FAQ / HELP / Frequently Asked Questions

Best Reviewer's members often ask questions, they're all interesting and help improve the site but some of them are just too frequently asked, they need to be answered on this page rather than by email, otherwise it's time wasted for everybody. So here they are:

- What is the Premium Membership? Do I need it?

The premium membership means you'll receive more AdSense money for the same traffic. It's only a way for me (James, the webmaster) to have money in my Paypal account in exchange for way less money in my AdSense account. I don't mind earning less money, but I like having money in my Paypal account because I use it to pay for online services and don't want to use my bank account to send money in my Paypal account, and AdSense sends money only in my bank account. So you pay via Paypal for a premium membership and then you have more AdSense ads on your pages on Best Reviewer, that means more AdSense money for you. This membership is at your advantage if you currently earn more than $5 a month via your pages on Best Reviewer. Having the premium membership means you'll multiply your earnings by three times or more immediatly. You can know how much you earn via Best Reviewer by setting a CHANNEL URL or a CUSTOM CHANNEL in your AdSense account. So, if you're interested in a premium membership, go here:
http://www.best-reviewer.com/premium-membership

- How can I delete or modify my tops?

In order to delete or modify a top it's very easy. Simply send me a message with the URL(s) of your top(s) that you want to modify. The URL(s) should start with http://www.best-reviewer.com/...
In this message tell me what changes you want to be done to your tops, including deletion.
I will act on them as soon as I read your message and will contact you back when the changes have been done.
Please note that you can edit your tops yourself, by clicking on the EDIT link near the title of your tops, but I can do it for you too.

- How can I modify my username? I want to delete my user account and all my tops.

In order to modify your username it's very easy. Simply send me a message with your current username and the new one you want. I'll do it and send you a reply, your referral link will be the same, no need to update anything but your profile page url as well as your rss feed since it contains your username in the URL.
If you want to delete your user account and all your tops, it's the same, simply send me a message and I'll do it promptly and send you a reply to confirm deletion of your account and all your content.

- How can I track earnings from Best-Reviewer? How am I going to get paid?

You will be paid directly by AdSense. Since your ads will be displayed 100% of the time on your tops, you'll receive money for each click on those ads. In order to track your ad impressions and earnings, you'll need to watch directly into your account, you have three choices:
- in AdSense admin, click on Performance Reports and click on Sites, then you'll find BEST-REVIEWER.COM
- in AdSense admin, create a new URL CHANNEL and input the url BEST-REVIEWER.COM when asked for an url.
- in AdSense admin, create a CUSTOM CHANNEL, then write down the associated ID and add it in your user account on Best Reviewer.

Here is the AdSense page to review and create URL and CUSTOM channels:
https://www.google.com/adsense/channels

If you need help in creating a URL CHANNEL in AdSense, they've made a page to explain the process:
How to create a URL Channel in AdSense
When asked for an URL simply enter best-reviewer.com nothing more.

In both cases, stats will start to show in a few hours after creation and data will start to record from the moment you created the channel, you won't be able to see what happened before. But note that with the URL CHANNEL only you may encounter a problem of page views reporting always 0 in AdSense.. If that happens, use a CUSTOM CHANNEL.

- Is Best-Reviewer.com bad for my original articles I link to from my tops? I see the tops pages in front of my own article in Google's search results! What about duplicate content penalties?

This myth confuses LOTS of members. Google has already demystified the duplicate content penalty myth in its official blog, you can read for instance:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/duplicate-content-due...
and
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicat...

So please, as Google suggests, stop listening to people who don't know any better and try to scare you uselessly... copying your article introduction in the top's description doesn't qualify as "scrapping the content" because that would involve copying all the article in the top description, and even then, google is good at knowing where the original content came from.

It's true that at first you can see Best Reviewer in front of your own articles in search results, but don't worry, that is simply a freshness boost given by google to new pages when it first discovers them. This artificial boost can last from a few days to weeks, but eventually the original article will always be in first, if only because on the top page there's a link to the original article, and there's no link from the original article to the top page!

I understand that you can be afraid, but don't be, because even Google says there's no reason to be, and please tell that to the person who first told you this false information, this myth.

- Why do I see Amazon ads on my top?

Well, I've put this in place as an attempt to deter members from submitting tops with their Amazon affiliate links in them. So I thought perhaps having competitive ads (my own Amazon affiliate links BTW) on their page will lower the perceived value of making tons and tons of tops with only Amazon affiliate links in them. I don't know if this will work, but I'm trying.

Why do I try to deter members from submitting tops with Amazon affiliate links? Well it's always for the same reason, Google doesn't like it. I once read an internal documentation made by Google for its online workers in charge of ranking sites and reporting spam sites. And inside this documentation it was clearly written that one of the factors to help determine if the site needed to be reported as spam (and so, penalized) is the fact that pages have affiliate links on them and so don't add much value compared to going directly to the merchant site.

So, I know that having 10% of pages with affiliate links is ok, more maybe, but how do I limit members from doing too many such tops? I can totally ban Amazon links, it's easy. But I don't want to do it, because it's perfectly fine for Google to have some of the pages with affiliate links in them, so I came up with this solution to try to deter members from doing it too much.

I don't know if that will work, so if I see that the trend continues to grow, then I'll ban it (not delete the tops but by simply not displaying any link going to Amazon) and I'll update this FAQ page to say so. Probably won't happen as I believe members doing that kind of tops will not be happy to see competitive ads on their tops and will limit themselves automatically :-)

If this measure affects you, the only thing I can recommend is that you create one page per product you want to promote, on your own blog/site and only then you can create a top which links to your pages. That way there won't be any Amazon ads on your top page, it will be clean :-)

- Can you explain me this or that part of the Best Reviewer system?

You can find some very detailled articles about Best-Reviewer.com done by members of the site, such as:
http://www.squidoo.com/best_reviewer
Search Google for "Best Reviewer" and you'll soon find many articles simply introducing or explaining in great details the site.
Also check those video tutorials on how to use Best Reviewer efficiently:
http://www.best-reviewer.com/create-best-reviewer-video-tutorial

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Do you have another question? You're welcome to ask it directly by contacting the webmaster (James) and receive a reply very quickly.