Blog Owner Scam Alert!

by: countrycat

Wed Dec 09, 2009 at 12:41:55 PM CST

Two questions:

1. What blog owner wouldn't like the chance to display some high-paying advertising?

2. What blog owner would want to be banned from Google because of that advertising?

At Left in Alabama, we got approached by a Web advertising scammer and wanted to alert other bloggers and Web site owners. I immediately knew it was a scam because - in my paid professional life - I do search engine marketing and Web work.  But Mooncat and I know that most of our fellow bloggers don't have that much knowledge of search marketing and Web design.  So here's some free, important advice!

If you've received an email like this recently, please don't respond to it:

My offer is to buy a single text-link on one of your article-pages.

The position of our link on your article-page is up to you. It can be on a sidebar, in the middle or at the bottom.

You can compare this link to a so-called blogroll link. The difference is that our link will show up on 1 page only.

If you want we can make the link invisible to anyone who reads the blog article. The benefit to us is increased link popularity.

We can pay $75/month for such a link. This offer might not break the bank, but please consider this:
1) It's just 1 simple text-link which will only show up on 1 article-page (not the mainpage).
2) We can make the link completely invisible.
3) $75 is still $900 yearly for just one link that doesn't interfere with your current advertisements.
  We are also interested in buying multiple links. So for every extra link that will be an additional $900 per year.
4) All payments are made in advance.

So easy... how could this be this a bad deal?  I'll explain on the flip....

There are several warning signs.

The first is the "too good to be true" nature of the offer.  $900/year just to display one link on one blog post?

Second is the "paid in advance" nature of the offer.  That sounds totally legit - except that this Web site is an offshore site and isn't covered by US law.  They'll require some "banking and other information" before they can transfer funds.  And the only transfer is likely to be OUT of your bank account and into the account of some Nigerian prince....

But the worst part is the "hidden links" aspect.  That's not only dangerous financially but can kill your Google rank and also cause problems for other bloggers and Web sites who link to your site.

Google indexes and ranks sites according to their "importance" on the Web.  So an incoming link (meaning another site links to you) from CNN is far more "valuable" than your grandmother's personal blog link.  And if you're a highly ranked site, then the sites that you link to (outbound links, they're called), boost the rank of those sites.

In the same way, if your site is suspected of using techniques to manipulate the search engine or fool visitors, then Google may delete your site from its index and could penalize your web of incoming and outgoing links as well.

That's a terrible way to treat your friends.

How do "hidden links" fit in? Google specifically forbids them in their Webmaster Help section:

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors.

[...]

Hidden links are links that are intended to be crawled by Googlebot, but are unreadable to humans because:

• The link consists of hidden text (for example, the text color and background color are identical).
• CSS has been used to make tiny hyperlinks, as little as one pixel high.
• The link is hidden in a small character - for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph.

If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.

What really ticks me off about this scam is that it not only hurts the site that agrees to display the advertising, but hurts they guy's clients as well becuase he's probably packing their Web sites with unethical HTML tricks too.

So, be careful about there!