Analysis? Selling Links for Money Spam

Either I’m beginning to become a connoisseur of referral spam or I’m just bored with the usual offerings. Today brought something slightly different to my Blogger stats that piqued my interest: http: // prlog . ru / analysis / from-the-sidelines . blogspot . com . Having my blog address in the spam brings such a warm, fuzzy feeling. Wait.. no, that’s indigestion. Anyway, it was a blink and you’ll miss it hit and run.

Ever curious, I fired up my copy of Ubuntu on a virtual machine and used TOR to anonymously check out the site the link came from. Don’t try this at home unless you know something about security or reformatting your hard drive. Never click on suspicious links like this, leave it to crazy people like me.

Seeing the dot ru ending to the address meant it would be out of Russia and probably in Russian, so no surprises there. I did not use the complete link and omitted my blog address for security reasons. Instead, I went straight to prlog . ru to see what the main site was about.

With no Russian language skills, I didn’t see any obvious clues as to the nature of the site. But mousing over the menu options up top revealed the English language names of the pages and I quickly found “analysis” which had been part of the link. That took me to a barebones input form for typing in a page address.Of course I wasn’t about to do that!

Feeding the main site address to Google Translate produced the above screen captures. Now I started getting somewhere.

PRLog is aimed at getting you to part with money after getting a free analysis of the search engine rankings of your website. Since I was unwilling to enter anything, I can’t say whether or not it gives a good analysis, but my bet would be that it will always find something wrong with your site. Scrolling down reveals that they also provide a widget or counter for your site to track traffic. This seems reasonable until you realize they are also helping sell backlinks, which is a black hat (bad guys) form of search engine optimization (SEO).

Three different forms of backlink purchasing or trading are shown. First up is an exchange for website owners to buy and sell links. SAPE, MainLink, TrustLink, SetLinks, and LinkFeed are listed. Using these services is an excellent way of getting in trouble with Google.

The second category is for external link exchanging and cross blog promoting. Some of this involves writing articles on other blogs or selling the opportunity to do so on yours. While not as black hat as the first exchanges, Google is not very fond of the practices found here. I’ll note that the translation is dodgy in places, so things aren’t as clear as I’d like. SAPE (again), GoGetLinks, Miralinks, RotaPost, and Blogun are listed.

The final category is for services that “automatically” promote sites. How much do you want to bet that spambots are part of this? SeoPult, ROOKEE, MegaIndex, and WebEffector are listed.

Buying links or exchanging articles looks like a good way to get more hits from searches on Google and other search engines, but these methods only provide a temporary boost. Google has been aggressively tweaking their algorithms to hunt down sites doing this and penalizing them. Overnight a catastrophic drop in traffic hits and rarely will a site ever recover from it.

Having been accidently caught in such a sweep though not using any back linking or such, I can tell you the penalties are harsh and you will not always be notified in Web Master Tools if you are signed up for that from Google. A year ago I had added Google’s own ad service, AdSense, to my blog to learn how ads worked on the web. It turned out to be a very harsh education due to an unsolicited link coming in from a Gawker chat, my experimenting with layout, and a meteoric rise in traffic for several months causing the blog to look suspicious to the automated analysis.

Traffic from Google plummeted on December 15, 2012 and I didn’t see any kind of recovery until I removed the ads the following May. Within a month the blog started to get more traffic and I’m now where I was before the rug was pulled out from under me. That’s extremely rare because it is usually a permanent demotion when hit this way.

I can only imagine how much worse it would be if I’d been involved in using services in the spam. Don’t play with fire, kids.