Paid Links still work : Death by SEO

 

UPDATE 4/4/12 : There has been quite a bit of talk lately about Google’s latest algorithm change and how it will devalue the content farms primarily used by link spammers and link merchants. I am definitely seeing a shift in organic results for quite a few sites, but the sites that are coasting on blatant link spam are still doing  just fine. When I see mezzaninesbydesign.com drop, then I will believe that Google has finally struck a blow to the dreaded link merchants. 

Link spam is alive an well, and is still the fastest way to the top spot in the SERPs, for a while anyway. I have two clients that are dealing with competitors who are involved in aggresive link spamming campaigns. It is frustrating as hell for me, because I am not going to risk the agencys or my clients reputation by beating them at their own game. So, short of submitting ineffectual tattle-tail reports to Google (which never do anything anyway), and mapping out the link spamming companies client list to let them know they may very well see their organic traffic drop to zero in the coming months, there isn’t much I can do.

So I am going to bitch, AND, I am going to name names. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the hardcore black-hatters, in the same reason I have a lot of respect for DB Cooper. In fact, I have so much respect for some of them that when I discover their secret, I keep it. Typically I am not a snitch, in all aspects of life. I just don’t believe in it, and its a safe bet that those who aren’t living right will eventually do themselves in, but if you are directly stepping on my toes, or making my life difficult, all bets are off.

So lets begin…..

If you are reading this, then you probably already know what link spamming is. If you stumbled on this article and don’t know about SEO, link spamming is the practice of building as many links as possible, from as many domains as possible, with your target keyword in the anchor text, and flooding the search engines with these pages. Here is the definition from Google:

Web definitions

The theory, and rightfully so, is that the sheer volume of links pointing to your page using your keyword in the anchor text will cause Google to give you favorable positioning in the search engine results. This has been the foundation of Googles algorithm since the beginning, and usually it works pretty well.

Now, on to the good stuff..

Let’s pick a random keyword, how about ‘Mezzanines’. There is a fair amount of volume for this keyword and it spans several industries. I would like to get in the top 10 for this keyword, how hard is it going to be? Let’s check the competition. I am going to use Market Samurai for a quick snapshot of the competition. If you don’t use Market Samurai, you’re nuts. It is hands down the best piece of software a web marketer can have. So this is what the landscape looks like:

Click the image to enlarge

For the most part, this is typical in the industrial safety supply world. Most of the companies have been around for close to the same amount of time, most got online around the same time, etc. Wikipedia is an un-movable so we forget about that, but what do we have here? Something is strange.  In the DA (domain age) column, you can see that most of the sites are about the same age, 9-12 years old. But it looks like we have a real up and comer in the #2 position, mezzaninesbydesign.com (yes that’s nofollowed). Mezzaninesbydesign.com is only 3 years old, and I know for a fact that they were not in the top spot for Mezzanines a few weeks ago, but look at em’ go! This needs some investigation.

So, what is mezzaninesbydesign.com doing SO well that they are able to just shoot up through the SERPs and pass all the old dogs? The RDD (referring domains) column shows that they don’t have nearly as many domains linking to them as most of the other sites, in fact, none of their numbers are that impressive.

Note: the screenshot of the competition is only a partial picture, if you would like to see all the site results you can check them out at http://www.noblesamurai.com/share/seo-competition/a84jtocflggkwcgk448w#historical 

The next step is to visit the website and check out what they are doing. It is clear that the site was built with search engines in mind. They really wanted to rank well for ‘Mezzanines’, but no matter what you do on-site, it’s not going propel you to the top of the SERPs when you are facing off against these other seasoned websites. Scroll down to the bottom and you can see that the site makes no bones about the fact that they are using a SEO company to get their rankings. The footer of the site says it all:

Click the image to enlarge..

 

I don’t have one client that would ever allow me to advertise my company in their footer so this makes me question the ownership of this site, certainly looks like there is more than just a client relationship between Mezzanines by Design and Magnetik Search Marketing. At least I don’t have to hunt to find out who is working on the site.

Given that all the important numbers from Market Samurai are lower than the competitor’s sites, it’s immediately clear that this is a backlink issue. Either the few backlinks that mezzaninesbydesign.com has are coming from seriously powerful sites, or they have an abundance of links with the keyword Mezzanines in the anchor text (or both).

Natural links come over time, and almost always are to the home page and use either the company name or the URL. If your keyword is your company name, well lucky you, but that not often the case. Mezzanines by design does have their target keyword in the company name and URL, but that’s not enough to get the top spot for this keyword. So let’s look at their link inventory and see what we can see..

