Beware of the REL NOFOLLOW Scam

Beware of the REL NOFOLLOW Scam

By Strictly-Software

For those of you who sell articles or blogs to people you should be aware of a scam I have been caught in twice now.

I call it the rel nofollow scam as it basically means people get link juice from your site without paying for it.

The scam goes like this.

1. Someone offers to pay you £$ for an article to appear on your site. Usually with good PR. 
2. They send the article which has links to their own site in it one or more times. There is NO rel="nofollow" on these links. 
3. They say it will take 3 days to pay you so you put the article up. 
4. 7 days later you are chasing them for the money as it hasn't been sent to you. 
5. They then make some sort of excuse why they cannot pay you and say "take the article down". Which of course you do. 
6. However unbeknown to you they have already obtained what they wanted, which was BOTS like GoogleBOT, BING and so on, to crawl the article and then follow the link to their site passing on the link juice from your site. 
7. Believe it or not the benefits of this link juice being passed stays around long after the article exists. 
8. So you have basically been ripped off as they have got their PR and link juice and you haven't received a nickel.

Don't Believe Me?

At my company that makes Job Boards we used to do tests to prove to our boss we could get to number 1 on Google for a one page Job Board for long tail terms like "latest jobs in CSS" or "latest London jobs in SQL".

We did this by turning on a switch that at night made sure every major SERP BOT (GoogleBOT, BING) saw different banner links, alt and title values than normal.

Because we had hundreds of Job Boards it looked as if they were all pointing up at our magnificent Job Board.

This was in the days where the number of backlinks was king and SEO companies selling links from directories was the main thing SEO companies did.

So we were testing features for "boosting" a sites Page Rank through linkage systems.

This wasn't the "illegal" GoogleBOT masking method of showing different content to humans and then to robots.

The reason is that banners rotate anyway and the href, alt and title values will change naturally anyway.

If you refreshed most sites with banners they will rotate and show different images than the page load before.

If all these sites were all breaking the GoogleBOT masking rule no site would be able to rotate banners.

So to a SERP BOT it looked like our one site Job Board was sitting at the top of a pyramid with 200+ high PR Job Boards all passing link juice our way. Basically saying although we have good PR, this site is better than us (in basic terms).

Also a mate who had an online T-Shirt company that was ranking nowhere on Google turned this "feature" on for a weekend, changing the TITLE and ALT attribute values to all have multiple long tail keywords within them.

Here is an example of a multiple long tail stuffed attribute:

"Buy the best XX T-Shirts from XX company, the best looking XX T-Shirts by company XX. Buy XX T-Shirts now for rock bottom prices! Sale now on at XX Company" 

Within a week he was on the top of the first page of Google! 

Also even though the "tweak" was turned off after a few days the benefit he got from all these sites linking to him over just a couple of days lasted for ages.

He was still on the top page of Google many months later!

Even after we turned this Job Board feature off the one page jobboard stayed at the top of Google for months later for our desired keywords.

The algorithms may have changed by now for BOTS but the idea of passing juice along to sites with higher "domain authority" than you still exists.

The ideal SEO situation for a site linking to you is this.

A site with a homepage where there is only one link on it which points at your site.

This is basically telling the SERPS that your site is "better" than them e.g it has more site/domain authority than them.

Plus as their homepage only has a single link on it (the most important page on a site) and this link goes to YOUR SITE then they are telling the SERP BOTS that crawl it that this other site MUST be very important.

The original PR algorithm is below. It is probably much more complex now and SERPs use responsive site designs, social media and load speed a lot more in weighting the "worth" of a site when ranking it.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)) where:

PR(A) is the PageRank of page A,

PR(Ti) is the PageRank of pages Ti which link to page A,

C(Ti) is the number of outbound links on page Ti and

d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1.

The original PR algorithm.

This scam has actually happened to me twice now so I am putting an end to people stealing link juice that can stay around for ages anymore by insisting that rel="nofollow" is put on all links UNTIL I get paid.

Once I get paid I remove the rel="nofollow" attribute and they get the benefits of the link juice they are paying for.

I usually change the posted date of the article as well so it looks like a new post to ensure BOTS will crawl and see the new links.

So beware.

This REL NOFOLLOW scam is real and I have fallen for it.


© 2014 Strictly-Software

Websites For Sale - Buy Now

I am in the process of selling a number of domains and if you are interested please contact me to discuss a price.

