Hi guys -
After a very successful first post on our blog, I have decided to sit down and hit the keyboard one more time. A link to our first report has been placed on the home page of Gawker and we had a huge number of social shares, totaling almost 3,000 readers in the first 24 hours. Not bad for a new blog.
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As promised at the end of the first report, I will now talk about something that you should all avoid– especially if you plan to have your online venture rank for a long time. Let’s start.
3 in 1: Fake Sites – iStock Bloggers – SEO Scammers
Now, you may ask yourself: What the heck is an iStock blogger? This not-so-rare animal in the SEO animal kingdom is a creature that is creeping around with a beautiful face that often looks familiar. But when you look at it closer you will notice that this blogger is more like a shadow. Let’s check out one of them. She is cute; she has that Colgate smile. But something smells fishy here.
It has no real face (because the profile picture is taken from iStockphoto.com), it has no real name (because it often names itself after an actor or a celebrity poodle) but almost always has a G+ profile – quite an interesting fact. Now, why do editors of the sites where these bloggers work never notice something like that? They don’t notice this because these sites don’t have editors; these sites are created for the sole purpose of spamming the site with fluff articles and linking back to random sites (sites likes Expedia.com).
So, what’s the big deal about it?
The big deal about it is the fact that these fake bloggers like to draw you in, offer you awesome links, low prices and a shortcut to the first page of Google. Okay, but that’s not a new thing, right? Wrong. This report will show you a twist to this method. And the twist is that:
- You WILL get the links from something that looks like realUS news site.
- You WILL get it for the price….hmmm….price…I don’t know which price to put here because they will take whatever you offer. You know why? Because…..well, read on and you will see.
- You WILL have awesome communication with a middleman.
Now, let’s start with my favorite middleman.
His name is – ladies and gentleman please stand up to show some respect – Lee Sadaowski (or Sadawski, I don’t know how to call him, cause he is not sure either) , also known as the“Internet Spider,” according to his site. This little fella really likes to show off his muscles, but that’s not really him; he is just using these pics for his profiles. That’s some guy from South America.
These are his fake profiles on LinkedIn, Elance, and Facebook– and this is his site on Google, promoting his “services.” Thumbs up for Google…
I even received an email from him. Check it out, seems legit, right?
But why is this guy so important? He is important because he is connected with the site called UT San Diego. That’s a pretty well known site in the US, and quite popular in San Diego. As you can see on his “site” he even claims how he is an “authentic blogger “at UT San Diego (among other sites).
The “authentic blogger” at UT San Diego is a guy called Shaun Spellman. Actually he is not authentic, he doesn’t exist, and he’s as fake as a Chinese Rolex. But this ghost has an access to UT San Diego and he posts articles there for the sake of link building. You’re probably still wondering what’s wrong there. Well, if you were into SEO and someone approached you with an offer to have your link placed at UTSanDiego, you would probably take that offer, right? Especially if you’re doing it for a client that has some random site.
Imagine the smile on the face of your client once he sees the link on such a “reputable” site. Well, the thing is…
That link won’t stay there for a long time
This is their modus operandi: They have network of sites (UT San Diego being a part of this network) which they either own or they have some kind of an agreement with the owner or…well, I don’t see why someone would allow scammers to sell links on their site, so they have to be somehow connected with each other – an owner and “bloggers” arrangement.
First they find victims on forums or they spam your inbox with offers.
Once they find clients they negotiate the price. This is how you negotiate prices with them: Please take a look at the following screenshot. You will see that they don’t give a damn what the price is. Of course, the higher the better, but whatever the price is they are winners, because they will delete your link afterward and switch it with the article of some other victim. (Start reading the screenshot of our email conversation from the bottom. My lines are blue and his responses are underlined in red.)
I hope you enjoyed that. Have you noticed how the price of the link went from $200/link to $30/link? Okay, great. Now let’s jump to UT San Diego a little bit. This is a screenshot of the article posted by our “authentic blogger” Shaun Spellman.