Let’s cruise over to www.backlinkwatch.com and look at the links pointing to the site, paying particular attention to the anchor text.

 

OK, mystery solved. It’s clearly the links. The shot above is just a small sample but it pretty much all looks the same. Lots of links that use Mezzanines in the anchor text and are not nofollowed. In fact, out of all of the links pointing to the site, only one or two are nofollowed. We now know that none of their links are natural, they are all either spammed, planted, or paid. Google doesn’t like this, I don’t like this.

What is even more interesting is the domains. If this were a natural profile, there would be plenty of domains that had something to do with industrial safety supplies, but there are none to be found here. In fact, the only consistent thing we can see with the domains (other than the lack of nofollow), is that the word India seems to appear in quite a few of them. There are real estate sites, car rental sites, tourist sites, but no sites that have anything to do with Mezzanines.

I visited almost all of the sites and after the first ten or so it was obvious what was going on. First, they are all WordPress sites, all of them. Many of the sites are using the same theme, and they are all following the same format of a few articles and then a ton of links. A quick check of the WHOIS information shows that they are all owned by the same guy.

Registrant:
Mahender Reddy chintalapally

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, LLC (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: JERRYDMOOREFORCIRCUITJUDGE.COM

Domain servers in listed order:
SNS159.WEBSITEWELCOME.COM
SNS160.WEBSITEWELCOME.COM

Not even trying to cover his tracks. His process is simple: Mahender Reddy chintalapally is snatching up seasoned domains as they expire, throwing a WordPress site up and placing the links on the site. He has a big network of sites that he controls and sells the links. Buying links is the quickest way to get de-indexed in Google. They are quite clear on the matter. This is how mezzaninesbydesign.com was able to race to the top. Check out their link history:

 

That my friends is a link spammer profile. Again, not even trying to hide it. So, the next question is: what involvement does Magnetiks Search Marketing have with this technique? Their site is big and professional looking, they list some decent clients that I’m quite sure would not want to befall the same fate as BMW and JCPenny but who knows? Looking over the sites owned by this Indian link spammer, it’s just simple connect the dots to create a client list of people who are buying these services. I’m sure some of them know whats going on, but I’m sure some of them don’t and someone will lose their job when their marketing team see’s their organic traffic drop to zero and the CEO cant even find their website in Google when she types in the company name.

I have not contacted Magnetik Search Marketing to ask them why they would employ someone who is so brazenly breaking Google’s TOS. I’m sure they would plead ignorance, or say “we discovered this a while ago and are no longer working with mr. so-and-so”, and honestly I don’t particularly care. As I said earlier, I respect people who really put effort into working the system and do-so under the radar, but this smash and grab bullshit that $299 SEO’s engage in is very frustrating to me and when I have some free time, I will occasionally hasten their falling on their own sword.

I hate losing the top spot to spammers, but as long as I know and my client knows that this is temporary, I will sit back and watch, and wait for Google to hopefully figure out how to deal with this. If for nothing else than to see what new creative ways the true blackhatters come up with the game the system.

 

Are Penny Auctions a Scam? Answer : YES, ALL OF THEM!

Penny auctions have been around for a while now, a few years actually. I have been working online for 15 years which has really hammered home : if it sounds to good to be true, it is.. Not probably.. It is.. I actually did some work for someone in Montreal that was starting a penny auction. I felt a bit slimy helping him and I eventually bowed out of the deal. Two days ago my 75 year old Mother messaged me and said she had been ripped off – by a penny auction.

We all know the above saying, but there is something about the human brain that really wants to believe. Unless you are skeptical about everything – which means you probably have missed out on a lot of great stuff – it’s a good bet you have been taken in by a too good to be true deal. Unscrupulous online marketers know how to push all the right buttons to suck money out of even the most intelligent people. Marketing is about playing to emotions, a good marketing piece will actually trigger a rush of serotonin and dopamine in your brain causing you to do something foolish. Auctions have been doing this for hundreds of years, I am not telling you anything you don’t know.

The Psychology of Advertising

SO.. Onto penny auctions. There is no such thing as a legitimate penny auction. To say that one site is legitimate is to say they are all legitimate. This makes my scam argument a bit shaky, technically it’s not really a scam. It’s a suckers bet. There is a difference. What is a scam is the advertising being used to promote these penny auction sites – that is a scam. I will get to that in a minute.