Most of these domains also have either code associated with them, Twitter accounts and automatic TweetBots that post to those accounts or post articles to the website.

If you are interested in purchasing this code as well as the domain name then obviously this will cost you more. 

The sites are:

www.hottospot.com

• domain
• website
• Twitter account
• Tweetbot

www.hattrickheaven.com

• domain
• website
• Twitter account
• Tweetbot

strurl.com

• domain
• website

A site I have had to take down due to my hosting company not "agreeing" with people being able to provide shortlinks to their websites!

You can see a screenshot of how the site looked before it was taken offline below.




The prices are all up for negotiation and you can contact me by using the contact link in the footer of the page or from this email

It's a bit hard to get accurate statistics seeing that I have had to take 2 of the sites down and put up holding pages in their place which is why I am using screenshots from Google Webmaster Tools.

However all 3 sites have been around for over a couple of years so they will all have site authority and a page rank of at least 3 to 4.

Plus they will have lots of back links from news sites, football sites, my own blogs and sites and many other sites - and none from spammy directory sites that are totally bad for SEO!

For example for  www.hattrickheaven.com using http://www.opensiteexplorer.org and Google web master tools I got these details:

• Page Authority 32/100 
• Domain Authority 21/100 
• 6,419 URLs indexed.
• 134,077  Links to site.

If you are interested in running your own #altnews website email then I suggest buying www.hottospot.com as it already has over 15,000 articles in it's database and uses Wordpress as its back-end.

You should  read this article on it or contact me at   to discuss purchasing options.

Let me know! 

Implementing SEO Strategy too late in the day

Think about Search Engine Optimisation early in the day

In my 10+ years of web development I have noticed many mistakes that customers make in terms of creating an application that meets their requirements as well as being cost effective and delivered on time. Most of the mistakes and problems can be traced back one way or another to not having a detailed specification document that is not only just signed off by both parties but also kept to 100% with any deviation treated as new work to be costed and developed.

Loose specs lead to misunderstanding's from both parties where the customer expects one thing and the developer is building another. Even with a signed off stringently kept spec there is also the problem of customers not understanding the technical limitations or boundaries of the system they are buying into. An example I want to give is in relation to SEO which is usually treated as an after thought by the customer rather than as a key component during the specification stage. I work for a recruitment software development company and have built a system that is now running 200+ jobboards. I have noticed that what usually happens is that the customer is under some illusion that the 7 or 10k they have spent on a site has bought them a custom built system that is flexible enough to allow any future development requirement that they may wish to have down the line. Now this maybe the fault of the sales person promising the earth for peanuts or it may not but in reality they have bought an off the shelf generic product that can be delivered quickly and comparatively cheaply exactly because it hasn't been custom built for their requirements.

One of the ways this problem manifests itself is in Search Engine Optimisation as the customer will usually wait a couple of months after the site going live before realising that they are not top of Google for the word jobs and ask why. They then discover numerous SEO specialists that offer to get them to the top of Google for certain terms and invest lots of money in audits and optimisation reports only to find out that we cannot implement everything they want because they are using a system with a shared codebase. Yes our system has numerous inbuilt features for SEO that can be turned on and off but asking for and expecting specific development that has been recommended by a 3rd party after development has completed can cause unneeded stress and tension especially when the customer is told no due to system limitations.

What the customer should do is think about and investigate the possibilities of SEO before the specification document has been signed off rather than months after the site has gone live. This way any limitations of the system can be discussed so the customer is made aware that spending money with a 3rd party who is also unaware of system limitations is probably a waste of £££. Also any good ideas they may have regarding SEO requirements can be planned out and possibly developed during the main development phase rather than thrown in later as an after thought. Even if its a generic system good ideas are good ideas and a benefit for one customer will be a benefit to others as the development house can make money by reselling the feature as an add-on to existing customers.

I am not saying 3rd party SEO consultants don't do a good job but potential customers of sites need to be aware of what they are buying and what is and not possible before they spend money with any 3rd party. There can be nothing worse than spending money with a consultant only to find out that their recommendations cannot be implemented or if they are implemented it will cost even more money for the extra development. So take my advice and think about SEO before not after development as not only will it save time and money but having good SEO from the off will mean your site gains better positioning in the search engines quicker rather than later.

Further Reading:

Please read this article of mine about techniques for good and bad search engine optimisation.