You know the handwriting’s on the wall when a personal ad I respond to on Craigslist turns out to be spam.  Whoops. 

Now before you start ragging on me for surfing Craiglist, I was bored, ok?  BORED.  I was checking out apartment prices and then out of curiousity (and absolutely nothing else) I checked out the personals for my area.  That’s when I came across this one:

Okay so here is the deal: I am an attractive 28 year old woman who tends to attract emotionally unavailable men….of course! So basically I am trying this out too see if this “dream guy” actually exists. I would be interested in a man who is attractive (I am a face person) with a great smile/great teeth. I tend to be attracted to men who are not thin or overly muscular. I like a man to have a little meat on his body. I love to laugh and am looking for someone who can make me laugh. I am a born again Christian and would like him to be the same. I love music and love to sing. I also love animals and could not imagine someone not loving them too! I am fairly low maintainance (who also may not be able to spell the word…HAHA). I am somewhat of a homebody and dont need to go out all the time. I am interested in a man who is caring, thoughtful, a “team player”, handy, outgoing, moderately successful, and “real”. I am a very genuine person who’s biggest weakness is my “big heart”. I am thoughtful, caring, and have been told I can “light up a room”. Being my own worse critic I would like to be a little thinner. However, I do have great curves and the softest skin! I came to this website because I really believe that I am a “great catch”. PS) hair is red by choice not by nature!

Seems like a nice enough girl right?  So I emailed her and asked her how strong she considered her Christian beliefs to be.  I got a response shortly afterwards:

Hi, I got your email and wanted to get back with you to see if you might still be interested.  I know you don’t know much about me but you can at least go see what I look like at http://www.eimages.info/barbera21. I posted them on this free site to make this whole “getting to know you” thing a little easier.  Just tell me what you think & if you want, a little about yourself and we will go from there.  Thank you.

When you click on the link however, it actually turns out to be a phony one and is in fact a redirected AFFILIATE link that takes you to the signup page of a dating site.

This whole time I had been communicating with an automated script that had been set up by an affiliate marketer spammer. 

I should have had the foresight to Google some of the phrases in the Craigslist ad to see if it showed up elsewhere, and sure enough the exact same wording shows up on a profile page at PlentyofFish, only this time she hails from Michigan.

Sigh.  And people wonder why I’ve become so bitter and cynical in my old age.

I consider myself to be a somewhat intelligent person, and if I got fooled by this, I’m sure many others have as well, especially as these bottom feeding scum of the earth affiliate marketers get more and more sophisticated in using deceptive methods to make money.  Just make sure, if you experienced something similar and you were tricked into clicking on an affiliate link that leads to a signup page, flush the cookies in your browser, so even if you happen to sign up for that very site in question a few months or so down the road, the spammer won’t get credit for it (affiliate links typically insert cookies into your browser that can last several months to over a year.  Read my article on affiliate spam for more info.)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be drowning my sorrows in Dairy Queen’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Blizzard.  Oh wait, there’s no Dairy Queen around here.  Sigh, not even this huh, Lord? 

Black-hat affiliate marketers follow a common pattern in their efforts to liberate you of your money. Once they decide on a niche, they then sign up for the most lucrative affiliate programs that appeal to that particular niche, and then they’re off to work their dark magic. As a case study, let’s take a look at how such marketing was done for appetite suppressants, specifically Hoodia.

Now if they’re the sort to go apesh*% nuts in their marketing campaign (and the more successful ones usually do), their next step is to buy dozens upon dozens of domains that have the kind of keywords they’re looking for. Since they want to market Hoodia, the domains they buy might look like this:

…and on and on and on. Literally hundreds of domains may be bought prior to launching their campaigns. Once that’s done, they begin the process of building landing pages for each domain. These pages take on the appearance of a normal looking website, but there are certain distinct characteristics they have that can help us detect whether it’s authentic, or whether it was built by an affiliate spammer. Here’s one example. It purports to be a Hoodia Review site, but there are several telltale signs that should give you pause:

• The page has a vanilla or light appearance. Content is light, dry and impersonal.
• There’s no contact info.
• The date shown on the top right is automated, made to appear as if the content is continuously being updated when it isn’t.
• None of the external links are organic, but are routed using a cloaked redirect. Simply put, an organic link means the actual, natural link to a site. Instead of a simple, organic link however, a redirect is used to hide what’s actually an affiliate link. You won’t know the actual link address until you click on it, and by that time a cookie will likely have been placed in your browser, so even if you backtrack and end up purchasing the same product another day, the affiliate marketer may still receive a commission, depending on the rules of the affiliate program he’s using for that link.

Now take a look at the table near the bottom, listing the ratings for each product. You can bet that it’s suspect. The ratings are completely arbitrary and are based on absolutely no user input at all. This isn’t a Consumer Reports type of site where extensive testing was done to determine the quality of a product here. The affiliate marketer simply made it all up. The top picks are probably only top picks because they offered the best payouts for him.

Note that the links in this table are ALL affiliate links too. Aside from having no user input or testimonies where individuals who’ve tried these products can relay their personal experiences, there’s no other external link of any kind to any editorial source (except for Google Ads of course), and that’s all by design. The affiliate spammer doesn’t want any external link to compete with the affiliate ones, that way he can be assured that the only links you’ll be clicking on are the ones that will make him money. Wasn’t that thoughtful of him?

Once the game has been set up and the landing pages are ready to go, it’s just a matter of running a series of PPC (pay per click) and SEO (search engine optimization) related campaigns to bring targeted traffic to these fake review sites.

