Previously I wrote a piece about my suspicions on a series of websites I think are scams. So what happens? After proofreading my post, I happened to noticed that Google was displaying contextually relevant ad links… to one of the VERY SAME SITES I was writing about and suspected of being a scam.

Only me.

I immediately went to my Adsense account and had these sites’ links filtered out. Adsense however only allows you to filter out at most 300 links. And there’s what, a bazillion illegitimate websites out there? So what’s to stop another scamming site from advertising on my blog, especially if I’ve maxed out my blacklist?

Here’s Google’s answer: Absolutely nothing. Even worse, Google makes mad money off these seedy advertisers and businesses, so they’re not going to be in any hurry to clean up their links and do some form of serious quality control. It just wouldn’t make any business sense to them, ya know?

Unfortunately, the type of ad links that get displayed on my site is going to reflect on me, whether I like it or not. If a guy clicks on an Adsense link he sees on my site and purchases a product as a result, only to end up being the victim of a scam, that’s on me. I do feel I have a certain responsibility in granting advertising space only to those businesses I feel offer quality products and operate with at least some measure of integrity. That’s part of why I dropped Go Daddy as an affiliate, since they refused to even look into these websites that I suspected were trolling for suckers they could rip off.

So, after a little bit of soul searching I decided that I will no longer use Adsense, and will be removing all the code for it from my blog by the end of the day. My readers deserve better… (all three of you).

In the meantime, I don’t suppose anyone knows of any other service that also serves contextually relevant ad links, but where I have far more control over what gets served? …….. yeah, didn’t think so……

Update 10/6/08: I received an email tip that strongly suggests this scammer may be operating out of Singapore.  In addition, one of the aliases being used, Aaron Smith, is an actual real person living in Australia.  He is NOT the scammer, but is in fact a victim of identity theft unfortunately bearing the brunt of harassment by those who have been swindled and believed him to be the actual perpetrator.  DO NOT CONTACT HIM if you managed to find his contact info, as he is NOT the one running these scams.

Update 8/30/08: The Washington State Attorney General’s Office recently visited this site, indicating that the complaints about the spammer are at least being read.  I don’t know if they’ll take action since the Washington address itself may be fake, but it’s good to see they’re at least looking into the matter.

Updates: I received several helpful email tips about the following sites in question, including:

1. That the “pictures” of Aaron Smith vary with each site.

2. That he is apparently based in the Sydney suburb of Cronulla (Australia).

3. There is a known glitch on his sites where you can download all the eBooks without paying for it. (Simply add “/download.htm” after the root address of any of his sites, and the link to directly download the eBook can be obtained.

4. The scammer also uses “Sharon Kresler/Sharon Cresler” as an alias to sell “natural cures” for diseases that afflict women in particular.

There seems to be an insane number of these types websites, all with the same modus operandi, all touting natural cures for various types of diseases, but what’s truly sad about it all is that this only reflects the work of one possible scammer.

As always, exercise due diligence before spending your precious money online. A simple Google search was enough for me to uncover the suspicious nature of dozens (if not hundreds) of these eBook sites.

Original Article:

I was googling around for information on acid reflux, and what kind natural remedies there might be to alleviate some of the symptoms, when I stumbled on to this site.

The author promises a natural cure in less than one week using nothing more than common grocery items. Sounds awesome! Here’s a short quote where he introduces himself:

Hello, my name is Aaron Smith and I’ve been exactly where you are now. I’ve experienced GERD and the feelings of extreme pain, burning, nausea, depression and anxiety that often accompany this condition.

But wait a minute, he has another site, this time relaying his problems with ulcers:

My name is Aaron Smith and for about 2 ½ years I suffered from the pain and discomfort of ulcers every single day of my life. At first, I lived with the pain by taking over-the-counter antacids - lots of them! If you saw me during that time of my life, you would have sworn I owned stock in the big antacid companies. I was popping Tums and Rolaids like they were candy and using Maalox and Mylanta to wash them down - that’s how bad it was!

But wait a minute, he has yet another site, this time sharing his story on how he cured his problem with shingles:

You see my name is Aaron Smith, I live at 300 Elliott Ave, Seattle, WA, USA and I have been exactly where you are. I had Shingles for 3 Months - and they were the most painful months of my life… which is why I was so lucky that I stumbled upon a simple, unique home treatment that I used to heal my shingles in 6 days.

But wait a minute, he has yet ANOTHER site, this time touting a natural cure for genitals warts. I won’t even link to this one because of the graphic images contained therein.

