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If you haven’t been hit up by a company making promises of moving your site up in the search engines chances are you’re not doing business on the Internet or at least no where near the first couple of pages, but do you know how to spot those that are scams?
Recently a client of mine got an email, which I’ll paste below, from a company ( PrivateLinksBuilder.com ) promising to get her higher in the search results through linking. Now getting links to your site is a very important but how you get them is even more important. The company below suggests how they’re going to get links with this sentence, “My partners and I own 1000’s websites and offer private linking to hundreds of website owners just like yourself.” Google would call 1000’s of sites owned by a few people for the purpose of linking back to sites a “Link Farm.” Take Peter and his buddies up on their offer and you will soon watch your site’s ranking go into the tank because Google is on the lookout for link farms and they will penalize you for having links coming back to your site from a link farm.
Pete’s is not the only scam out there though, nor the only manner of scam. So how do you find out if any such a company is scamming. Here are a few steps.
Check the Website in www.whois.sc -
1) when were they registered?
2) Do they use their own service? Type the following into a Yahoo! search site:www.theirwebsite.com obviously replacing their website with the actual url this will tell you how many pages they have indexed and how many links coming back to their site.
2) Google their name plus something relevant in this case you might try Peter Cogan + Linking which gets you this page of search results http://www.google.com/search?q=”Peter+Cogan”+%2B+linking and no shortage of evidence.
Other interesting results:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/msg/4c449f3088311eb9
http://www.google.com/search?q=”My+partners+and+I+own+1000’s+websites+and+offer+private+linking”
Other sites that you may want to put to the test:
www.linkshog.com
http://www.quantumlinx.com/
And here’s Pete’s email to be on the look out for.
I was looking at websites under the keyword xxxx and came across your site xxxx.com. I see that you’re ranked #X on page X in google.
I am not sure if you are aware of why you’re ranked this low but more importantly how easily correctable this is.
There is no reason you cannot have a top three ranking for this keyword based on your site structure and content. You have a very nice site, with quality content.
You need significantly more one way anchor text backlinks.
If you are interested I can help you with this…
I am talking about getting you ranked for ALL your keywords. Adding new backlinks on a steady and consistent basis from high PR quality websites is what produces the rankings you are looking for.
The right kind of links are very critical in getting top ranking….and I can hand deliver these quality links to you.
My partners and I own 1000’s websites and offer private linking to hundreds of website owners just like yourself.
I did not send this email out to thousands of people but I am currently reaching out to a list of your “keyword competitors” as well. You are the one I really favor and the one I see can monetizing the targeted website traffic this can deliver.
I have your contact info as: phone #…-…-….-. Is it Ok to give you a call?
I have a very simple way to prove that what I do works and it is isk free for you to try. Nothing beats seeing the results with your own eyes.
Is it ok if I give you a call? I would love to pursue this further over the phone with you or should I go somewhere else?
Sincerely,
Peter Cogan
PrivateLinksBuilder.com
704-489-0616
P.S - Please just hit reply and tell me specifically who to ask
for when I call and what time of day is best to reach that person
and what is their position with the company?
