Want to save yourself or your clients a quick $5000?
Make sure you understand an Adwords pyramid scheme that has been becoming more popular this year. You’ll be surprised at how many people still get duped by these scammers:
What’s the Sales Pitch?
I’ll quote directly from one sales letter:
“3.5 million visitors on average per year to our site, verifiable by Google. Approximately 10 thousand visitors to your state page per month average. So far, month to date, 724 click thru visitors from us to “Your Rival”, 901 visitors from us to “Another Rival”. This traffic, please note, is comming directly from the “Valuable Keyword” searches. We offer “the best Quality traffic for “Valuable Keyword” that the internet can offer”.”
How the Scheme Works
- The scammers buy their way onto the frontpage with Adwords and assume that victims can’t tell the difference between being on Google’s frontpage via organic results and via Adwords. You’ll be surprise at how many people don’t understand the difference.
- One person pays them $5000 which they can spend on Adwords while they look for new victims.
- The cycle continues for as long as they can find victims. Even one victim per month can produce a basic income – spend $2500 on Adwords, keep $2500 for yourself.
How to Spot These Schemes
- The best links are the ones you find yourself. Automatically assume that anyone actively seeking you to sell links is a scammer.
- Check when the domain was registered via domaintools.com and check to see the history of their site via archive.org. This particular scammer registered his site in December 2005 according to Domin Tools and launched the site in early 2006 according to Archive.org. Hardly enough time to rank well for “Valuable Keyword”.
- Actually check their search engine results, links and Page Rank for yourself. The SEO toolbar for Firefox is an easy way to do this. This scammer doesn’t rank in the top 100 for any keyword related to his business, has 15 Yahoo links and a Page Rank of 0.
- Check their traffic via compete.com. Its not 100% accurate but it will give you a good idea? of whether they’re telling the truth. This scammer who claims 3.5 million visitors per month is barely averaging 8000.