The penny auction sites are run on a very basic principle. They advertise an item for a fraction of the cost and place it up for auction. You come to the site and create an account and deposit funds to be used for your auctions. The terms of the auction say that the bid price will go up incrementally by a few cents as people bid, but every time a bid is placed the counter on the auction adds an additional few seconds or minutes. On many auctions you are expected to pay for the action of bidding, so to stay in the action it will cost you every time you increase your bid. This time will continue to reset as long as people are still bidding. You see whats happening here?

Example:

You see an XBOX 360 for $1.00 and the auction closes in an hour.You decide to bid $1.25, the cost of placing a bid is .75 if the bids are increasing by .10 increments you will have to spend about $3 just to be able to bid $1.25.So, imagine if you said the most you would pay for the xbox is $100!?!. If the bids are incremental at .10 and it costs you .75 to place a bid, that means that you would pay $749.25 just to stay in the auction. Add $100 more if you win. Congrats, you just paid $849 for a $299 Xbox.

The goal of the site owner is to get as many people bidding as possible on a pay per bid system. If there were 100 people bidding on that item and they all stayed in to $100 the site owner would make $74,925 on the auction for that Xbox 360. Please re-read the last sentence – the website owner would make $74,925.00 for selling an Xbox that he paid $299.o0 after the item was sold.This is an extreme example, but yes – its true – the profit margins are that much. It’s obscene.

I remember a few years back there was news about a site called Unique Auction.com they had an interesting model that was quite clever – to someone who admires a good ponzi scheme. The premise behind Unique Auctions was that you could buy a high dollar item for pennies if you were the only person to bid that exact amount. Essentially that was it – Im sure Im missing somethings but I only looked at it for a minute. So they would advertise things like a $60,000 Nissan with a starting bid of $300. So the goal was to bid a totally unique amount above the $300, and you should know that because its a car – each bid will cost you $10. Do you see whats happening here? Let’s say that the company was 100% legit , the auctions were real and real people won. The profit being made is still STAGGERING.

I am not anti-capitalist, not at all. I am anti-rip off and all these sites are obviously run by people who just don’t give a shit about ripping off people who are already hurting for money. They are no better than high interest check cashers, spammers,  fake pharmacies, hidden cross sell site, shady continuity programs, penis enlargement pills, diet scam, etc. Would you be surprised to know that all of those industries I just listed were the former industries of most of the penny auction owners? Its a natural progression. Profit off the hopeful with no remorse. Hacking a persons weaknesses should be no different than hacking a computer system. Its illegal to exploit a hole in a system and there is absolutely no difference. The FTC is the human anti-virus software.

There is NO doubt in my mind that the FTC is going to drop the hammer on a lot of these sites. I am sure the warnings are out there but many of them have been in the shadows. Recently I have seen them popping up in the sponsored links on MSNBC.com and other reputable sites. The majority of these sites are veiled corporations with offshore merchant accounts and address in the Nevis, Cyprus, Antigua and any other place with lax banking laws. Penny Auctions are basically the porn sites for the masses. Not that I am against porn sites, but the marketing is the same.

There is a crafty online marketing technique thats been employed heavily in the supplement and weight loss industry, also in teeth whitening and basically every information marketing scam. The happy Bob penis pills made  billions with this method. Create a fake news site and push the product. Its not new. People have been doing advertorials in print for a long time. The beauty of the online advertorial sites is that they are doing one thing that the print world is not. They are flagrantly violating FTC laws. Posting fake online testimonials is illegal – plain and simple. I ran across a fake news site pushing a penny auction and I was impressed, even the domain is convincing.  I will post a link here, but please do not click on this link and think that I was mistaken and this site looks legit. Its 100% bullshit and you will lose your money.

http://cbcnews9.com/2a/?t202id=881&t202kw=160×600-bid-2

I have spent too long writing this , but I do get some good scam traffic to this site so I wanted to put something out there for people wanting to know if Penny Auctions are a scam – the answer is YES basically, but this isnt the question you should be asking. What you should be asking is : Will I get ripped off by a Penny Auction? The answer to this is unequivocaly YES you will either get completely ripped off or you will end up paying 500x the price of the item you wanted. There are NO reputable penny auctions. There is NO WAY to get an item for pennies on the dollar. You WILL NEVER find a hidden gem on the internet fun by charitable philanthropists who want to give away high dollar merchandise.

If you want to bid in an auction, USE EBAY. Even on Ebay you run the risk of getting ripped off, but at least you know the reviews are legit and you have some recourse. If you throw your credit card down on a Penny Auction – the money is gone. You should just send 50% of it to me and I will make you feel better about not getting ripped off.

Auto Blogging : Killing the internet on auto-pilot

If you are here for the 3 free hours of SEO consulting, please read this post. The information is near the bottom.

