HyperVRE - The Test
Posted April 30, 2007 
Comments(0) By now you may have come across references to ‘HyperVRE.com’, a
website offering a free piece of Windows software that generates
‘niche’ websites for you automatically. Being in the business,
and interested in ‘VRE’, or ‘Virtual Real Estate’, I have, of
course, signed up for this service and downloaded / tested the
free software. Here’s what I found.
The software is interesting, and some considerable work appears
to have gone into it. However, the complexity appears to be so
extreme that it continually falls over on my XP machine. In
order to get it to run to completion, I had to move it to my old
Windows 98 system, where it took a not too unreasonable 35
minutes to generate a 120 page niche website.
The website was composed of static HTML pages, with references
to my adsense code, and a number of RSS feeds relevant to the
topic I had chosen. The process of generating the site is fairly
simple, follow a dozen or so steps then you will be presented
with a batch of html files you can upload to your web server
with your FTP client.
There’s nothing particularly difficult about the steps, you just
enter a list of keywords (or select them from a file) and choose
various other things such as RSS feeds, font colors and so on,
then click the button to generate. After uploading to the web
server, I could see the pages pretty much as they had looked on
my windows machine, and the RSS feeds filled as expected.
So far so good. I then noticed something interesting - constant
references to a site I am familiar with, and completely
irrelevant to the topic of my niche. Upon further investigation,
I discovered that you can ‘brand’ your copy of HyperVRE and give
it to people. When they use it, the software ’secretly’ (as it
says on the HyperVRE website) inserts this affiliate’s link all
over every site you generate. Investigating further, I
discovered that this MLM idea seemed to be the reason the
software was free, as the owners of HyperVRE embed their
websites in the generated html code too, as a quick check at the
whois proved.
To make matters worse, my ‘packetsniffer’ alerted me almost
immediately that the HyperVRE software itself was sneakily
monitoring me - passing both my niche topic, keyword list, and
other information back to the HyperVRE server whenever an
internet connection was present - in other words, it was loaded
with spyware.
There may be a way to disable the spyware, there may not. Of
equal concern is the fact that the generated site had a HUGE
footprint, no matter which one of the free 27 templates I chose,
meaning that Google and other search engines would have no
problem at all tracking down these generated sites and
automatically banning them, together with my adsense account.
The RSS feeds would also be a problem, as would the random
definitions and articles - duplicate content on PR0 sites isn’t
good news, especially if the ‘viral’ idea embedded in it kicks
in and large numbers of people start using it - obviously the
owners have no control over who ends up with a copy and
generates millions of spam pages with it.
So - pros:- It’s free. Cons:- Pretty much everything else. Use
it at your own risk, is my own personal opinion, and I would
certainly not consider adding it to my arsenal. Oh, one final
point, use a disposable email address for the contact when you
sign up - the quantity of spam from HyperVRE is unbelievable, as
is the attempted upsell to the ’silver / gold’ edition.
About the author:
By J Reese
