do is use Epik as a platform for developing their sites. A platform on which they can create their own content and add their own value. If they add value, Google won’t slap them.
But does Epik even offer that with their product portals? If they don’t then it shows that the product was flawed from day 1.
@ TB – your email is bouncing. Please use a valid email address when commenting.
I am surprised there is no mention of the refund policy if people do not want to be upgraded.
How would it work?
An example…fishingpolecity.com , fishingreelsworld.com , fishingtackletown.com , fishingreelsonly.com , fish-hook.com and fishinglines.com all selling the same product and same feed?
Is Rob suggesting that Epik is going to write unique content for all those sites where basically you could pick any one of those names and just have one site. Is he going to invest resources into those names?
I don’t think so…I have a feeling it will be the same gift in a different box.
Kudos to Rob for addressing this issue quickly
How are they going to create content rich, value add so google and other sites find value in what they are doing.
No google = no money
I applaude Rob for his forward thinking and trying to take this industry to the next level. All these other weak minisite developers that have their own agenda really need to take notes because EPIK is doing things they never thought would ever be possible.
Rob- you know you’re doing something well if you have all these other companies watching your every move.
“1. The content is richer and adds more value, making it more worthy of Google’s search engine love”
If a site is deindexed it won’t matter if you get a free upgrade, you still aren’t listed on Google. And since Google drives approx. 76% of the domestic search engine traffic being deindexed really kills sites that depend on SE traffic.
@ TLD – you can get back into the index.
Don’t get me wrong, this whole thing sucks, but Epik isn’t going to rollover.
Same ip’s, linking? so what. If someone visits whateverwidget.com and it sells whateverwidgets in a clean organized, secure platform then it should be indexed. Removing clean, on topic sites from the index because they are on the same server or are linked as a network shouldn’t be a problem as long as all of the sites and content are relevant. Eliminating affiliate sites on the actual product or service keyword domain suggests that gargoogle may want the affiliate game all to itself??
Epik’s sites are the cleanest sites I’ve seen yet without dropping huge$$. this sucks. 🙁
For the folks that have had domains banned, it’s possible to get re-indexed by Google:
1) create sites with unique, informative content (affiliate product feeds like Epik’s product portals do not suffice in Google’s eyes)
2) make sure all nepotistic/ network links have been removed
3) verify the site on Google webmaster tools and submit a “request for reconsideration”
More details are here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40052
I’d be happy to help if anyone has any questions: mattbentley at gmail.com
Good luck! Epik isn’t going to rollover, but this is a real bummer for people who’ve had quality domains banned for no fault of their own.
http://copyscape.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.emergencyfood.com%2Fstore%2Fmre-entrees%2Fmainstay-emergency-food-1200-calorie-30case
Need I say more? That’s a page from the new eCommerce platform sample site (EmergencyFood.com) run through CopyScape. It’s the same crap that got most of the sites blacklisted in the first place… duplicate content and no back links.
Besides, what good is a fresh new site on a blacklisted domain?
Do you really think Google is going to approve your reconsideration request if your “new” site doesn’t have a single page that can pass CopyScape? You might fall for Rob calling it eCommerce, but Google will see it as the same old affiliate spam.
Andrew, I love you man, but this post is a load of crap. I hope it earns you a lot of brownie points 😉
“He planned for ways to depend less on search traffic.”
So what are they going to depend on instead ?
@ Adam – I believe the idea is you can buy traffic to an ecommerce domain since you make more on each sale.
“Anytime you MASS PRODUCE something with very little effort online it will eventually become worth very, very little.”
///////////////
That is really what it comes down to. A business model like this is never going to have any legs.
Having said that the % of Epic sites really making the likely returns claimed ($299+ yr) was tiny anyway.
Im NOT worried Ecommerce plan will be allot better and i own 300 pik sites only 5 got de-indexed and they will index them again
We had the same issue w/ whypark and had to move away.
It’s safer to have domains not pointing at all than have them sandboxed, no amount of revenue is worth that.
The issue with non-custom mass produced sites providing duplicate content will always exist, specially at this scale.
I don’t see how losing the source of 76% of all search traffic is “not something to worry about”, think that is a downright dangerous thought process.
