When is a Wiki Not a Wiki?

Google’s new tool Side-Wiki looks like a great new addition to the plethora of new tools coming out that are essentially plug-ins to the browser. For most sites that are simply presentations of information of various kinds, this new tools just creates a comment bar on the side. Even though it is called “Side-Wiki” it is not a wikipedia page at all, but just a set of visitors commentary on the information in the site. Normally this would be considered a cool thing, there is only one problem with it: Anyone can post anything, and if the page is your sales page, and the poster is your direct competitor they can post slander and libel against you and direct your prospects to go to their sites all while hosting it on your site!

That is an outrage! Because now all that work you did to create traffic and improve your site, to create your product and drive traffic can be destroyed by just a few clicks from an enemy.

What do you do? Well, if you are smart you get a blocker for Side-Wiki. A good blocker needs to be able to sandbox your site without screwing up any of the links, existing anchors, or data – it needs to be able to create random redirection, and should be keyed so you can see that the redirection is yours and not put in by some hacker or other spam tool.

So how does Google’s Sidewiki work, look at the picture below and you can get  good idea:

It can get Evil

What is happening is that with the Sidewiki tool bar you are really running two browsers at once. The first, your regular browser, is looking at your sales page, or as you see in the picture, at the Google search screen. The other browser which is hosted on the left side is communicating directly with the Giant Google Corporation, and accessing the Massive Google Database, and posting the various comments from the database to the sidewiki application.

Then what happens is that your competitor or person who simply does not like you (represented by Dr. Evil in the picture) decides to write all kinds of bad things about you, your business practices, your products and services, and then offers the same product for less money elsewhere. This drives all of your business away!

And there is nothing you can do about that as long as your site is not blocking sidewiki, anyone who has downloaded the new Google toolbar has this capability to see the bad things others have written about your site, and you are hosting it, at least that is how it appears to them.

You need some way to block this! You need an Ultimate Side-Wiki Blocker.

There are a few on the net, but most of these are remotely hosted scripts. If you put one of these on your site you are bound to have problems if that remote host goes down, or gets hacked. It is a much safer bet to get a script you can install on your own site. These scripts will work in your blogs as well as your straight sites, landing pages, mini-sites etc.

Look into a Side-Wiki blocker, like the one I offer – even if you decide not to use it, it should be in your toolbox!

-DTM

The very Best Side Wiki Blocker on the net is the one I wrote, which you can get for free at the Wordpress plugin site or from the link on the sidebar.  I have improved and updated the initial blockers offered on the web with a new one that includes the following options:

• Random length redirection key
• Ability to Add Special key_word to redirection key
• True random with date seed

So why would you want to Block Side-Wiki?  Well…

Your competitor can write horrible untrue things about you and your products and these will show up for all of your prospective customers when they visit your site if they happen to have Google Toolbar.  Worse, your competitor can steal your traffic, always undercutting your prices or features/benefits right there on the site you are paying for!

Google links from Side-Wiki might feed you link-love, but basically what this means is you are left wide open as if you were allowing full access to anyone to write anything about you, and you cannot do anything about it…

Oh yes you can!  Enter The Ultimate Side-Wiki Blocker.

This blocker sandboxes your site while preserving all of your own links and plugins, functions, scripts, etc.  And it does it better than any other script out there.  And if you are reading this at my site (www.achievemaster.com) and have sidewiki installed on your browser, then you are seeing it in action!

Get it today before someone says something awful about you!

David T. McKee