buy-traffic.net and friends are gaming Google
Shauna's bookclub is meeting tonight at our house to discuss John Grisham's Skipping Christmas. She wanted me to see if there were any lists of discussion questions I could find online for her. I went to Google expecting to find something relavent...
Do a Google query on "skipping christmas" "book club" questions. As of today, five of the top ten results are from:
- ooipkro.ru
- ribolovam.ru
- wickedtoys.ru
- belkhp.ru
- topnavigator.ru
Amazon.com's product page on the book doesn't even make the first page of results.
Let's try a slightly more specific query and with a -site:.ru to get rid of the Russian sites. There are sixteen results. Some .com friends of our Russian .ru sites show up:
- adnaver.com
- artnetcn.com
Each of the aforementioned websites, when you link through to them, redirect you to buy-traffic.net. (I'm not linking directly to avoid helping their Google PageRank in any way.) The destination page on buy-traffic.net lists a number of affiliate links to various online merchants.
At the bottom of the buy-traffic.net page is a copyright notice of SearchMeUp.com Inc. That website, in its footer next to it's contact link points to umaxlogin.com for it's "affiliate program."
umaxlogin.com purports to offer "the highest paying solution for your search traffic." Their "contact us" page lists (soley) a yahoo.com email address.
A whois lookup of searchmeup.com is registered to a company in Seychelles (a group of islands in the Indian ocean northeast of Madagascar, according to the CIA World Fact Book).
buy-traffic.net, meanwhile, is registered to a Javon Lockley, who ostensibly lives in Muskegon, Michigan.
umaxlogin.com is registered to a company in Cyrpus.
A little research turns up The Russian Institute for Public Networks Whois Service. All the Russian sites listed above are "Corporate" sites registered by one Eduard P Mashkin.
The two .com's, adnaver.com & artnetcn.com, are (at the time of this writing) mysteriously missing their "registrarname" attribute, so no information is available. Very very strange, no?
Quite the global little group, all working together, no doubt, persuing the holy grail of search engine optimization.
I hope Google fights back and bans all these websites from their search results. They are obviously feeding the GoogleBot different content and redirecting all the unsuspecting web searchers to their partner sites for their own pecuniary gain.
—Michael A. Cleverly
Thursday, January 27, 2005 at 19:30
This site buy-traffic.net needs to be reported to Google and other search engines, it trys to install an exe. file when you log onto the site. I cancelled the offer but something tells me this is not a good program based on now what I have read here.
Thu, 23 Jun 2005, 07:27