People need to take remedial action and immediately if they don’t want their domains to become worthless in the long run and I agree with the comment above that if the nameservers are being used to sandbox domains, goog won’t really care if it is a ‘product portal’ or a ‘content minisite’.
owen frager and other blogs pumping this crap that were on payroll didn’t help
didnt buy into this epik rubbish personally
there is no easy route guys, but with qulaity software never been cheaper, why aren’t people developing properly? rather than putting a tinpot template with feeds on for a few weeks then expecting to auction for loads more few weeks down line, lol
many would rather have a raw, unblemished quality name and develop how they want!
hope people have learned lesson
don’t touch with a bargepole!
from what i saw of the mass developed sites epik were peddling, it was only 3 muppets who bought the whole lot between them!
There is an element in all this that is being completely missed, that is that Google is ruthless and wants to completely annihilate any small website that sells anything. They want all search for products and service to go through them, where they collect phenomenal advertising revenue. This speaks more about Google than Epik. It is getting harder and harder to compete against Google, if they decide to go after your market segment you can kiss your business good bye, no matter how many dollars you throw at your site. Google local search is about to destroy many small viable internet businesses. Google is out of control and to all intense purposes a monopoly not only in search but in most facets of doing business on the internet.
Predictable, Rob pretends to know Seo, but truth is few actually do -and if it were so easy Google would bleed money. It’s sad domainers trust these guys, deindexing is serious and they happen for good reason. Deindexing has happened before to similar networks and it will happen again! Don’t believe the hype, sometimes you get what you paid for!! Some industries like learning the hard way, domaining just takes it to new levels of oblivious!
@ jim
Very well said and insightfull.
I remember when google was new to the Internet…
they started out very popular in that
compared to yahoo there image was that
of concern for online community and
“content was King over Advertising”
and what that meant was that, when you Searched you were lead to believe that you would land on the very best subject content, regardless of it’s commercial standing,
and thus is why they
became the leader in popularity …
That Business model has changed as Jim
has eloquently pointed out, above.
http://www.4th-of-july.com/ is the site Rob had set up for me, but this is a seasonal site… just hope I can make it work for next season.
**”Eliminating affiliate sites on the actual product or service keyword domain suggests that gargoogle may want the affiliate game all to itself??”
Cluttering search pages with text ads is just as bad or worse than putting up a clean, on topic amazon or whatever affiliate site.
Why don’t they ban every online store, walmart, amazon, macy’s, etc, etc. They all just regurgitate products that are available on the manufacturer or authorized distributors site. Where do they draw the line? Walmart is ok, sears is ok, etc. but the little guy with the exact match product domain that people naturally go to is no good?? bullS%*T
It’s only natural that they want to eat/own/run everything. Scary times.
Time to bunker down and pump out completely original mom and pop sites, one at a time. ouch.
when will people finally understand that any mass development platform is always going to be a risk. You could invest tons of money in epik only to have it all taken away at anytime in the future….how is this a long term strategy? Google is the smartest company on earth…they have one goal and it is not to put mass produced sites in the serps
I like Epik and Rob. I don’t have any sites there so I don’t know the pitch and TOS but I would think that any SEO is a BONUS, not a guarantee.
I don’t know if Rob ever implied that Epik pages would rank well in Google and even if they did, for how long?
So, seems to me that the Epik platform is still great, just that the “bonus” of getting search traffic is now in question.
Also, this happened to WhyPark a few years back and I think they got it worked out with Google.
So, Rob… there’s no such thing as bad press as long as they spell your name right 🙂
In 1996 I had domains that were indexed by WebCrawler (before Google existed, and Yahoo was just getting rolling), which took up all 10 spots on the first page of search. I literally controlled whole subjects by owning the first page.
Then WebCrawler got smarter and removed my listings. After a couple more similar situations I realized I must literally own the traffic so nobody can take it away.
You can not trust your traffic sources other than the traffic you get naturally to your own domains. That is the only real way to freedom. Forget the engines, links, etc… you must own the traffic that comes with premium generic domains.
Regarding Rob, I have given him a hard time over the last year on the boards for the IP issue, but I commend him for upgrading these sites to ecommerce sites. I just hope he can pull it off.
