Review Crusher is a new product by Mike Filsaime to help you in making a review site. It’s a script (a program that runs on your web site) he had developed to assist you in making reviews, letting people vote on products, and write their own comments. There’s a lot he isn’t telling you about this type of product however. Let’s go over the ups and downs.

A quick personal note, Mike has been very successful in marketing on the Internet. In fact, just because we have a review site which was referenced in his sales presentation I feel the need to go out of the way in being impartial. I am no affiliate of his, and at the same time going to go over some difficult questions about this product. I did software sales on the Internet for 15 years so this is one review I’m well suited to research it.

First off, this type of script has been around for a long time, there’s many of these available from free to a hundred dollars or so and many marketers already use them. Hotscripts and others have hundreds of these available. I would avoid the free ones as they are usually less secure since there’s no company making money to make improvements, provide support, or patch security holes. The same thing can be done with WordPress addons and commenter accounts if you decide to do the blogging route.

Security is a big deal for these kind of scripts. I’d much rather trust one that’s been around for years and had security bugs fixed than something that’s just been developed. There’s a lot of spammers who exploit known message board software (as mentioned the free ones are the most vulnerable). We tried one years back and a casino spammer blasted over 10,000 links into the message boards. We found out the hard way it wasn’t secure after doing all the work setting it up. With that said, this product hasn’t even shipped so I would wait for any bugs to be found and let others test it.

Mike sounds determined to have his team address any problems, and also add requested features. I just don’t believe in being first on the block when it comes to this kind of script. He announced the source code will never be available, so compared to open source projects where people can check for vulnerabilities, all you can do is hold your breath and hope there aren’t any. If you must have this, make sure your web server does daily backups and keeps at least two weeks worth in archive just in case something happens, you can revert to an older backup and wait for a security fix/patch.

His motive for making this program was because he saw lots of people buying PPC ads for his name and other people he knew. His response in the video to people doing this was “game over”. I see his point in getting angry at the people who use pay per clicks listings like “is joe marketer a scam?” or others where they imply something is wrong just to get you to click out of curiosity. Sounding mysterious is one thing, but when they use scam in a listing just to get your attention, that is against Google’s terms of service and probably grounds for a lawsuit in some cases.

Now with that said, his answer was to make a review site software that lets even more people use the pay per clicks to put reviews up. I just don’t follow the logic here, of that being the answer to him getting mad that people are putting reviews up on pay per clicks. He is offering an initial 50 reviews of Internet businesses which you can start using right away. Ironically, those are the precise examples he used the “Game Over” comment about. Now, you too can put those up for your game. There’s also plans to have other modules available for purchase so you can upload premade reviews for your pay per click empire.  This sounds good on the surface, but like most things, it’s what they don’t tell you about doing this kind of thing.

The problem with this is everyone who buys it bidding on the same 50 keywords or whatever modules they sell in the future. To get ranking you have to outbid the next person, and this is what will happen as people buy this product just for this purpose. Mike is very ambivalent on how many he will sell, if it will ever be unavailable, and if so if it will ever be available again, but says if that happens it will come back at a higher price. It’s hard to gauge the value of something that hundreds or thousands of people might all be using.

Using a product like this for natural search engine rankings is a mixed bag. Google knows which site had the reviews first in their index, and penalizes clone sites, which is why unique content will always be king. There isn’t mention of SEO built into the formatting. Also the script will have to be customized like all the others out there, a unique look is a must.

People with existing review sites won’t replace this if they have natural ranking already, it’s too much of a risk to lose what you have. Also if you do a fresh install with this and hope to score natural (not paid) ranking there are two mandatory steps that must be taken or all your efforts will have to wait about two years to get any traction. This is explained in our books here

The good thing this type of product will do is allow people to post their own comments which will help natural search engine ranking. Google loves frequent updates and unique content. The downside is in most scripts or WordPress you have to approve commenter accounts manually to keep spammers at bay, or approve each comment individually. There just isn’t mention if you can do this with Review Blaster, but in similar scripts it’s available. Allowing people to just enter a comment without verification is a spam based disaster in the making.

The voting system might seem like a good idea, but it also has a downside to it. Just like any voting, it can be skewed by people searching for strings of sites using this software, then voting themselves up and others down can be a big problem. Also owners of the domains with this kind of software can skew the results as well. With other software it’s common to see 5 star ratings to just places with affiliate links that benefit the webmaster. It doesn’t say for Review Blaster, but on many systems you can vote without registering, so it’s something to ask about whether that is possible with this one.

The video is over fifty minutes long to find out the price, and there is no fast forward option. You must also sit through the whole thing or you can’t get to the order page. Checking the order page as of this writing it showed “on hold” and no further orders can be taken so they can verify sales numbers.

The cost currently is $497 plus $67 per month for one year ($1234) or $1997one time without the bonuses. This pricing plan is no doubt due to the slowing economy so people can spread payments out, and the $1997 without the bonuses is to make the payment plan look better. This is very typical of a product by Mike, Frank Kern, and others. Price it high, limit quantities for a feeling of exclusivity (and fear of being left out) and nail their large mailing lists all in a marketing blitz. Many high ranking blogs are used to announce it ahead of time so when you do search for the product, they are in the natural listings ahead of everyone else. This of course, is very effective as you might imagine.

This product however, has been around a while, available in time tested versions that are already proven to be secure, much cheaper, and still doesn’t solve the problem of actually making unique reviews that will hold reader interest. I still believe you’re better off doing this yourself with unique content and a very specific approach to PPC keyword selection instead of following the herd and watching the price of those fifty keywords form into a financial arms race. Review Blaster looks like a good product, it’s not bad from the screen shots. It’s just so expensive compared to similar scripts from companies who have been making this kind of thing for years.