Scam Is this a real deal

[techtimmy]

Hi all

I received this email and wondedred if anyone had dealt with this company before, is this real?

Hi *myname*,

I work for More Digital; a UK based Digital Marketing Consultancy.

We represent clients interested in social media marketing on smaller sites with little or no existing advertising and we're currently looking for advertising partners.

Would you be interested in placing a small text-based ad on *mysite*.net?

We pay a fixed upfront annual fee which we will agree on with you. Once the ad is in place, payment is made within approximately 48 hours.
I hope to hear from you soon.

Kind regards,
*******

I responded to the email saying i would be interested in more info. I received a follow up email.

Thanks for getting back to me! I have two clients you might be interested in:

1) For an online gaming client, I can offer you 120 USD per year
2) For a finance, telecommunications, tourism or health client I can offer you 100 USD per year

We aim to complete payment via secure payment partners Paypal or Moneybookers within 48 hours of the advert going live on your site.

Also, please read our terms and conditions: www.moredigital.com/terms.pdf.

Please let me know which industry you prefer, we'll then let you know which client fits your site best and draft an advert.

Let me know if you have any questions for me.

Best regards,
xxxxxxxx

I know it's not a massive amount of cash it just seems strange someone is interested in advertising with me without knowing hits or anything.

Their website seems genuine. Just not sure if it's real.

 

[retired_member13]

My guess is that they're trying to buy follow links from a range of sites to help SEO. You can take them up on it, but it's against Google's webmaster rules.

 

[alex]

The company records say it is a dormant company and the WhoIs data matches their registered address, so if the email came from them it matches, but they appear to be dormant. The database I'm using says they have a 'High Risk' Credit score and I don't have any account details. Although these may be discrepencies in the database I'm using, it's generally completely up to date.

As many here know PayPal is not secure, they can reverse the payment pretty much any time. My suggestion would be to specify to them that you are interested, but they must agree to your terms (hence an actual secure service). I would take them up on it, maybe counteroffering a price in pounds, say £60 per year, or you would do both for £100? Also get their phone number and say that to advertise you need contact details for the site owner, or if they are legal agents of the registrant then you need their contact details 'should any issues occur'.

 

[kendalcottages]

I receive many similar emails. I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole because...

1) it's spam, IMHO

2) if you take payment for text links on your website, you're risking a Google penalty

 

[leeds1]

^^ what he says

 

[alex]

Okay, the last thing I would suggest is breaking Google's rules, however if this is a genuine opportunity to make money I wouldn't turn it down. Try suggesting that they can advertise in allotted advertising space on your site, using a graphic link - basically do it officially.

Granted much of this is usually spam, but it's not often (well in my case) that it is a registered company that contacts me. I would certainly be cautious (as mentioned above) and I’ll be honest here in saying I don’t know Google’s exact policy so others may better advise, but if you can guarantee payment and you don’t break Google’s rules then don’t miss an opportunity to make a hundred quid.

 

[techtimmy]

OK cheers for input all.

From where I stand at the moment I can't see why a simple paid text link would break any rules. Surely loads of people do it as a basic method of SEO. I've seen lots of people selling link on high PR sites on this forum!

But hey, i don't claim to know anything about Google policy on this so I could be totally wrong! Next stop is looking at what Google say about this!

 

[kendalcottages]

There are lots of people that do it, yes... some get caught, some don't. And it doesn't matter if it's just one link - that can be enough. Here's what Google has to say on the subject:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736

I am guessing that the people wanting to buy from you don't want it with the nofollow condition, but I could be wrong...

 

[alex]

I've never heard of this before, thanks for pointing it out. Is that what advertisers generally do then? I guess for the case of SEO this isn't great, but if the site is after genuine traffic and not PR then they are happy to follow the rules.

 

[kendalcottages]

I was a victim of a Google penalty on one of our sites in August 2008, and it had a knock-on effect for many sites that we ran. Some of the sites were many thousands of pages in size and it was a nightmare trying to work out what we had done wrong. I tried all manner of changes and re-consideration requests, I tried emailing all and sundry at Google... eventually, after many (different) attempts to get Matt Cutts to look at it personally, I got a tweet back from him that pretty much confirmed that it boiled down to a text link we had sold. Even though we had addressed this some time before, and said as much in a reconsideration request, the penalty still wasn't lifted. It was as though it need someone like Matt Cutts to sort it by hand as soon after our communication, traffic from Google started to resume. This was about 12 months or more on from the original problem and traffic didn't (and still hasn't) recovered to the same extent to this day. If your site is a serious one that makes good money, a Google penalty is not something you want to chance IMHO, particularly if it's only for $120 a year.

 

[techtimmy]

The site they want to buy a link on is pretty insignificant but it is on my dedicated server and i dont want that to be black balled as a bad neighbourhood because of 1 naughty link.

I've spent the last few weeks link building this site using reciprocal links from various related directories with high PR. How is Google able to tell which are genuine links and which are paid for?

 

[kendalcottages]

I don't think it can for sure, but it can make an educated guess based on what other links are around, what sites they are on, how quickly they have appeared, whether the anchor text is consistently the same, etc. etc.