The following scam isn’t new, but it is the first time anyone tried it on turnipofpower.com. It’s also the first time someone tried to scam me through cre8buzz.com. Here is how the scam works. You receive a comment or email saying ” I love your site and want to exchange links with you. I’ve already put a link to your site on my page.” Sure enough, when you go to their page, you see a link in their blogroll.
It’s a scam because they are either diguising the real link in the email, or checking referrers to show you a special version of their website. If you type their URL into your browser by hand you discover the truth. There really isn’t any backlink to your site.
Take a look at the actual email:
Hello,
Recently I visited your website http://turnipofpower.com ; while visiting your site I noticed that you link to http://www.cre8buzz.com at this address: http://turnipofpower.com/2008/07/07/cre8buzz-social-network-reviewed/. As we are closely related to them, I would love to exchange links with your website, currently there are about 5,000 – 7,000 people per day that goto my site and search for information, Therefore I would to link to an excellent site like yours.I have taken the liberty of adding your site to my home page: http://www.torontorealestatedirect.com to determine if it is of any benefit to you, if you have a stats program you can check it and let me know. By looking at my stats, it looks like today I have sent you 49 visitors but it may change by the time you receive this email.
Some website owners do not like when other sites link to them so I thought I might ask first. I think the information on your website could be useful to my visitors; and maybe you could receive some extra relevant traffic if you want. Please get back to me when you have a chance to let me know if its ok to link to your website like this.
Have a good week,
Melissa Thompson
Notice she claims my link is at http://www.torontorealestatedirect.com. If you check the code, it actually links to http://www.torontorealestatedirect.com/?pg=3gOKr where suddenly there is a backlink to turnipofpower.com. Scam! Also notice how “Melissa” talks like she discovered this thingy called “the internet” yesterday and whats to try her hand at SEO and backlinks. I get it it, some Toronto Real Estate Bimbo discovered how to scrape an entire social network, generate 10k unique pages for the users of that social network, and then mass mail all 10k people on that list. Not bad for your first day on the internet.
So who owns this page? Their nameserver points to ILLUSIVECREATIONS.COM. Hmm, an SEO company. Looks like a shady outfit that does a little “blackhat magic” for their clients. I sent them a little note to abuse@ILLUSIVECREATIONS.COM requesting I never be sent any feces by them again. I’m sure they listened.
You should take this as a compliment. If they are prepared to go to all this trouble to get a link from you, they must really think your site is special. Just what are these guys going to think of next?
I just got the exact same e-mail the other day. I simply ignored it as not of it really made sense, especially the linking they suggested.
What’s REALLY sad is that for every person “smart” enough to figure out what’s going on, there are probably 500 others who blindly back linked to the site and think it’s reciprocal.
I have read about this sneaky technique in some link building methods list. But this is the first time I am seeing this.
It’s worse than people who do link exchanges and take off the link after a month.
I got the email the other day too. I don’t really have a place for a real estate company on my blog.
I get the same type of email every week. I just ignore them. Never actually clicked the link to see their BS. Like Tom said, a real estate company on my blog doesn’t fit at all.
I was also sent this exact same message and ignored it. As soon as I checked out the site and saw it was a site completely unrelated to mine I figured it was either a scam or run by a complete moron.
Hopefully you keep at least some people from falling for this scheme in an attempt to get traffic.
I was surprised to see this. Not because I haven’t had my share of scammers, but because cre8buzz.com is no more. It went down some time ago and I doubt it’s coming back.
Timbury: That’s what made me notice the email in the first place. I went to check if cre8buzz was back online. I doubt the antman sold his mailing list. More likely this person searched google for any sites linking to cre8buzz. That makes sense, because people that link to dead sites don’t pay attention to what they link to, nor do they update often. So anyone falling for this scam is likely to be giving them a lifetime backlink.
It always amazes me at the different ways scammers and con artists keep trying their darndest to get the “normal” folk on the Internet.
If they ever though about it and turned all the energy they use in trying to “get” people with their scams and used for “Good”, they would probably make a decent thing with their energy. But they’ll never learn.
Beamer
Yes, I do receive such offers of link exchange.
Thanks for noting.
What a shamless seo method ..I have learn a lesson from you .Thanks.
Thanks for telling us about this scheme. I’ll be very careful when accepting link exchanges in the future, and I’ll check all the ones that I have currently.
Nathan
I remember reading this when you first posted it. Well, today I received an email from a gambling site and it is an EXACT copy of the letter you received. Thanks for the warning!