Disclaimer 1: If I mentioned you in this post – I am not necessarily bashing you. I have a lot of respect for many of the big name “gurus” , you guys either are, or employ master copywriters.

Disclaimer 2: I omitted a lot of links because I don’t care to give any link love to these programs. If I sent them traffic, I may as well become an affiliate. I have not changed any names of people or programs so BE WARNED: If you seek them out with the intention of seeing what I am talking about, you could very well be hypnotized into buying the exact product I am railing on. Their copywriting is that good. Don’t come crying to me when it doesn’t bring you money in a wheel barrow.

If you know me, you know there are some things that I hate: Long scrolling sales letters, excessive up-sells, and get rich quick schemes. I generally don’t like information marketing (even though I have worked it). I – like you – wake up to daily emails that sound something like this (real email excerpt):

WARNING! Ben

You need to watch this video right now.

http://www.anotherautoblogscam.com

It will be taken down in the next few hours
and it’s the most important video you’ll see
all year as it reveals a secret $100m loophole
and how you can use it to cash in big time.

Like $221,555 per month!

Watch it now…

Here is the one that is at the top of my hit list right now. The main reason is that I get a version of this email every other day and the subject line ALWAYS says “ONLY 4 COPIES LEFT!” – I have added COPIES LEFT to my spam triggers..:

Yes folks, the auto blog. With the popularity of wordpress growing daily – because it is truly sent from God, we are starting to see a lot of systems being pushed by the snake oil gurus that claim to be : the next big thing, that involves no money down, no traffic, no list, no experience – hell you can do it from a rented library computer! If you read between the lines, what they are selling is an automated WordPress blog that scrapes the web looking for content and posts it. The latest adds the feature of cloaking text links from within the article to affiliate links, making it look like its a link to another one of your pages. Lord help us. Auto blogs are in a word, garbage. Well not garbage, but recycled junk. The premise is that “its so easy, you can make 1000′s of them with one click”. GREAT! Thousands of websites popping up that contain rehashed crap often un-credited to the original author. These sites add to the giant trash heap that is the internet.

The auto blogging systems are nothing but packaged plugins (which are free) in a semi slick interface, that automates the setup process of WordPress and installs the plugins. They do not address traffic, they do not get attention from search engines, they do not contain quality original content – they are worthless. Well, they are worth a few cents – and therein lies the premise. Create 10,000′s of auto scraping blogs that generate a few cents a day in Adsense revenue or possible a couple bucks off of a zip submit (an affiliate link that pays you a few cents when someone fills out their email and zip code – most often for a free ipod or gas card). Yes I know, new people join the web every day, but does this mean that we have to take advantage of them?

When are are on a lot of mailing lists like I am, you can tell when a new JV(joint venture) has been given out to the big boys because the sales letters start piling up. COME WATCH THIS VIDEO OF A FORMER CRACK HEAD WITH A 5th GRADE EDUCATION MAKE MILLIONS ON CLICKBANK WORKING ONLY 7 MINUTES A DAY FROM THE WEB BROWSER OF HIS 10 YEAR OLD CELL PHONE!”

.. I expect them. Look for the word “auto pilot”.

I just did search of my Gmail account for the word Auto Pilot and I returned 39 emails sent within the past week. Lets see who the names are on the list of senders:

• Rob Benwell – he has been the biggest offender lately with a program called blogging to the bank. I actually bought his info product because I was curious to see what his system was. It was actually a PDF followed by 10 up-sells to more expensive products that would make the information in his PDF easier. Now I am not going to knock Rob Benwell too much, for one reason. I enjoyed reading his PDF. He wrote a 60 page document with very clear directions on how to turn WordPress 3.0′s multi-site feature into a sea of auto blogs. What I appreciated is that he never said it was original, he didn’t offer a product, he merely offered instructions on how to do it, and where to get the free plugins. His report wasn’t too full of bad humor and fluff, I read it on my cell phone over my lunch break. I even went one step further and bought one of his up-sells that had to do with his people actually creating the blogs, that charged me an additional $35 and I saw that was going to be recurring. I was never contacted by his people, support emails went un-answered, I was billed and got nothing for it. So, that pissed me off. I canceled with Paypal and I have been giving away his system to whoever wants it. Rob also has a really annoying email frequency (every 5 minutes).
• Jonathan Leger – He has been around for a long time. He offers some decent stuff. I think he is the one behind the worlds best spinner which actually isn’t bad. Not knocking him, smart guy and gives a lot of good information for free.  Honestly, I should probably take him off this list. (but he came up for auto blogging in my Gmail)
• SENuke – Hell, I paid for SENuke for 2 years. I finally canceled my subscription because the methods it uses are completely dead and produce little to no effect in my line of work which is real SEO. Still, I think those guys worked their asses off on that product and I have no regrets spending $150 a month for 2 years. I liked it for auto creating accounts and the feature of giving a simple rating to how hard it would be to get ranked for a keyword, but all that does is check to see if a Web 2.0 site is in the Google listings. If it is they believe you can grab that spot. Helpful, but not $150 a month helpful. Again, not knocking them. They put a lot of work into that product and I am sure they will come out with other cool stuff.
• Brad Fallon – OK. So this is the reason I decided to write this post. I am used to getting the same tired sales letters from the info guys like Ryan Deiss, Amish Shaw, Kern (he’s a charismatic genius), Alex Goad (His black hat book introduced me to the Blackhat community – I don’t use black hat methods but I am an Exec VIP at one of the big Blackhat boards because there are some really smart white hat guys there too), Blinkweb, HalfAgain, and all the other guys. I usually just delete them because I don’t need that for what I do. Brad Fallon – the Stompernet Guru is a well respected guy. Stompernet , while not SEOMoz by a long shot, is still a cool company with lots of smart people. I was SHOCKED when I opened an email from Brad Fallon last week and the firs thing that jumps out at me is the words BLOG and CLONE. The email from Stompernet on October 19th has the subject line: “How to clone your blogs for SEO and profit (free webinar) … Oh No!.. It’s come to this.

Stompernet has created some cool tools, they have great training discs (I have all of them – I found them in a crate outside my church ), but this clearly looks like another system to cash in on WordPress multi-site functionality. The email reads: “

Hey, Brad Fallon here.

I wanted to let you know that our very
own Faculty Member Wilson Mattos
has developed a rocking app called
“*****” that he is going to be
promoting to the world soon.

The cool thing is you’re hearing about
it before most anyone else.

(It’s good to be an insider!)

Here’s what it does: it actually clones
WordPress sites with a few pushes of
a button:  content, plugins, everything

• Brad Fallon (cont.). I don’t have time to go to webinar sales pitches. I barely have time to go to educational webinars that I really need, but I think the subject of this email is pretty clear about what we would find. A Pitch-fest for a tool that adds a simple line of code to the WP-config file, maybe installs some plugins. I don’t want to speculate too much because if I am wrong, I don’t want to be THAT wrong, but I think I am pretty close. I usually just delete these kinds of emails, but so many people hold Stompernet in such high regard – hell, I have even put it on a resume – that I was really surprised. I responded with a simple one line email: “Oh Brad.. You too?
• Chris Freville recently sent out a sales letter that was pushing another auto-pilot scheme for traffic that would flood you with free traffic etc. etc. His sales letter was REALLY good, this was for an application by Russian Programmers (of course) – who would think that a couple programmers from Youngstown Ohio had cracked the Google code?!?! He had all kinds of clickbank screen shots (I still cant believe people fall for that), but what he did have was a nice HD video of himself (I think it was him) pushing his product. He had all the hot button words and his copy-writing was first rate. He touched on all the problems, related to every issue that a new marketer has faced, and really portrayed some major enthusiasm. I like to keep up with what people are up to and I am willing to shell out the occasional $37-$97 to find out. So I bought in. Here is the email that I received:
  Hey Benjamin,Congratulations on securing one of my beta tester copies of
  Stealth Profit Machines software.Here is the access link again:

  http://www.stealthprofitmachines.com/tha555hddn80prdx2010release/custprodmain.htm <– Yes folks that is the real link and I am guessing you can find everything I purchased there, but that would be immoral to download something I paid for and there are only 500 copies being sold

  You’ll notice there’s a number of extra goodies added to the
  download area!

  Why?

  Simple. I like to over-deliver! Keep a look out for even more
  bonuses to be added in the coming days.

