I am sure people’s mailboxes are full of emails with various people promoting these two communities, which are going head-to-head with their launches. Feature wise they are probably only similar in the fact that both provide a backend community for advice and training, but I am not going to compare feature sets.

Comparing The Buzz

For some time I have had reasonable well ranking pages for both Stompernet and Portal Feeder.

I had written about Portal Feeder when it was first launched, in fact probably more than anyone else, back in 2005. Whilst that content was on my old blogspot account, that blog is being redirected here, and all the content is housed on this domain.

I have also written a couple of times about Stompernet, though I have never seen the service from the inside.

Up until a couple of days ago, I hadn’t written anything new about either service, so it is interesting comparing the traffic I have coming in for both.

Portal Feeder vs StomperNet – Which Is Getting Most Traffic?

This isn’t going to be a strict comparrison, because I am not looking directly at the direct traffic to each site, either from the blogs of promotion partners, or from email marketing. That will obviously be the largest amount of traffic, and a lot of people will make purchases based on direct recommendation and the materials provided.

Some people however search for more information, and will use a variety of search terms.

As an example, I currently rank well for “Stomper Net” and not so well for “Stompernet”, and that shows in the search results.
I also wasn’t ranking well for many direct Portal Feeder references, it was mainly long tail searches, and I also gained a fair amount of traffic from people following links from old forum posts in various places.

Portal Feeder will effectively be closed by the time Stomper Net opens, though there is a lot of overlap in the promotions.

Anyway here is some interesting data FWIW

Portal Feeder Visitors April 1st 2007 – Present

StomperNet Visitors April 1st 2007 – Present

(note I mainly rank highly for Stomper Net)

Portal Feeder vs StomperNet Traffic Analysis

If I had tried to rank for these products / services / training I would be getting a lot more traffic, it was interesting monitoring traffic on older content that hadn’t really been linked to internally.
I did post a Portal Feeder update a few days ago which did give traffic a boost. One of the most interesting things were the long tail keywords some people were using.

Where is the SERPs Competition?

Both of these services promote having great SEO training.

Whilst most of the members are probably not making sites in the Internet Marketing niche, I am sure a few of them are, and would have done something for the free SEO traffic. These numbers above are absolutely nothing compared to a 1st position result for the primary keywords.
I know that the most sales will come from the big list owning bonus waving gurus (in the case of many that is used as a compliment)

What are the real traffic numbers being driven to these sites by affiliates using email?

At time of writing Stompernet is hovering around 1K on Alexa, though I think that will keep raising for a few days, or at least maintain that level.

Portal Feeder is later in the promotion cycle, and has had a few peaks under 2K, in fact the week average is around 1800 on Alexa.

There is a lot of interest for both services.

I would say that people taking a look at Portal Feeder should take a look at StomperNet, and people looking at StomperNet should look at Portal Feeder.

It type of fell through, partially my fault because I didn’t keep following up or chasing for alternative ways of handling it.

In the end I think a lot of the differences came down to philosophy or the possibility that somehow it would be comparing apples to oranges to pears, though I am not going to suggest any of the systems would be “pear shaped”.

I was mainly interested in the SEO aspects of the sites created, and not interested in the backend solutions for providing content.

Over the last few weeks I have been seeing a fair amount of traffic from people searchng for information on Portal Feeder, and they have been landing on old content, most of it 15 months old, and some of it a good 6 or 7 months old.

Thus I thought it was important, even if I didn’t write a full review, to write something.

First of all, here is a link to the Portal Feeder sales page (not an affiliate link)

Portal Feeder Example Site

One of the things people are searching for is a current, Portal Feeder 2.0 site.

http://www.gpstrackingdevice.net/

This site is described in their sales letter as a test site used for training, thus it might not currently use every possible feature.

Here are a few other sites that seem like they are Portal Feeder sites, found being linked from the first. They might not be PF 2.0, and they might not be created by Jason Katzenback

http://www.voipinternetphonecenter.com/

http://www.raftingwhitewaters.com/

http://www.telephonesystemnow.com/

http://www.datarecoverytips.org/

http://www.thebatteryoutlet.com/

Site Review gpstrackingdevice.net

What we have here is a static HTML site, that is grown using the Portal Feeder backend, with a WordPress blog bolted on the side.

Portal Feeder in the past generated sitemaps for the static site, but as the blog isn’t integrated with Portal Feeder, they are now using an open source desktop application, GSiteCrawler. Edit: Jason Katzenback has responded in the comments that this was overlooked – the sitemap was created when he was testing out GSiteCrawler.

The static site does still have a RSS feed, well at least a sub-standard one.
No categories, no tagging, very small snippets – certainly not something people would really subscribe to.

Categories were actually possible with the 15 month old system, you would just have to use some very creative templates and treat each category as a separate site – that would have been a major pain.

There isn’t much in the way of interlinking between content. The old system allowed you to tag content with keywords that thus described a relationship between different articles, but the actual links is still using snippets.

One thing that is really important with RSS is autodiscovery, and it seems Portal Feeder doesn’t create the correct code in the headers for auto-discovery. That is the orange icon that appears in your navigation bar, to signify that there is an RSS feed.

With generators or semi-automated site development tools, people are always worried about footprints. I am not, because at the end of the day WordPress normally has one hell of a big footprint, and that doesn’t matter.

When I am creating niche sites, I am looking for ways I can link between content creatively, or categorise content in unique ways, and thus give the content more value to an end user and thus a search engine.

The blog is just a standard WordPress blog with a datafeed. They should definitely take a look at the RSS feeds because it is a bit risky including your Adsense code in your RSS. Most plugins don’t include Adsense in RSS feeds.

Is This Really a Portal Feeder 2.0 Site?

I honestly hope it isn’t.

I hope they have gone over to a purely WordPress based backend, but somehow I doubt it. One of the biggest selling points of Portal Feeder was that you didn’t need a database, it was all static. They are already using a WordPress blog, they should use it for everything, and have everything highly interconnected.

This Isn’t a Review

For a full review I would go into a lot more detail, and have hands-on – one thing is certain is that the guarantee on Portal Feeder is good. 14 months ago I didn’t have the patience to wait for the software to be brought up to where I wanted to be at, and the refund request I made was handled very promptly.
The forums then were highly active, so I am sure they are now as well. Lots of the bonuses were quite good as well, I remember quite liking the keyword / niche research tool.

If you are starting from scratch, and have relatively little knowledge, this might be a good introduction, and if you used their formula building sites, and followed the training, you would certainly make some money.

If you have some experience, and can bend WordPress to your will, Portal Feeder based upon these example sites isn’t going to offer anything new as far as the base platform is concerned.

If any of the Portal Feeder Team want to show me a better example I would be happy to add to this review.

Yep free information, no attempt to sell you this product, the least you could do is subscribe – all you receive is the contents of this blog