I’m rooting for him, even though many folks, including myself, knew the product portals would get deindexed. That was a no-brainer. I’m rooting for him b/c there has been a lack of successes in this industry in the last two years, even with these new product offerings like Octane360, which I believe will also be deindexed soon enough.
OK, I waited since yesterday to write about this google de-indexing mess.
Let me explain from my experience:
1. I always supported new/innovative companies and gave them a chance to prove their worth by being among the first to use their system.
2. When EvoLanding.com came on scene few years ago, their management (especially sales person Mike) begged me and convinced me to try their platform.
3.Btw, EvoLanding was the very first version of what epik is today and I think EvoLanding name was changed to DevHub later.
4. I trusted evo guys and risked 1500 of our domains….All of them were on the same IP as 1000s of other Evo powered sites.
5. After a few months one day google de-indexed every thing and here came excuse after excuse after excuse from the EvoLanding management…..it was just blah blah blah……no help was ever provided and I re-parked my domains.
6. Evo guys then changed to DevHub and started telling me to move my domains back…..they basically begged, sent so many emails and every time asked then what is your guarantee that google won’t de-index all sites again? What are you doing different now than before? They always avoided addressing my concerns and never answered my geneuine concerns head-on. Come on guys, by now you should know that all names on same IP and cross-linked from same IP is going to be a problem, I am wondering why epik kept ignoring this same IP problem over and over?
7. So I never let DevHub use my domains again because I did NOT trust them a bit. I am being very honest here. I can be rude because I am the one who suffered 1500 domains getting de-indexed from google because of EvoLanding’s fault. But I guess I thought I learned my lesson and I moved on.
8. Then came Rob M. on the scene and I kept checking his posts and other activities as I always thought he is different, calm, and more trust-worthy. I asked him lots of questions and he mostly provided answers about their epik system. I belived Epik is also a version of EvoLanding platforn just like DevHub.
9.But then Rob came with this guarantee that anyone who is not happy with their epik portal can get $249 back. Ok I then tried one of my domains on epik.
10. It has been almost 6 months and I did not have much success with revenue so far. I also quickly realized that epik portals were all looking same, nothing really unique from site to site and started getting worried. But since I had only one domain on epik (not 1500 like before) so I kind thought it should be ok, so I let my site on epik stay as Rob kept telling it will get better.
11. Fast forward to yesterday, my site has been de-indexed from google.
12. Now I am scrathing my head and feeling stupid thinking I should have learned my lessons from EvoLanding nightmare. But anyway, it was only one domains, I think I learned but did not lean 100% yet.
13. Now I know that I will never-ever use any cookie cutter mass development platform. There are so many free/cheap platforms available now like wordpress templates etc that just a barebone site will be better treated by google than these mass produced sites. Why not use just a WordPress template and have simple sites…..no need to put mass produced content…..just 1 page simple sites which will be unique and google never really de-index these sites….just don’t cross link from same IP.
14. Finally, I still respect Rob M. but I don’t know what to make of his new promise of free upgrade to e-commerce sites. I don’t know how that will help if our sites are still de-indexed from google.
I just hope Rob/Epik are able to sort this mess quickly and help all the people that put trust in epik/Rob.
Thank you.
TB – Muppets- Mike or whatever your REAL name is you flatter me but give me way to much credit. I’m just a lowly copywriter.
If you believe my words are the sole reason Epik sold 6,000 sites in the short 6 weeks that our firm has been posting the same press releases that every other blogger gets about about Epik, then maybe you should hire me?
Seriously though, I know that in politics you are not supposed to talk to dictators, perhaps Rob Monster will fly down to Google and have a civil conversation with someone at an executive level. I don’t think that’s been done before.
We are salesmen just trying to make a living in the recession and create jobs where there are none. We are also Google shareholders. Unless some malware was installed or a crime has been committed that no one knows about, we are doing nothing different than what 70% of the sites listed on Google do, including their own Blogger network.
Jim above hit the head on the nail with a bigger issue that affects all of us regardless of where our sites are and that’s on the the predatory and perhaps illegal practices of Google.
