Why MySpace Layouts Suck - Turnkey MySpace Resources

re you wondering why it took you four hours (or more) to find a decent MySpace layout to customize your profile? Well ladies and gents, it's time to blow the lid of this mess and get to the truth of the matter.

THIS IS WHY:

The 'MySpace resource site' scene has become flooded with turnkey sites which are all stuffed to the gills with ripped background images that are in no way shape or form owned by the webmasters. Essentially what you have is a bunch of cookie-cutter websites providing a vast array of copyright violations. If you've ever wondered why a lot of the MySpace resource sites seem to look the same, it's because they are.

Nowadays you can actually purchase content management systems which will automate the process of creating a full-blown MySpace layout site complete with prefabricated MySpace layouts, gaudy glitter graphics, friend adder scripts, code generators, the whole kit and kaboodle. To create a MySpace site these days requires NO graphic design skills, NO knowledge of HTML and/or CSS and NO imagination. This is why you'll often find MySpace resource sites with copy reading like it was written by a middle schooler who's getting a D+ in English Comp. When all it takes to slap up a MySpace site is a hundred bucks (to buy the content management script) and a few hours on daddy's computer in the basement then the results are going to be far from a virtuoso display of creativity.

The key to making sites like these work is to fill them up with thousands of ripped background images and/or user-submitted layouts (which themselves frequently employ ripped background images) and then promote them with the concept of BIGGER IS BETTER, e.g., "10,000 MySpace layouts". Unsuspecting new MySpace account holders (half of whom are over 35 years of age contrary to popular belief) seeking to customize their profiles do a search in Google for 'myspace layouts', find sites like these given top ranking and naturally think, "Okay, there's the Walmart of MySpace layouts. That's where it's happening." So they venture in and begin searching for that ultra-cool kick-ass MySpace layout that's going to make all their friends go ape-poopy. And they search. And they search. And they search. And they eventually get exhausted and settle for some unoriginal half-baked mess of a layout with illegible text and a cheesy, ripped-off celebrity pic for a background image.

Meanwhile, hand-coded MySpace resource sites (of which are becoming fewer and far in between) which in turn provide collections of professional, original and classy MySpace layouts (extremely rare) go largely unnoticed. To see for yourself, simply do a search in Google for 'professional myspace layouts', 'original myspace layouts' or 'classy myspace layouts' and then start browsing through the sites listed in the search results pages. Then ask yourself how many of those MySpace layouts you preview (assuming the previews actually work) are truly 'professional', 'original' and/or (*choke*) 'classy'. You'll be hard pressed to find one let alone enough to make a selection to choose from (my site excluded, of course... heh heh...).

As for how a lot of these sites get top ranking in search engines, some of it has to do with site age but mostly it's a matter of getting backlinks, many of which are provided by the distributed layouts themselves in the form of some kind of promo link embedded in the layout code. This is perfectly reasonable since if you provide a free resource you're entitled to be recompensed in the form of traffic back to your site. But backlinks all coming from MySpace profiles (and hence from the same domain name, myspace.com) have little value in terms of how well you rank in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). What really counts towards getting good ranks in SERPs (especially in the eyes of Google) is backlinks coming from other MySpace related websites, i.e. other MySpace resource sites.

So then what naturally evolves from this scenario is a whole bunch of MySpace resource turnkey webmasters (each providing his or her own personal collection of a thousand bajillion ripped backgrounds) trading links with each other to pump up their credibility in the eyes of seach engines which then drives their sites to the top of the SERPs. If you attempt to boycott this in-club of turnkey MySpace layout sites by refusing to trade links with them, your hand-coded MySpace site with homegrown backgrounds will suffer in battle to get top rankings.