Now think about it. There are a countless number of these affiliate marketers all competing to get a commission out of you, all using similar methods. Put them all together and what you have are literally hundreds to thousands of fake websites polluting Google’s search results, especially when it involves a niche that is notoriously prone to this kind of spam. That’s why when you do a search for “hoodia reviews,” you could go ten pages or more into the search results before finally finding a site that’s actually real. And maybe not even.

Hopefully though, what I’ve written here will help you keep a better eye out for these fake, affiliate based websites. Just remember, if you visit one of these sites and happen to click on an affiliate link, make sure you clear your cookies afterwards. That way if you actually do decide to buy the product in question, the affiliate spammer won’t receive any credit for it.

A while back I wrote an in-depth post on how an online scammer was promoting cures for ulcers, shingles, warts and whatnot, all packaged in eBooks you download for a fee.

It’s time to take that a little further and dissect how these scumbags run their games online, especially when they’re working as affiliate marketers.

One particular affiliate marketer recently clued his audience in on how he might typically run his campaigns, and what he reveals is pretty telling. It starts out by picking out what affiliate programs they want to join, which is often accomplished by joining a major affiliate network like Commission Junction, and then performing a search for affiliate programs that offer the highest payouts in the niches they’re interested in.

In this case, diet pills were chosen. The marketer then set out to build what’s called a landing page (in this case a landing page is a website that’s designed to encourage the visitor to click on affiliate links and eventually buy the products mentioned, resulting in commission profits for the marketer.) Look at what he writes:

…I used a review page. I included those offers in a list, and picked an order I wanted. Based on the EPCs my affiliate managers told me, I put the highest offer as the #1 and called it the “Top Rated”, and then the lowest EPC I put at the bottom and rated “Good Choice”. They each were rated 1 to 5 stars. The top rated was 5 stars, and the bottom of the list was 3 stars. You don’t want to rate everything five stars or else it looks fake, and people can tell.

He built a fake review page with a ratings system that had nothing to do with the quality of the products in question. They were actually rated in terms of what would generate the most profits for him!

I sold myself as a legit review site that was there to help the visitor find the best diet pill for them.

In truth he had no interest in helping the visitor make an informed decision at all, but every interest in getting their money. Virtually no effort was made to research the quality of the products he was marketing, or provide original content that weren’t merely borrowed advertising slogans. The only thing that mattered was the bottom line: converting visits to profits. That he would lie and provide misleading information to do so bothers him, not at all.

It’s disconcerting to see a 19 year old punk exhibit such moral ineptness so early in his life, perfectly content in sacrificing his integrity and promoting low quality goods that pollute the Internet, just so he can churn a good profit. And why not? After all, he has already raked in close to a million dollars already with his “marketing” efforts. But then again, drug dealers do pretty good for themselves as well. So do scumbag lawyers. And spammers. And the Russian mob.

This post is already a bit long, so in another post I’ll analyze how these “landing pages” operate, and provide a live example so readers can learn how to successfully detect whether a website was built by an affiliate spammer or not. Stay tuned!

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.

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……

For some time now I used to have this perplexing problem where I simply couldn’t access the administrative section of my blog without it timing out on me. I couldn’t figure out what was causing the latency issues, and I also noticed that if I tried to access it from a different browser or different IP address, the issue would usually clear itself up. It was an anomaly that only occurred every now and then, so I wasn’t too worried.

Then yesterday it started happening again. Only it got worse. MUCH worse. So bad in fact, that I couldn’t access the Admin page at all. Then I started getting 500 internal server errors after trying to access my admin from different browsers and different IP addresses. Nothing seemed to work.

I finally submitted a ticket to my hosting service, Hostgator. I was a little worried that I would get some half baked tech support dude, but these guys really rose to the occasion. After scouring over every nook and cranny of my blog, a network admin emailed me to let me know they they had been experiencing a lot of issues with WordPress blogs that day, and the only common denominator that they could find was that we all had Akismet installed. They since learned that it was an issue on the manufacturer’s side. The network admin then deactivated my plugin and asked me to check my blog again.

Instant access! Yaaaaaay! My admin page was now loading, and it was smoking fast too. I couldn’t believe it.

But now I had another problem. I no longer had protection from comment spammers, and my blog suddenly became open season for these scumballs. I was already getting comment spam while I raced to my options page and set all future comments to moderated status as a temporary fix.

I then went to the home site for Akismet (which is developed by Automattic,) to see what news there were regarding this issue that was apparently affecting quite a few WordPress based blogs.

Nothing. There was no update to speak of, and the Akismet blog itself hadn’t even been updated in a month. So I used their contact form to send them a polite note inquiring about this issue and how soon it would be resolved. No response. So not only did they hose the administrative portion of my blog, but they blow me off on top of that?

Suck it, Automattic. It’s obvious your support system isn’t worth a hill of smelly beans. This was a problem that had the capacity to lock out God only knows how many WordPress users from accessing the admin portion of their blogs, but this seems to matter to you, not at all.

I suspect this might have something to do with using an older version of the Akismet plugin though (I was using 2.0). When I upgraded to 2.02, everything seemed to work fine. But just by going to their website, you’d have no idea that there had been any updates since 2.0. There’s no changelog or even any other basic information, except for a download link for “2.0″ which in actuality was really 2.02.

This wouldn’t frost my cookies so much if it had been any other typical third party plugin, where you can only expect so much support from its developer. This was a plugin developed by the makers of WordPress itself, and one that required API access to their servers. If something goes wrong, it’s liable to create problems not just for them, but for your blog as well.

So… how about a little bit of courtesy here for us little people, mmmm-kay?