Well I smell a rat, how ’bout you?

Either this guy is one of the most unfortunate (and subsequently LUCKIEST bastages ever) to have endured all these major illnesses only to cure them all with simple grocery related remedies, or he is one scumbag of a scammer trying to rip you off.

I vote on the later.

Each site hawks an eBook that you have to pay 25 bucks or more for, even though they probably contain nothing more than the words “SUCKERS!! HAHAHAHAHAH!!”

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s these blood sucking pieces of amphibian crapballs who have the gall to try scamming those afflicted with serious physical problems, desperately searching for relief. May the Egyptian plagues of old descend upon them.

After tracing the domains, it appears that all the websites have been registered and hosted via Go Daddy. I’ve sent them an email complaint along with a list of the websites. Hopefully they’ll get back to me and these sites will soon be taken down. If not, then I’m dumping their affiliate program, and they can just find somebody else to pimp their services for them.

Update: I received a response from GoDaddy, but they will not do anything about these websites and indicated the burden of ascertaining whether these sites were scams or not belongs to law enforcement.

I dunno, I guess it’s possible that one guy managed to find a natural cure for ulcers, GERD, shingles, genital warts and more, all in one week’s time and using nothing more than common grocery items. Stranger things have happened, right?

For now I would strongly suggest you not do business with any of these websites. In the meantime I’ve dropped Go Daddy’s affiliate program, since they seemed to show little concern over the issue.

A guest blogger at JohnChow.com challenged the audience in commiting to writing at least one blogging post a day for 20 days. Apparently if you make something a part of your daily routine for about three weeks, it will eventually become a habit and thus a routine that will be easier to stick to.

I decided to answer the challenge as well, since one of the big problems I’ve had in getting this blog going was my history of erratic posting frequency. I have to admit I was actually afraid to link to Chow’s blog because he’s currently in the Google doghouse for engaging in controversial link building. I thought if Google saw that I linked to his site, they would think that I was another evil fan of his and then blacklist me from their search index for all eternity, forever doomed to the dark pits of internet obscurity.

I think I worry too much.

As for what’s holding me back, I think the main reason is TIME. I’m spending a lot of time working at my job, catching up on my news feeds, tweaking my site, reading up on affiliate marketing, learning about microstock photography, gaming, watching TV, staring into empty space, just about everything EXCEPT blogging. I make no time for it at all, and it shows.

There’s another reason for this though: I have nothing to write about. Well nothing that I think will at least interest anybody. I think my writing sucks monkey’s balls too. No matter how good an idea I have for a blogging post, it never seems to translate well on “paper.” Somewhere in the blogging process things get jammed up and the end result is mindless crap. Maybe as I attempt to blog more often things will get better. Maybe not.

Maybe I need a life. Maybe I need a woman too.

“Linkie?”

“Yeah, Karen?” Karen was a co-worker of mine who worked in our firearms division. I’ve had a thing for her ever since she started working here…that is, until she passed me up and married another co-worker last January. Of course.

“Do you know what band sang the song with the line ‘broken wings’ in it?” She then proceeded to hum the song, her cute face partly visible as she leaned over the cubicle wall that divided us.

“Hmmm, not sure, but I can Google the lyrics pretty quickly for you if you want. You can check to see which band rings a bell.”

“Is Mick around? Maybe he knows,” she said, completely ignoring my suggestion. Her hands were on top of the wall now, the shiny wedding ring on her finger gleaming in the light. I cursed inwardly.

But it wasn’t just the ring that annoyed me. I also HATED it when people would initially ask me for help, and then quickly dismiss me out of hand in favor of someone else. Don’t even give me a chance here to prove I’m not the idiot they think I am. Sheesh.

Dammit people, I’m a @#$%-ing human being. Can I not be afforded some modicum of respect at least?

“Sorry, Mick went on vacation. Let me look it up for you though, I’m sure I can find it. I’ll let you know.”

“Ok…” she said, and her head dropped out of sight. I could still hear her humming the song from beyond the wall.

I went to Google and found the lyrics to several songs containing the phrase “broken wings”, so I jumped up to call Karen over and have her take a look.

“Hey Karen,” I said, peering over the wall, “I got a few hits here and…”

But she was already gone.

I just stood there, marveling over how easily this woman could still hurt me, even now.

“Take these broken wings,
And learn to fly again,
And learn to live so free.
And when we hear the voices sing,
The book of love will open up,
And let us in….“

Up yours Mister Mister.

