Last October I entered a link building contest for Pink Internet Marketing, where the winning prize was a cute, fluffy bear. Amazingly enough I won the contest, and after Danielle emailed me to let me know I won, I sent her my address, though I left my name out for the sake of privacy.

After that, I never heard from her again. After receiving no bear for about a month, I sent her a friendly email, then sent another one to a different address of hers a week later just to see what was up. She hadn’t been updating her blog regularly, so I figured she must have been really busy, and let it go at that.

Then she updated her blog yesterday, so I left a comment in a Ashton Kutcher fashion, “DUDE! Where’s my bear??” I honestly thought she may have just forgotten and needed a reminder.

She deleted the comment. WTF???

For someone trying to create a successful internet marketing business, it doesn’t really help your credibility to run a link building contest, only to scam the contest winner out of his prize and ignore his repeated inquiries, ya know? Unless this is just a blackhat SEO technique I happened to be an unwitting victim of.

I wish I knew what went wrong. Maybe she changed her mind and simply couldn’t part with her beloved teddy. Maybe I wrote something on my blog that somehow offended her. Maybe the bear got lost in the mail. Really, I would have accepted virtually any explanation and been ok with it. It is just a bear after all.

But this silent treatment really pisses me off, and damn if it isn’t typical of how women usually treat me. One day you’re humming along, all is fine in the world, the birds singing, the flowers blooming, and then without warning, phone calls suddenly go unanswered, emails get ignored, and you’re left in the rain to wonder what had horribly gone so wrong.

Ah well. I guess I’ll just have to grin and “bear” it.

I updated my GERD, Shingles and Ulcers Scam post with some new information I received from readers. It’s amazing just how many of these sites are out there… maybe hundreds, and all being perpetrated by just one person too. There’s no way to keep track of them all, other than to just exercise some common sense and do a little bit of Googling and research before spending your precious money.

Previously, I wrote a post pointing out several suspicious sites that were offering natural cures for shingles, GERD, ulcers and genital warts, all written by the same person. It was ranking pretty well on Google for about a week or so, and then suddenly my rankings vanished. I couldn’t find it anywhere on Google, no matter how many different combinations of relevant keywords I used. Meanwhile this motherf-, excuse me, this dude continues to litter the first page search results for the same keywords.

Ahhh, Google, that ever eternal gatekeeper for quality content on the Internet.

I’m just trying to do a good thing here, trying to help people avoid getting ripped off, and then these anal Googlie Wooglie fartbags had to go breaking my blogging balls.

Ironically enough I stumbled across yet another version of those “natural cure for shingles” sites, this one on the same simpleshinglescure domain, but with the page title saying “Natural Cure for Acid Reflux,” and the author here is an Aaron D. Smith, rather than the Aaron E. Smith shown on the other sites. Different picture too. So there are two Aaron Smiths now? Both hawking cures for shingles?

I have a headache.

Internet dating sites have now become a huge industry, with thousands of sites dedicated to either providing dating advice or dating related services. This particular industry though seems to be HIGHLY plagued by online dating sites that may in fact be craftily designed splogs (automated blogs created for the primary purpose of spamming visitors), and crooksters looking to score off your dating misery.

These type of sites can be very hard to detect sometimes, but if you have pretty good intuition, maybe you’ll get a feeling like I do that something just seems to be a little bit… off here.

That’s how I felt about the site Online Dating Tips. Upon my first visit it seemed innocent enough, tightly coded, aesthetic design, speedy load, etc.. However, it also seemed light on the content, and heavy on the affiliate links. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that apparently EVERY external link on that site was in fact a cloaked affiliate link to some of the biggest dating services on the Internet.

Hmmmm….

The content itself is split into several categories containing very short articles, which is easy to read and to be fair, really does offer some sound advice, BUT… you get the strange sense that you’ve already read it all before. Additionally, for a site that purports to be an authority on how to use online personals, it certainly comes across as a bit… impersonal. There are no personal testimonies, and no heart warming anecdotes to encourage the reader with. It all seems very bland and emotionless.

There’s a reason for this though: the content is not original. At all. My suspicions were confirmed when I copied and pasted a particular phrase from an article here and did a Google search with it. The phrase I copied was:

“Is it possible to find a soul mate online through a dating service? You bet it is…”

And lookie see here, I found another article that starts the same way. In fact, it’s the very same article. But wait! Here’s another copy of the same article. And another one here, and here, and here and…

Hmmmmmmmmm….

Could be this “dating tips” site isn’t interested in the slightest bit about helping you find your loved one, but it does seem very interested in liberating you of your money through affiliate profits. Look, I don’t begrudge anyone who does affiliate marketing since I do it too, but if that’s their only purpose and they have no intention of offering anything of value in return, then they need to get their boonie boons spanked silly.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m devastated. And here I thought I found a place where people cared. Where people truly understood my sad plight and heartfelt desire to find a snuggly tookie tums butter pot cuddle pie to call my own.

Alas, alas, it appears that such is not the case here, and I shall have to continue my search elsewhere.

Using the awesome and very promising OIOPublisher Direct plugin, I can now sell ads and other services directly to potential advertisers without the need for a middle-man, which means I’ll keep 100 percent of the profits I make. WOOOOO!!! I’m gonna be rich! Filthy, stinking, disgustingly rich out of my greedy butt, depraved mind! BOOYAH!!!!

Well maybe.

It’ll be interesting to see how I fare with this, but at the very least I’ll finally have total control over what gets placed on this blog. There’s a lot of bad hojos and jojos out there looking to bam-bam your jam-jams with their scam-scams, and advertising networks like Google’s Adsense have done very little to stop them. With this solution I’m hoping the quality of the ads and goods that get served here will be far better than what most readers and visitors usually see elsewhere, and will help to complement this site rather than detract from it.

Well, I can dream anyway.

If you’re interested, I’m offering rock bottom prices right now since my traffic and readership is um, *ahem*, not quite where I’d like them to be right now. You can choose from link ads to paid posting to video ads, and more.

Click here for details, and if you’re interested in installing OIOPublisher on your own blog, let me know and I’ll give you some pointers. Initially it was designed for WordPress 2.1 or better due to its native cron support, but after working with the developer for a few days, he was able to come up with a solution to run cron jobs on Wordpress 2.0.X blogs by using the WP-Cron plugin. Muy coolio.

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……