Only until there is conversation can that be negotiated. And yes, nothing is set in stone or means anything is over just because in the tech seo world many just accept the hand Google deals them without challenge. You can negotiate anything.
I look forward to hearing more from Rob this afternoon.
Whats everyone crying about, Free Storefront, Higher profit margins, We can finally start taking control and paying for traffic.
There are usually consequences to things that are too good to be true, or seem easy to pull off. This is no different.
How is getting an upgrade to a full ecommerce site on a banned domain name a big win? Sorry, don’t see the win here.
As Jim pointed out, Google is playing dirty ball.
The fact is they don’t want anyone to have too much power, control, or money. If they can keep you under their thumb, you will never be able to leave.
This is why you must literally “own” the traffic that comes from great domain names.
Google wants all of to lose so we pay them.
Can you see what just happened here?
1. Google deindexes Epik product portals.
2. Rob offers upgrade to ecommerce sites.
3. Unless you “own” traffic, like I said, you will have no traffic from these deindexed sites.
4. The trafficless, if that is a word, domains will now need to buy traffic.
5. Google wins!!!! You now pay them, instead of them paying you. It plays out perfectly for Google.
The house always wins, and the house is Google.
Will the full upgrade get the domain re-indexed? Maybe, but it seems like an empty gesture with a self-assigned price tag to impart a sense of value.
I’m not here to bash Epik as some are. I would like to see them do well, but I can’t even afford to try them with the prices they charge.
I didn’t read all the posts, but of the ones I did I don’t see anyone asking questions about what happened – really?!
We have been running 11 classified ad sites on the same years with the same basic template for years. There have been changes in PR and traffic, but we were NEVER de-indexed. And yes, the sites DO all link to each other. Why the hell would we NOT link to each other? Isn’t that NATURAL? Too much SEO stuff is repeated by others that have no real experience and have not done testing. They just pick up what was said and assume it’s true. When you start hearing 10 people say the same thing, what other conclusion can you have? Well if you have been doing SEO for over 10 years, you know that once a myth is started it’s impossible to stop.
I think there is something else going on and with the number of people that do bash Epik, I would look towards some black hat stuff going on that took out the domains. Maybe just a simple complaint to Google would be enough, lord knows they are going to miss yet another cookie-cutter site.
I don’t know if Epik has experienced SEO staff members, but if they do then this should not have happened unless they are under some kind of “attack” which could be the case.
THANKS so much to “RKB” for your detailed post about your experience. You seem professional and a true asset to the community. 🙂
It sounds like many of you are happy to hear about this so you can have your, “I told you so!” moment. How sad to be rooting for someone’s failure instead of their success.
Even though 2 of mine were de-indexed I’m not having a knee jerk reactions here. I took the risk, I rolled the dice. Aside from an expensive and time consuming custom development project for each domain (most custom development projects fail or go way over budget anyway), Epik is the most promising solution I’ve come across yet. If you disagree then propose some better ones.
The measure of a company, and a man, is how he handles adversity. The fact that Rob has decided to compensate de-indexed portal owners with free upgrades to eCommerce stores demonstrates a huge level of commitment to each and every client, and confirms to me that Rob is going to do whatever it takes to make Epik successful.
Regardless of the day-to-day fires that ignite out of thin air, Rob is a proactive problem solver who gets results. If he fails it won’t be for lack of passion and effort. If he succeeds, we all win.
@ Owen said: “Seriously though, I know that in politics you are not supposed to talk to dictators, perhaps Rob Monster will fly down to Google and have a civil conversation with someone at an executive level.”
Rob can preserve his dignity and stay away from that behemoth. Here is what Google thinks of us:
http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
Would seem all the parking and affiliate community should be rooting hard for Epik on this one. If Epik, with appropriate push back, can shape Google policy here, it will open opportunity for all parkers and affiliates. If Epik loses here, the limits of Google-power remain undefined and rather frighteningly unchecked. Somewhere a stake must be planted in the ground. Would seem some critics only root for their own demise as they root for Epik’s.
Perhaps the parking and affiliate community needs to have an organization by which to represent itself, and not just back any one company?
The problem is what is there to “push back” against? Did Epik violate one or more of Google’s rules” Did Bing or Yahoo (Ooops, same thing now) also deindex the same domains?