Look people, how much effort does it take to download an image from my blog, upload it to a Photobucket or ImageShack account, and then hotlink it from there? 30 seconds worth? If you’re going to hog my bandwidth and directly link my images (without credit mind you), could I not at least have the flipping courtesy of a backlink, you bunch of lazy leeching butt balls? Sheesh.

This has been an ongoing issue for me for some time now, and initially I had been using .htaccess to block visitors from hotlinking my files. The only problem with this approach is that my images don’t show up in online feedreaders, and despite the hotlinking abuse, I still wanted Google and other search engines to index my images. Image based search engines are often an overlooked source for SEO purposes and bringing in more traffic to your site, so I wasn’t quite ready to toss in the towel just yet.

Interestingly, Blogstorm came up with a novel way to offset the damages of hotlinking, by designing a plugin that stops hotlinkers from right-clicking and grabbing the image’s url. Instead, when they right click an image, a window will pop up with a snippet of alternative code that they can use to link the image. The code actually wraps the image in a link, providing a legitimate backlink that hotlinkers can use for… whatever. The more savvy Internet user can find ways around this of course, but it seemed to be an excellent way to encourage backlinking and thus boost your site’s search engine rankings.

Unfortunately the plugin only worked sporadically on my site. It didn’t work at all in IE7, and in Firefox the window containing the alternative code would always pop up at the top of the screen, so if the image in question was located at the bottom, visitors would have to scroll up again to see the window. There were also some unexpected issues when an image was lightboxed, and it also caused some weird things to happen with my AdSense ads. Alas, I had no choice but to uninstall the plugin.

This project is still in its infancy though, so I’m hoping the developers will be able to build on this idea and work out whatever kinks there might be to create what would be surely be an extremely popular plugin. After all, if people are going to hotlink images, we might as well derive some benefit from it. Savvy?

Update: In the meantime, it looks like Thiefinder has a cool little PHP script that can save considerable time in checking your logs for hotlinking. If it works it would be a godsend for me.

Inspired by Mashable’s latest streak of publishing insane link lists for their readers (covering images, audio, video, analytics and podcasting), I decided to publish my own personal toolbox for bloggers in general. Enjoy!

Analytics This

• Add This! - Make it easy for your visitors to bookmark your blog and subscribe to your feeds. Saves you the real estate of using tons of bookmarking icons, and also provides tracking stats.
• BlogStorm - A free service allowing you to track the number of websites linking to your blog posts.
• Clicky Web Analytics - One of the best stats services I’ve seen out there next to Google Analytics. They have a premium version you can try out free for 3 weeks, and it only costs less than $2 a month to use (if you sign up annually). Worth every penny, and offers even more features than Google does. Check here and scroll down for a comparison between Clicky and other analytic services.
• Google Analytics - Arguably the most comprehensive analytics service out there, now with a much improved interface and look.
• HitTail - Reveals in real time which keywords people use to find your website, while offering optimal keyword suggestions you can use for marketing and SEO purposes. They have a basic free service.
• Sitemeter - One of the oldest and most popular tracking service of choice for bloggers.
• Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem - Get a rough idea of where your blog ranks in the blogosphere. Determined largely by link popularity and Sitemeter stats.

Buzz Buzz Buzz

• Google Trends - You can view the latest Google search trends here. VERY useful for getting a sense of what the most popular keywords searches currently are, so you can possibly utilize them for your next blog post.
• Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ BlogPulse - Find out what the blogosphere is currently abuzz about. Also contains helpful tools to track stories and conversations between bloggers.
• Sphere - Excellent service that can help you find blog posts and media articles related to your content. They provide a widget you can install on your blog as well. Very helpful if you want to find other bloggers who are posting content similar to yours.
• Spotplex - Provides real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count. Similar to Digg, but without the voting.

Everyone’s Got An Opinion

• Co.mments - I use this over coComment as it runs faster and it’s easier to use. Comment organization is rather simplistic though and can be hard to read through sometimes.
• coComment - This is more community oriented than Co.mments but it can get VERY buggy (and at the time of this writing there has been a lot of issues and complaints regarding its integration with Technorati.) Still, when it works it does prove useful.

Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money!