The thing is, I can’t give you a link to this page because this page has been deleted from UT San Diego. I know that you may think that editors of the site deleted this fake article because it was fake. But, if that were the case we wouldn’t have this guy Shaun Spellman still being allowed to post any more articles. He would probably be banned for life.
You think he’s banned? Nope.
Here is how I know that he isn’t – and how anyone with average Internet research skills can find out. There is that handy site called archive.org where you can check out how some pages looked at certain points back in time. So, this article about Spina Bifida is from May 2013 (I took the screenshot a few months ago) and this article about FOREX is from October 2013. They have been doing this for at least 8 months already.
You pay them. They post the article.The article stays there a week or two. The article is gone. Rinse and repeat.
Let’s take a look at this screenshot from the Warrior Forum. You can see that this link reseller had enough of it so she decided to post that on the forum.
Let’s play with Shaun Spellman a bit. If you decide to search for this guy using Google you will find him on another site from San Diegohere. If you follow that cute face you will find him here, and if you decide to see who he actually is you will end up in a dead end…unless you visit this G+ group. (avoid these “SEO experts”, they will ruin your SEO efforts)
If you pay attention you will see that there is a girl with a characteristic surname (Sadowski) and you will also find a person called Sandra Bullok there. That’s original, I must say. And all of them will offer you a pretty much similar list of sites/blogs where they can post “unique articles” for you. Here is part of one list of the sites – so avoid these sites like the plague: IMPORTANT – even though I wanted to post a list of these sites I decided not to do so because…well, there is a lot of sites there, and I didn’t want to ruin someone who is legit. There is high possibility that some of the owners don’t have a clue that they are a part of a bigger game.
Often people will ask:Why can’t I rank? Not even for a low competition keyword? The main reason is due to having links on such sites. So basically, you think you have 100 quality do-follow links, yet all those links are not worth a single cent.
And in the next algorithm update your site will go down the drain, leaving you wondering what just happened.
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I see a lot of UK and US businesses placing links on similar sites, and I also see that a lot of these businesses are actual brick and mortar stores and companies that want to get their online sales boosted. This is a completely wrong approach. Let me show you where your links are placed when you hire an “SEO expert” that will give you 100 links (or even 10 times more) for $100.
In a best case scenario you will get this. You can see the URL of this site is finance88.net, but the name of the site in the header is Gadget (that’s actually the name of this WP theme, so the owner didn’t even bother ordering a unique logo on Fiverr) and the name of the FB page is Odishasys. Seems legit, right?
I have checked the links on the site and I saw that the majority of the links are pointing to UK, US and AU sites. Guys, why do you need a link on a fake Indian blog pointing to your site? You certainly don’t need that. There’s nothing wrong with links from Indian sites, if these sites are legit.
But if you scroll to the bottom of the page you will see that devil sign – no, not 666 or a goat’s head in a downward-pointing pentagram – it is a logo of My Blog Guest!
This means that the site owner is a proud member of this site. I gave you a link to this site in case you don’t know what this is all about. If you don’t want to bother to read what this site is about, it is basically a platform where owners of super-low-quality sites and so called “SEO experts” meet each other to exchange services for goods.
In this case,“goods” are semi-readable articles of “original content with one link” and the “services” are content placements.
I give you a free article – You give me a link
I have also seen business owners there, searching for sites in their niche…but just don’t do it. You don’t need links on these sites, and site owners, you don’t need those free articles written by God knows who placed on your site. It’s a lose-lose combination. Nobody is a winner, especially your business. I do understand that your budget is an issue when you’re first starting out, but if you can’t write an average article and if you can’t afford a content writer, you shouldn’t start blogging.
Thank you for reading this small report. In the next article I will show you how to get targeted lists of endless potential clients free of charge (using nothing but Google), how to turn those emails into double opt-in listsand how to milk the cow like there is no tomorrow. Stay tuned.
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The post Nobody calls me Sadowski. You got the wrong guy. I’m the Dude, man appeared first on Nenad SEO.