Please, more facts and less opinions on this issue. Thinking that any of us, even if all are united with one voice, can change Google’s policies may be unrealistic.
Clearly Epik is doing something right, based upon the number of customers in this comment thread who are willing to forget and forgive.
I have to take issue with the idea that they are somehow a victim of an unjustified attack from Google, however: certainly Big G is not above reproach these days, but this is one area where they are comparatively transparent: they don’t want sites consisting primarily of affiliate feeds with no added value cluttering up their results. As a search engine user, it’s hard to disagree: anyone with a week and “PHP for Dummies” can make 100,000 thin affiliate sites. Think how useless the SERPs would be if Google didn’t proactively remove them.
If Epik had stopped there and simply monetized domain traffic, there would be no problem, but they also attempted to game the rankings by aggressively interlinking. It would have been easy to follow Google guidelines and interlink the sites in a manner that didn’t effect search rankings, but they chose not to.
Google says: “we will de-index you if you do X”. They did X. They’ve been de-indexed. Where’s the conspiracy?
I don’t get why Epik and their marketing guy on this thread are trying to make this a Google issue rather than a real problem with Epik parking. Google has been very clear about its standards for the quality of their search index and their goal of keeping it free of spam sites. They consider affiliate feed sites like Epik to be in that group. You may disagree with their opinion but Los search users prefer not to be directed to spam sites and they are serving their users exactly the way they say they will by deiindexing such sites.
The only problem for the domaining community with Epic’s de-indexing is if they fail to provide the refunds evidently promised to their customers now that they seem to be falling short of what they and their very aggressive marketers have promised and implied.
If they give the full refunds without delay or excuse then that is the only way they can disprove the naysayers and their concerns about MLM type marketing.
I do have a considerable amount of sites with Epik, and got one of them deindexed. I checked and 2 other sites are on the same IP as the deindexed one but have not deindexed or dropped in ranking … yet. All other of my sites are on different IP’s then the deindexed one.
I will be giving Epik the benefit of the doubt and wait till after the conference call / update from Epik today. I’m pretty sure that many other Epik Publishers are in the same boat and will be making some hard decisions in the next few days/weeks in regards to pulling the plug and asking for a refund if there is no short term solution in avoiding more sites getting deindexed in google.
Looking forward to hearing what Epik has to say in getting this solved, I’m sure they will come up with a solution, but will it be too late?
Guess well see …
i have only 3 point:
first ,i trust rob.
second,i trust epik.
third,i just ordered another product portal.
forth,i have problems with logic.
Andrew. That was about as biased an article as I’ve ever read. It was not news, it was pure PR damage control. I and many others ecpect better from this site. IMHO
Just had 4 product portals go live yesterday, still trust Rob, still know Epik will do the right thing. They are a class act over there.
I just used a go daddy promo code SCARYONE and registered a domain for $1.18 I will throw on their platform next week actually.
Keep your head up Rob and Epik, a champion is judged by how quick he gets back up, not how many tmes he has been knowcked down.
@ Shaun – you’re right; this is clearly my opinion. My opinion is that this sucks but Epik will be fine overall.
Of course this sucks and of course they will rise up…. they got Rob f’ing Monster running the show. This is a bump in the road for them and the customers. Save the comments until we all see what happens. Or….. if you think you can do better, offer up some positive feedback to someone who is trying to change the game so we all can make more money,
Lastly, you can google GMI and see where Rob took that. He certainly won’t take this laying down or let epik fail bc of it. He’s a proven winner and I don’t see anyone else ponying up millions of their own cash to build a brand and take a shot at something big. That’s bc most domainers just know how to bitch and complain and whine and rarely have what it takes to go make millions, spend some, and make a few more.
Tine will tell either way, it always does.
Just my. 02
ImSure Rob will fix the problem, as a mass developer myself we had the same problem 2 years ago when 600 of our sites where dropped by Google. yes before they where all on the front page.
We discovered it was our code and content that was causing the problem.when doing mass development and rolling out sites you need to make sure you dont have one bit of duplicate content, also if your using same image for say 100 sites, you need to rename that image or images 100 diffrent times,
development is a very hard business to do and doing it in mass is no joke it takes lot mistakes and time to get it right,
It takes a very brave company to mass produce websites and those sites have to perform and be better in search and rankings than anything else around.
Im sure Epic will work out the problem and fix it. but domainers have to be real where else are you going to get systems build to handle 100 200 500 1000 websites at time.
Epic is by far away head most with regards this.
Ps this is not a pr for Epic I have never used there products or spoken to Rob or e-mailed them just been doing mass development for 5 years now and thats my personal views.
Andrew, earlier this week, you said the single biggest threat to the domain industry is a lack of professionalism. I think the biggest threat to the industry is domainers (and their companies) pretending to be larger and more capable than they really are. Some domainers I highly respect are guilty of this, and I think it’s inexcusable for Epik to charge so much for its services to allow something like this to happen. Whether or not Rob is a great guy is beside the point. Business is business, and Epik really dropped the proverbial ball on this one.
I have two sites with epic and i made an effort and wrote a few articles of my own , today i checked and both sites are indexed with google, bing and yahoo but if i can get an upgrade to better sites it may be worth looking into i guess , at this point i suggest if you dont make some form of effort on your own you cant expect the world
Seems like anytime there’s a thread about Rob, comments tend to be a mix of vitriol and praise.
He’s still learning about what will work and won’t work in this industry and even though the stars didn’t quite align in my previous experience with him, I’d give him a tip of the hat for his vision and constant work to improve the domain industry.
Any updates?
Dub-A,
I’m surprised you didn’t respond to Samit’s comment where he put Whypark in the same wagon with Epik. Whypark has proved itself in the last 18 months as the premier content site perfect for domainers with longtails, ccTLDs, and excited about the website building features that Whypark gives you for peanuts.
As proof, I moved 1/10 of my domains that were getting NOTHING at PPCs, slowly and adding a custom page of original content, and those “non-performers” now are beating the rest of my “performers” at several PPCs in monthly revenue.
I agree with Paul (Snoopy) that you can’t expect good results from a website without significant effort. If you just click the setup links using catalogued content without “mixing it up with custom moves”, you’re going to get knocked out.
The issue is “how much does it cost to get it started?”. In Epik’s case, $249 for ONE domain. Whypark — free, or a $30 a month for managed accounts, and continually evolving to meet the domain investor’s needs, using amazing apps and enabling a PPC feed/Affiliate cornucopia.
A domain investor has to seriously think about how they handle their domains, because there’s not just one solution to gaining the most value from your portfolio.
I don’t know if Rob had a conference call or otherwise updated on the situation yesterday. I haven’t seen any news posted about that anywhere yet.
But I just found some interesting comments Rob Monster offered on Namepros forum yesterday that has info I have not seen reported anywhere else.
I hope Andrew doesn’t mind this link to Rob’s comments:
http://snurl.com/EpikNews
So any comment that includes a link no matter how helpfully meant and that is not self-promotional automatically gets sent to the garbage heap?
Is that standard practice?
@Tricolorro It doesn’t appear that way, there are links on #35, #22, #12, and #11. If you look at the start of this thread, there’s a certain openness that isn’t found on other sites. Some of those comments would not have lasted elsewhere, so I’m appreciative of the way things are run here.
@tricolorro
Your email sounds like what Akismet does automatically on my sites with live links. Most auto blockers filter that, but I don’t know what this site uses. For mine, I recommend a reply not contain a live link i.e. just sitename.tld and no http prefix
Stock,
Okay but I had posted a comment that included a link to some comments that Rob Monster had made elsewhere re the Epik situation that had info I haven’t seen anywhere else.
My comment was not posted and there was no
“Your comment is awaiting moderation” notice.
Yes Art,
Good advice.
Thanks.
@ tricolorro – your comment got snubbed by Akismet for some reason. It is now live.
If you ever make a post and it doesn’t show up or say “waiting for moderation” just send me a note and I’ll try to recover it.
I have to agree with the most of the people here – to call this anything but a disaster for Epik seems crazy. Pretending that some sort of “$2500” freebie is going to fix things is even worse – they are crapping their pants and are giving away a piece of software nobody would pay $2500 for in a hundred years to try to keep people happy.
