Money for nothing, and your clicks for free!

by | Monday, November 24, 2008

I knew that website developers would go to great lengths to rise in Google rankings. What I didn’t know was just how far people were willing to go, till I received this email.

Note: I have deleted all the links and names, since that would be giving free publicity to the sites in question – something they are after.

I’m the webmaster of r a s m u s s e n [dot] e d u
I wanted to know if by any chance you would be interested in doing an unbiased review of our site [URL] on your blog http://punyamishra.com/
If you agree we will send you a payment for the review.
Please let me know if you are interested.
If you are interested please click here to receive your money: [LINK to a page on sepblogreview [dot] com with a long alpha-numeric identifier / parameter
If you want to receive more paid review proposals, just click the following link: [LINK deleted]
If you don’t want to ever receive mails from us, just click the following link: [LINK deleted]
If you have any questions just send a reply to this email.
Thank you

I was sufficiently intrigued that I clicked on the second link, the one that asked me if I was interested in getting some money and this is what the page told me:

We are interested in having a review of our product published on your blog.
The review doesn’t have to be positive, you are free to voice your opinion whether it’s good or bad. The review must at least 300 words long and contains at least 3 links pointing to the pages we will provide you and with the anchor text we will provide.
The website you will have to review is [Link]
The review must come from the blog http://punyamishra.com/

Here is more information about the product:
R a sm us sen College has educated people for more than a century and has taken revolutionary strides toward developing career-focused curriculum that will prepare you for your future career. [LINK]
We can send you money as payment for the review.
Click here [LINK] to recieve (sic) payment.

Now I was even more interested – so I clicked on the last link (despite the spelling mistake) and was redirected to a web-form, which asked me to write down the amount of money I would like to receive for the review. I was also warned that if the amount I requested was too high my offer would be rejected. There were other details such as the minimum length of the review (300 words), that it should have a certain number of links to the site being reviewed (at least 3), and that my review should be published within a specific time period (2 days of receipt of the money).

This is where I decided to stop clicking and started writing this post, wondering about the ethics of all this. Turns out that this is pretty standard procedure as this page indicates: How to buy blog reviews for SEO link building

Now I am as fond of free money as the other guy – but isn’t there something problematic about buying links? What would be a right price-point for me to feel ok about writing this review? I mean, all of us have a price, don’t we? Most interesting was the fact that the site in question didn’t care whether or not the review was positive or negative – what mattered was that the review would have three (at least) links! What a strange world we live in?

Topics related to this post: Blogging | Crime | Economics | Philosophy | Technology | Worth Reading

A few randomly selected blog posts…

2001, 40 years after

Musings on local newspaper headlines, 2001 A Space Odyssey, media and creativity, and ending with some thoughts on the meaning of life... a lot to fit into one blog post but again I had the weekend to work on this. I read our local newspaper, the Lansing State Journal...

Beirut, Nairobi, Paris

After I had posted my "Paris, City of Love" design on FB, my friend Pilar Quezzaire posted on my wall the following question: What about Beirut and Nairobi, Punya? Can you make one for them as well? In another posting she linked to the...

Phoenix rising

Mark Ambinder at the Politics blog at the Atlantic President Obama plans to name Howard A. Schmidt, a veteran cyber security warrior with experience at senior levels of government and industry, to fill a long-anticipated cyber coordinator position at the National...

Learning Futures: The Podcast

Learning Futures: The Podcast

What if education systems were doing more and thinking differently about preparing learners to thrive in the future? The Learning Futures Podcast (from Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College) is a series of conversations on improving education and the future of learning....

Exploring visual space with mathematics

Stacy Clause just sent me this very cool link to an article titled Exploring logo designs with Mathematica. In this article, Chris Carlson, of the User Design Group at Mathematia shows how one can mathematically develop variations on commercial logo designs by the...

Media, Cognition & Society through History:  A Mapping

Media, Cognition & Society through History: A Mapping

If oral cultures prioritize memory and print cultures emphasize systematic organization, what types of knowledge will AI systems foster? Marie Heath and I wrote this line in a chapter that is currently in press. But the idea underlying this quote has been with me for...

Miami / Globe Video Update

Miami / Globe Video Update

I had posted earlier about the work our design initiatives team is involved with at Miami Junior-Senior High School. Essentially the entire faculty and leadership at the school have taken on the challenge of re-imagining the 7/8 curriculum through an integrated...

Systems level change in education

Systems level change in education

How do you design for change in complex systems—like education? Implementing large-scale changes within educational systems can be a challenging task. Doing so requires many actors, working at different organizational levels (and perhaps across organizations), to not...

India Week @ Erickson Hall

The Indian community in the greater Lansing area celebrates India Week every year (more or less) around March. [More details here and here.] As a part of this event I (and other members of the College of Education) have been organizing an Indian themed breakfast and...

6 Comments

  1. mark green

    edu sites are considered to be very helpful for seo purposes so no wonder savvy marketers are willing to pay good money for those linx

    Reply
  2. Eric Carter

    It’s so easy for many people to go for the fast money nowadays, and throw their ethics out the window. In the end it’s not worth it.

    Reply
  3. jd webb

    Hey, thanks for this!

    Reply
  4. Microsoft Cash Back

    Haha. I think that is only the tip of the iceberg as far as how far they are really willing to go.

    Reply
  5. Link Building

    lol! i like the title and beleive in free clicks too. thats why i do seo on my site than spending money on PPC or any other paid adverting.

    btw, i’m a dire straits fan

    Reply
  6. Ultratuga

    That´s a little scary indeed. Everyone wants more traffic and forget all about ethics. It´s hard to create a a trustable and respectable name online, so they keep looking for shortcuts and fast money only.

    Reply

Leave a Reply to jd webb Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *