Editorial - The Misuse of Topsites

What are topsites? For those of you who don’t know, topsites are basically networks which collect information on a bunch of sites on the same topic, and then help users interested in that topic find a nice site. As for the webmasters, they get more popularity in a clean, nice way. Or at least they’re supposed to.

Lately, I’ve seen a lot of sites with buttons on their splash page. Buttons which say “Vote 1”, “Vote 2”, etc. Well, they ask that in order to keep their sites “running”, the visitor must click on the votes, and vote that their site is placed higher on the topsites mentioned earlier. Well, I usually go through the process, but simply close the vote window that pops-up. This might not seem like too much bother, but think about it. Why do they “need” votes in a certain topsite, just to keep building their site?

If they are building a Dragonball site for fun, then that makes no sense whatsoever. Even if they want to become the best, they should realize that this isn’t going to happen. How many of you have seen vote buttons on..say…Ginga Giri Giri, Pojo’s, or any other truly elite site. Some sites may have a really awesome layout, but that just doesn’t cut it. Anyway, for those of you who have this on your site and use some fancy little script so visitors vote for you, I suggest you change your ways.

Anyway, a few vote buttons aren’t half as bad as other things. Some sites go as far as putting about seven to ten pop-ups on their site, begging for you to vote for them in a certain topsite. Now, why would anyone want to vote for a site that they haven’t even SEEN? Sometimes this even causes people’s computers to freeze, which pretty much guarantees that they won’t be visiting your site again.

Not only that, when the visitors finally get through all the begging and screaming to vote for the site, on every page, certain sites have around ten to fifteen buttons on each page. Each one takes a long time to load, and the visitor immediately loses interest. We have joined only one topsite, and I’m soon planning to change that into a text link.

Some topsites have scripts from which voting isn’t really necessary. When the buttons are placed on the pages, they keep track of each and every hit the page receives. To put it simply, the more hits you get, the higher your place is on their database. Now, some webmasters go as low as making as many sections as possible (usually info around a paragraph long), then instead of organizing them, they put all fifty links on their navigation bar. Although this makes the sections seem dry, the webmasters don’t care. They only care for a few extra hits that the visitor will give the site, so they can move higher on the topsite. Now that is downright low, and something that I despise (yet see everyday, even with “elite” sites).

So, if you have ten pop-ups opening up, or make visitors vote to enter your site, or have about twenty topsite buttons on every page of your site, well I hope that this editorial has gotten through to you. If you fix your ways then I guess that writing this has been worth it.