  Cheers,

Chris

• Chris Freville (Cont.) – I downloaded the software, opened it up. The purpose of the software is to create auto blogs in seconds. What it does is login to your Cpanel account, install WordPress, install 2 common WordPress plugins, and install its own plugin. You then give the blog keywords and it goes out and scrapes article directories for articles that match your keyword. You associate a keyword with an affiliate link and it automatically inserts it into the article text but masks it so when someone mouses over it, it appears that they are going to another page on your site. That’s it. Is this a time saver? Sure, does this generate traffic? NO! His sales letter was ALL ABOUT TRAFFIC. This software does NOTHING to generate traffic.  I should also mention that when I tried it, I was inundated with error boxes which spawned so many times I had to ctrl-alt-del to kill the process. It only actually worked once, kind of, but I had to use it on a previously installed blog, and the best part : the articles were already loaded with the authors links! I’m not even going to touch on the fact that you are giving your hosting panel login information to a piece of software that calls home (contacts its owner). I should point out that 2 minutes after I bought it, a day before I even downloaded it,  I sent them an email:
  Hi Chris,
  No offense, but this product is not worth $37 to me. You have automated WordPress installation and a couple plugins – Your sales pitch is good, good enough to get me to fork over the $37 but I am pretty disappointed. WPpost robot or any number of other auto-poster plugins + a cloaker+ and SEO links = same thing.
  If you had included a multi user function to mass produce blogs and manage them from one spot, that might be a bit better.
  I know there is no easy button and the best way to make money is by designing a product like this and getting a good list, but I would be very appreciative if you refunded my money. I am not going to use this software for anything. Your letter is a bit misleading because you talk about traffic and nothing here does anything to generate traffic. Just a lot of junk blogs sitting online doing nothing.
  I would appreciate a refund. Thanks a lot!

  Ben

No response. Surprised? No.

I could continue on for days about auto-blogging and what an incredible waste of time it is, but I have to get back to my real job. I am a search marketing and traffic specialist for one of the fastest growing tech companies in the country. We produce valuable content, generate valuable links, and create sites that will not only make millions of dollars, but they will be here in 50 years. Auto-blogging is nothing more than spam – don’t fool yourself. The logic behind spam is that the conversion rate is less than a 10th of 1%, but when you are sending out hundred of millions of emails, that’s good money. Auto-blogging is really no different. You are flooding the web with useless content that had been rehashed over and over.

I know that some people go into auto-blogging with the idea of automating the tedious tasks and creating original content and syndicating it, but let’s call a spade a spade. It’s another bullshit “easy button” and like most things in internet marketing, it is not a way for someone with no online experience to make money. I love the fact that all internet sales letters mention that “aren’t you tired of throwing away your money on useless gimmicks and systems that don’t work?”.

These marketers are laughing at you. Seriously laughing at you. Money making schemes always boom when the economy tanks and it really hurts my heart to think about how many families are out there right now, out of work, struggling to pay bills and looking for ANY way to bring in some money. $37 is a lot to them – $37 can buy you a weeks worth of groceries if you are frugal. $37 can be a cell phone payment or a payment to the electric company.

There is nothing wrong with being an entrepreneur, its admirable. There is something wrong with making bold bullshit statements that a piece of poorly written software is going to change your life. If you do this, you should be ashamed of yourself. If you do this and are reading this, you are probably laughing at me too. I don’t care. I make a lot of money, the old fashioned way.

Unfortunately, the people who are searching the web for ways to make money are not going to find this blog post, my warning will not reach them. If anyone reads this blog post it will be other SEO pros or the narcissistic info marketers who are Googling themselves. There are a couple things I can do that might be able to help.

1. I will give 3 hours of completely free SEO coaching to any small business owner that would like some help. No strings, no up-sells, no catch. If you need some help with the fundamentals of getting your website found, I will give you 3 hours of my time. I can teach you more in 3 hours than you will learn from any $2000 seminar or b.s. marketing product.

2. I am going to contact my college friend at the FTC to look into the claims and statements being made by these guys selling these products. I know there was a bit of a scare a couple years ago with compliance issues and the use of fake testimonials, but I have noticed that people have gotten lazy recently. I have spotted a few clear violations.

3. I will speak to a very close friend of mine who is one of the countries top attorneys to see if there is a possibility of a class action suit against a couple of the major offenders.

I will close this with a true story from my past. I worked in the adult business from 1996-2002. A random occurrence landed me a job at Xpics publishing in Lake Tahoe, the dominant company at the time. Xpics was re-billing credit cards for $60 million dollars a month and had created an empire that was truly amazing. Back then you could put a banner for them on your site and get paid .27 a click for a raw banner click.

I had NO idea the amount of money being made by these companies – had I known I would be a multi-millionaire several times over right now, but the owner was REALLY good at keeping us in the dark. We were just having fun.

Anyway, this job taught me many amazing things and I witnessed – and occasionally was part of – the birth of some life changing technologies – the pop up console is a good example (read about Brian and his attempt to patent the popup). As soon as I figured out how much money was being made – and how underpaid I was -  I bolted, and went to a new company in Santa Fe where I was paid a much better wage ( i still have regrets every day that I didn’t know what I had at the time).

