Textbook SEO - Textbook spam

Here is how to drive traffic and make money the easy way - until you get caught.

Alternatively, I could have titled this “How to take traffic from Google and get Yahoo to pay you for it”

Here is an innocent looking site www.porthalcyon.com and another here www.co-motion.com - Just what do these two sites have in common? About 50,000 pages.

Let me walk you through it:

Do an search on Google using the following [site:co-motion.com] type it in exactly as shown without the brackets, then click SEARCH.

You will see results “Results 1 - 10 of about 13,800″. This amount may vary. Thirteen thousand pages seems like a lot for a bike shop and if you surf through the page numbers at the bottom of the search results and go to results 180 and above you will see something interesting.

Notice all the org.co-motion.com pages? Take a look at a few of them. I am just grabbing the first few such as org.co-motion.com/org/laptops.html, org.co-motion.com/org/seafood.html or org.co-motion.com/org/herbalife.html. Take your pick, you have 13,000 to choose from. These are pages designed to trick the search engines. Typically, they are called Search Engine Spam pages.

If you click one of those spam pages you will be taken to a cheezy directory that that pretty much has nothing but ADs on it. http://dp.qsrch.com/ is the directory - I visited the org.co-motion.com/org/401k.html page and was treated to a nice page full of Yahoo Search Marketing Ads for 401 K plans. I bet those ads pay pretty well.

HERE IS WISDOM

Pick your favorite spam page from co-motion.com - I will use org.co-motion.com/org/antidepressants.html - and get ready to click the Google Cache link. When you click the link you will be redirected to the directory page, but if you are quick, before you are redirected - you will be presented with the Google page which has a link at the top right side called CACHE TEXT only. If you click this link you will be able to see the page that Google was shown. That is a different page than what a visitor sees.

You can do all the above tests with another domain - porthalcyon.com

The spammy pages are under the second level domain dir.porthalcyon.com.

Now, take dir.porthalcyon.com and run it through the DNS Lookup on www.DNSstuff.com . We are looking for the IP address of dir.porthalcyon.com and it gives us 207.58.149.128. This IS resolves to non other than www.co-motion.com.

Surprise, surprise. These sites are starting to work their way to the top of many search results.

Read more about it at ThreadWatch - iPowerWeb and Spam Sub-Domains

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