Owen – you have pumped this thing more than anybody, you can’t suddenly just say “i’m just a copywriter passing along news they give me”. And to suggest Rob could fly to google to have a “civil conversation” is silly.
The sites added no value to end users, so google sent them packing. It wasn’t a surprise at all to a lot of people.
more than 8000 sites could have been deindexed by google and no actual news from any domain news publishers.
It’s just wrong that Epik is still selling the product like nothings wrong. No blog post about this on their website either.
“If you ever make a post and it doesn’t show up or say “waiting for moderation” just send me a note and I’ll try to recover it.”
Okay, thanks.
@gm77 (aka Mike Cohen) give it a rest buddy. You are going in and out of character trying to remember your last persona.
Your problem is that the customers LOVE this stuff and are as connected to the company and its team as the Apple champions are. They love it because it delivers. We can hear from all the Monday morning quarterbacks and arm chair pundits on this thread and in Namepros, who sit on the sidelines with no skin in the game, and make assumptions with no basis in fact.
Or we can listen to the big Epik customers like Oliver and several others on this thread who are in lock step with their Epik journey through good and bad.
“Im NOT worried Ecommerce plan will be allot better and i own 300 pik sites only 5 got de-indexed and they will index them again: –Oliver
Epik is not a mini-site it is a development platform that grows, changes and adapts to the market needs. It can morph into a business much more powerful than it appears at rev.1. Developers can add/change content, source and review products, drive lead gen. It all depends on how lazy or busy the owner wants to be.
The other difference when it comes to comparing costs is the Epik bucks which most Epik customers have used to buy a better future by trading in drop-worthy domains for the cash to upgrade to better choices. Several people even used Epik bucks to attend traffic.
There’s a new level of innovation here that is leap years ahead of the former “set it and forget it” minisite mentality.
“They love it because it delivers.”
How can it be said that it delivers when the number of domains making any sort of ROi on there system is tiny?
The whole mass development concept is flawed from start to finish (no matter whether it is Mike Cohen or Epik doing it), this is the kind of site Google does not want in their index.
Oh my. Notice how the Snoop (Paul) didn’t mention Whypark?
That’s because Whypark is rolling along like a runaway train right now. Thx Snoopy!
Epik fail, muwahahahaaa….
Sorry Owen, but I’m not Mike. In fact I think Mike is a jackass, but he is smarter than most in the domain space when it comes to some of the technical pieces of things. And I completely agreed with him when he called out Epik for their utterly terrible SEO strategy, crappy content and delivering zero value to the end user. Anyone who understands the basics of SEO could see it from a mile away (btw, and no offense – you don’t seem to fit into that camp).
If you want to point me to a dozen of these domains that “deliver” I’ll be happy to eat my words – but seeing the horrible sites and horrible stats from those sites has done anything but convert me.
Mini site development services pretty much all suck as Latona learned, as Epik is learning and as I’m sure angry Mike has learned.
“If Epik, with appropriate push back, can shape Google policy here, it will open opportunity for all parkers and affiliates”
Yeah sure and pigs will fly. Why should google abandon the practices that has made it the number one search engine so people like you can flood it with low quality duplicate content cookie-cutter websites? Do you actually think they would devalue their own property to benefit you – when all you are offering is what they have repeatedly smacked down before?
As someone who takes days and even weeks to create a single site – I say good riddance to the spam – and that is what these duplicate content websites are when they are created by the thousands with nary a difference between them.
BTW – Google handsomely rewards those that take my path. We have seen how they reward yours.
@ Deluted
I know Dub-A, the owner of this blog, and he’s a smart, and fair dude.
So, if you take “weeks” to create a “single site” and get results from it, I’m sure Dub-A would DEFINITELY allow you to respond to my request to post your homepage featuring your services.
Since you say all those “minisite” companies suck, services like yours would be a GODSEND, so Dub-A and 200 other top domainers would like to know who you are, and what services you provide for our domains that will give us killer ROI.
Who are you, and what can you give all the DNW readers? Guaranteed, most top domainers are reading this blog.
Can’t wait to hear from you!