Part of my job was going to trade shows and conventions. The trade shows were identical to every other trade show except it was full of naked women, tanorexic GQ guys, and the old-school super shady pioneers of the business. The first trade show that I actually had a booth was IA2000 in Miami. I remember that trade show for several reasons, one being approached by this guy who said he had the next best thing for payment processing – gold, turned out to be e-gold which is a story all its own.

The other thing I remember was that there was an old couple walking through the crowds, they were much older than the other attendees – probably 70s. They looked really out of place, not nervous, but definitely overwhelmed. They came up to my booth to see what I was pushing, which at the time was a non-adult program called sports clicks that fell flat a few months later. I asked what they were doing there and they told me that they had just recently retired, didnt have a lot of money and had heard on the news that the adult business was making new millionaires every day. They said that they were thinking about cashing out their entire retirement account and trying to make money in the adult business, but they didn’t know how and were looking for advice. I could have done several things at that moment.

1. I could have pushed my program on them, would have been easy – get paid for clicks to my sports website, we even buy raw exit console clicks and garbage traffic.

2. Offered to help them come up with a viable plan on how to make their money, make money.

3. Told them I had a company of my own and would happily let them invest in it, then stolen their money.

4. Told them that this business was not for them, its much harder than it looks. Everything is easy except one thing: getting traffic and thats where the money is

5. Ushered them to the door and told them to get out and never come back.

I wish I chose #5, but I didn’t, I chose #4.  I told them all the various facets of running an adult site (back then bandwidth was REALLY expensive), and that I can pretty much guarantee that they will lose all their money- either slowly- or all at once. I talked to them for about 45 minutes and they seemed to listen. Unfortunately, that was a huge convention and the adult world is full of the best pitchmen on the planet – the online porn biz created  methods that are just now coming into play on infomercials and webmarketing. I would bet that before they got to the door, someone got to them and told them they had the “easy button”, just click it, sit back, and watch the money roll in.

The idea of the free SEO consulting occurred to me as I rambled off this post, I will put up a page with the details in the next day or so.

Have a great day.

Sidenote: It’s funny. I am scanning my email for a sample sales letter text to fill in at the top of this post and I see two emails, one from Jason Katzenback and one from Comment Kahuna – both have the same theme – GOOGLE HATES BLOGS! pay us some money.  Imagine getting this email 2 days after spending $500 to have some chucklehead tell you why Google LOVEs blogs?!?

TicketsNow.com : Rip Off : Yo Yo Ma Milwaukee Concert

This should get interesting. I am entering into a battle with TicketsNow.com over the use of deceptive tactics to sell tickets. Before you read this, first let me say: I do accept partial responsibility for this situation. I made an emotional decision to purchase tickets from TicketsNow.com who are a ticket scalper portal. I have been an online marketer for years, and it takes a lot to scam me, but I definitely walked into this one head first.

The back story to this is that my Fiance is a cellist. She has had a tough year and I really wanted to take her to see Yo Yo Ma at the Pabst theater in Milwaukee. I knew that the ticket scalping businesses would snatch up all the good seats (which I am amazed is still legal) and I was prepared to spend a little more for the tickets. I am fundamentally opposed to companies like Ticket King and other companies that use expensive software to bash away on online ticket sellers, using proxies to fake ip’s. The process is disgusting to me – and honestly – I can’t believe people don’t put some rocks through their windows. Maybe they do and I don’t know about it. Anyway, I have been known to go against my beliefs on occasion so I can’t complain too much, I pulled out my credit card and contributed to the problem.

My issue isn’t with the cost of the tickets, $150 a piece. I would have paid that much for decent seats. My issue is that the website uses a seating diagram that very conveniently implies that these tickets are in a nice spot in the house, in fact they are literally the WORST seats in the house. This show isn’t sold out. I could have walked across the street to the Pabst and purchased them for $55. Seats on the 1st section are $130 a piece and are still available.

When you purchase the tickets, you see a message that says Front Row in Section, the night I bought them, it said Front Row in Section * <– there was an asterix which is no longer there as of today.

As you can see the section says 3LC, when I bought tickets it said 3RC, Row A. This is where the seating diagram comes in handy (for them). The seating chart is vague, but appears to have all the information you need. However, the illusion is that the row is actually the seats, and the section (to me and everyone else I have shown this too) would be left center, or in my case right center.

Here is the image of the pabst theater that they use next to the tickets:

The information that is conveniently missing is the 3LC (3RC) etc. What is  noticeable is the section A.

I lingered on the tickets for a while, trying to make up my mind whether or not to buy them. I decided I would go to the next purchase screen and order them.

