Hi @BenLeong
Thanks for chiming in, I appreciate the idea of educating authors in SEO very much and I understand it needs to be somewhat on topic. I am sure the Envato staff here is doing their very best to help out authors and that’s great. Still I agree with @MartijndeBont and we all know that the Elements banner itself, is what really is permanently off topic at our market item pages and it’s clearly the elephant in the room in every topic where the intention is to make authors drive more traffic to their item pages.
From the perspective of the Envato CEO and top managers, I get it, recurring revenue is a great upsell. But let’s not forget that for the common up and coming business minded author on the market, the banner is a huge downsell, and for most of us, a huge downsell to a competing market. Therefore the incentive to drive traffic to the market diminishes with such an aggressive advertising. I can only speak for myself, and as a non exclusive author it has sadly been a no brainer to remove all my external links to my AJ item page and redirect them to other sites.
We don’t even have the possibility to have a clean direct banner free link to our item pages at this moment, which is simply unacceptable for any author who wants to have a minimum control over their marketing efforts. If not done already, please communicate this author feedback upwards in the system. I am sure it should be in the interest of everybody that authors wants to drive traffic to their item pages.
As for the duplicate keyword issue, sorry if I am being overly pessimistic here but I don’t see how a policy change can fix this issue at all. In fact I am worried it might ironically increase the problem, spreading the word about this. There are simply to many examples of policies that are not being respected at the market and not enough resources to address all of this as far as my impression goes. Maybe it could help the situation to some degree if a strict reaction to authors who do this is executed, like 90 days blocked upload rights or something. But then again, still lots of resources would have to be used at this.
It is my impression that the search engine is sort of a house of cards and I do understand that developers needs to progress carefully, a task I don’t envy them. Still I think the only solution at the end of the day is to make it happen so the search engine does not reward this behaviour. Treating the cause instead of the symptoms would probably save us all a lot of time here.
(I am not telling to introduce a system that would automatically check the title of the song…)
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Moving the above posts to a separate thread, to keep the original