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Let's look at a similar situation that arose a couple of years ago. Stephen Pierce (who was unknown at time in Internet marketing circles) released an eBook about his online success. One chapter of eBook covered something that he called 'Smart Pages'. There were, quite simply pages which had been designed in a certain way to rank well in search engines. They were completely different to directory pages I have mentioned above but concept was same - fast, free traffic to your site from main search engines.
Smart Pages were big business for, I guess, a year after Stephen's eBook was published - software was written to create them, more eBooks were written, I even tested them and wrote about them myself.
Gradually though their effectiveness started to reduce and nowadays, I doubt that any serious Internet marketer would even consider using Smart Page technology. I am sure however that for that period of a year, a lot of people made a lot of money from Smart Page concept.
Just to illustrate this point further, I did a search on Google today for term 'Smart Pages' and not one person is paying to advertise using Adwords for this search term - not one! How often does that happen?
As I say, directory sites that TE and other software products create are completely different to Smart Pages and do at least have some content but fact is that they are being mass-produced and in many cases people are not even bothering to change standard page templates that come with software. If Google (or any other large search engine) wanted to exclude results of such pages, in most cases it would be pretty easy for them to do and if your only traffic comes from these very search engines, any income could stop overnight.
So what is point of this article? Am I telling you not to use this technology?
Absolutely not - I have been testing various software products available myself to see how well they work so I am certainly not saying 'Don't do this'. What I am saying is that you should be aware of risks. You should be aware that you 'might' wake up one morning and find that as far as search engines are concerned, your automated pages no longer exist and therefore don't rely on methods such as these for your entire income. In other words, don't put all your eggs in one basket - make hay while sun shines but be prepared when it eventually goes in :-)
Plenty of people make a good living jumping from one fad or craze to next but it can be a risky business. Just make sure you are aware of risks.
Richard Grady has been helping ordinary people earn online since 1998. He writes a free newsletter which is published every two weeks. To subscribe (and claim your free gifts), visit: http://www.thetraderonline.com/newsletter.html