At this point a box popped up that said that my password for Verified by Visa was required to make the purchase, then without me touching a key, an error box popped up and the screen forced through to the purchase page without me being able to stop it. Interesting, this certainly looks like they are forcing transactions to go through. Why would they do this? Do they benefit from credit card fraud? Do they know that a certain percentage of fraud will never be reported? I have worked in online fraud for many years and I know that the ticket industry is rife. This is speculation on my part, but I certainly found it strange that the website could force a bypass on me having to enter my Visa verification password. I will leave that up to Visa to determine (I have sent them my concerns).

Well, my gut was telling me not to deal with scalpers, and as soon as I saw the transaction go through I had a sick feeling in my gut. It was impulsive on my part. I was trying to do something special for my Fiance. I really couldn’t afford it, but it would be a nice evening. I decided to check the Pabst theater prices and chart so that I could accurately see where my seats are so I could surprise Sarah (my Fiance) with my awesome seats. Well, this is what I see:

WOW! Can you see the difference? The sections are clearly marked and would you look at that? 3RC is the very last section and the worst seats in the house!. I walked right into it.

This entire research project took less than 2 minutes. I immediately called customer service at TicketsNow.com, a maze of options leading to no answer. I emailed customer service and the “manager” at manager@ticketsnow.com and told them that I had placed an order less than 2 minutes ago, I had not recieved confirmation that it had gone through but that I wanted to cancel it because I was clearly misled by their diagram of the theater.

2 minutes later the confirmation came through. I responded to that and forwarded it to manager@ticketsnow.com and explained my situation. I was polite, but I knew what to expect. So, I called my bank. I explained to them what happened. I said I wanted to give TicketsNow.com the opportunity to cancel the order. They listened to the story of how it went down and agreed that this is a clear case of misleading a consumer.

The next day, I received the email from TicketsNow.com that I expected. They said “tough luck”. I sent them back a polite reply. I told them about my career as an internet marketer and search engine optimization expert and that if they behaved honorably, I would be more than willing to write them a glowing review and spend some time making sure hundreds of thousands of people saw it. However, if they didn’t stop the transaction, I would definitely go out of my way to tell hundreds of thousands of people of my experience.

I mentioned my dealings with Venue.com, how they had taken advantage of Sarah and within 48 hours the search engines were plastered with my negative experience with them. We received a phone call from Venue telling us that her money would be returned and would we please take down all the bad press. My story about Venue.com ended up costing them quite a bit of money in lost sales and I feel good that I was able to help steer consumers away from the company. Every email I received thanking me for the review of Venue.com that prevented one more person from getting sucked into their predatory practices, gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.

So, in the beginning of this, I said I take partial responsibility for this. I didn’t do my due diligence on TicketsNow.com, which is very unlike me. Had I done some research, I would have seen all the complaints about the company and their practices. I would have also read about the $500 mil  lawsuit against TicketsNow.com and Ticketmaster. If I had done my homework on the company, I never would have pulled out my credit card. However, me not doing my research on the company is one thing, using a sparse mis-leading map of the theater to increase ticket sales on scalped tickets is something altogether different.

So. There is the story, but it’s not over. Now comes the online assault. I spoke to my bank and I will be getting my money back. I will send the tickets back to TicketsNow.com when they get here. I do not want anything for free. I will also post all of my email correspondence with them as it happens. I am afraid that I am going to have to take it one step further. For the next month, I will be using all of my SEO and marketing skills to make sure the WORLD knows to stay away from this company. I will have PPC ads, top search engine listings,  I will even post videos on 30 sites, and email my list of 300,000 people and ask them to pass it on. I will also be bugging our Wisconsin politicians about this company. Milwaukee is a music loving city, and a city of blue collar workers. Ticket Scalpers should be tarred, feathered, and run out on a rail. I am embarrassed that I fell prey to them.  I can afford the loss I suppose, but many people cannot, and if I fell for it – many, many others will too.

I will begin posting the emails and saturating the internet tonight.

MESSAGE TO TicketsNow.com:

If you are a representative of TicketsNow.com, and I know you will be reading this. I want you to realize that it was really silly to not take my proposed plan of paying you the face value of the tickets plus handling charges. Your tactics are despicable. The music industry, venues, and industry have been raping fans for years. Your adding poison to the mix has pushed me to the limit and I am going to cause you as much headache as I possibly can. Don’t bother trying to troll comments on this blog, they are all reviewed and I wont post them.

Watch the first page of Google in the coming weeks. You will recognize my mark.

Incoming search terms:

• pabst seating chart

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