Real Estate Blog Directory Reciprocal Link Scam
Posted by John Lockwood on December 2nd, 2006
Recently I posted a blogroll link to a Real Estate Blog directory — look there it is again, albeit with a penalty nofollow tag. It seems these industrious fellows are garnering page rank by encouraging reciprocal links back to their blog directory — sort of a Web 2.0 circa so-ten-minutes-ago approach.
Well, that was fine, I bit. Here’s a portion of the confirmation I received:
YOUR LISTING HAS BEEN ACTIVATED!
—————————————————–
Thursday 30th of November 2006 08:55:50 PM
Name: John Lockwood
URL: http://www.placerville-realestate.com
Title: Amador and El Dorado County Real Estate Blog
Description: Local Realtors® discuss homes, land, and the real estate market in Amador County and El Dorado County, California.
Reciprocal: http://www.placerville-realestate.com
Reciprocal Verified: Y
Well, so far so good, except today I was doing some surfing around, and lo, my incoming link was gone, as was the rest of my customer record. So either their MySQL DBA has been hitting the crack pipe pretty hard since getting out of rehab, or this site is deliberately scamming webmasters to grow their incoming link count.
Well, some good came out of it — it’s something to post about so these scammers just helped a hungry person. And now we’ve added a touch of caveat linktor to out blog. Sweet.