• AdBrite - A versatile ad marketplace that offers you a variety of ways to publish ads and advertise your own site.
• AuctionAds - Display live eBay auctions on your blog for profit.
• CafePress - Merchandising, merchandising! Where da REAL money from da blogging is made!
• ChipIn - A cool widget that provides an easy way to do fund raising.
• Chitika - A contextual advertising company that offers the popular eMiniMalls ads you can place on your blog for profit. Best for blogs that are more product oriented.
• Google Adsense - Google’s ad publishing network, one of the foremost and most widely used networks by bloggers.
• Kontera - A service where you can change some of your text into link ads for profit.
• Openads - A huge ad-space community that offers powerful software to help you rotate and control ad space on your site. The ability to rotate ads will also make it far easier for you to use multiple ad services to help monetize your blog.
• PayPerPost - Write about web sites, products, services, and companies and earn cash for providing your opinion. As with most monetizing efforts, your blog should get a considerable amount of traffic in order to truly benefit from the service.
• Text Link Ads - One of the most popular context advertising services on the Internet, where you retain full editorial control over the advertisers that appear on your blog.

Multimedia Frenzy

• Radio.Blog.Club - One of the first stand-alone players that lets you stream sound on your blog.
• BlogTalkRadio - Host your own live talk show for free. A great alternative to podcasting, and allows call-ins to your show as well. />
• BlogTV - Broadcast live and recorded video shows for your blog.
• finetune - A visually appealing widget that allows you to build your own custom playlist and embed it on your blog. Not as versatile as Radio.Blog.Club though.
• Flixn - Fast and easy way to upload a webcam video to the web and your blog. Very easy to use and perfect for those times you want to make a quick webcam vid on the fly.
• Gabbly - Chat service including code you can use to embed a chatroom on your own blog.
• Hipcast - A service that can take a lot of the guesswork out of podcasting for you. Offers audio and video blogging capabilities.
• Meebo - Meebo now offers you the ability to embed any chatroom you want on your own blog.
• myBlogTunes - Create your own radio station and embed it on your site.
• Odeo - Podcasting portal that recently assimilated Audioblogger into its service.
• Project Readon - If you’re a hearing impaired blogger, this site offers closed captioning for many popular Internet videos.
• Quizilla! - Got blogger’s block? Here’s a site with tons of quizzes you can take, the results of which you can post on your blog. There’s also a directory of lyrics, poems, stories, games and more.
• YouTube - Again, if you don’t know what this is by now, there is no hope for you.

Newsworthy

• Bloglines - One of the oldest and most popular free online readers for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content.
• FeedBlitz - Gives you the ability to offer email subscriptions to your readers, though it’s not without its problems. There’s a newsletter edition as well.
• FeedBurner - It’s FeedBurner. Nuff said.
• Feedster - A new service that gives you the ability to jazz up your favorite feeds and include them as widgets on your blog.
• Google Reader - Despite still being an experimental service, it’s already become one of the most popular feed readers out there. Neat and simple, though some features remain severely limited.
• Popurls - Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, NewsVine and more, get it all in one neatly organized page here.
• Topix - This might prove useful if you want to blog about local news rather than national or international (which is what every other blogger does.)

Picture Worth 1000 Blogs

• 123Flickr.com - Takes the guess work out of creating Flickr galleries for novices. The galleries are basic looking, but they can spare you a lot of coding grief.
• Flickr - You really, REALLY should know this one by now.
• PhotoBucket - Along with ImageShack, both sites provide one key service that will serve you well: the ability to offload your images elsewhere, thus relieving the stress on your own server during peak traffic times.
• SlideFlickr.com - Instantly turn your Flickr photos into a slideshow, which you can then embed on your site.

Promotion Commotion

• Blog Carnival - A directory of carnivals you can join to help promote your best blog posts.
• Digg - Want to try bringing in a horde of obnoxious, drunken, one time visitors to your site? Then Digg is the perfect place to go!
• Meshly - Not as popular as the major user driven news site like Digg, but it offers an interesting way to submit news articles (via instant messaging).
• Netscape.com - one of the largest user driven news sites, but it’s a bit slow and hard to navigate. However, it contains far more topics you can choose from to submit posts to, so your content is more likely to hit the popular front pages here than at places like Digg.
• Reddit - Another user driven news site, but one which can be more effective in bringing traffic to your blog. The quality of visitors also seem to be far better than the Digg community as well.
• StumbleUpon - Randomly surf the Internet with a toolbar to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. Also proven to be a great for bringing traffic to your site. (For more info on stumble promotion, read this article.)
• Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone - READ THIS THREAD from Webmaster World. It provides the