I have registered a bunch of domains that were dumb. Lots of random combinations of related keywords that made no sense in the hopes that I could “SEO” it. I mean seriously… lol.. what was I thinking? I have bought lots of domains with dashes in them which I think are bad as a rule of thumb for organic but are great for PPC. Sadly most of the ones I purchased were so I could once again.. .”SEO” it. Thank god I am not drinking that koolaid anymore.
Some of my more interesting purchases…
iLoveToPoop.com - I figured I’d make a poop report type site. What can I say I have a really low brow sense of humor. Registered this awhile ago then my son found out about it and decided he wanted it. It was his first site, he thinks the name is embarrassing now but at the time he thought it was the funniest thing ever.
AlCaydah.com - I envisioned this being a video blog of some average joe type middle aged guy who happened to have an unfortunate name, Al P. Caydah. I dunno I still think the ideas funny but it requires an odd sense of humor. i never took this anywhere because the work required to do it right would be to much for me alone.
Hacklactica.com - Honestly I love this name and I still might make it into something. I see this as a place for promoting scripts and programming news.
Jowlbangers.com - It was on the Daily Show as an adult site for people who loved men with large jowls. I registered it a minute after they mentioned it. It was funny.. then nothing came of it.
MattCuttsFacts.com - I made a Chuck Norris facts type of spoof site for Matt Cutts. Its silly… totally my sort of thing If you have any interesting Matt Cutts facts please post them. ;-)
Web-Professor.net - I hate my domain name. It has a dash.. its a dot net… its terrible. Man I was bad at buying domains back then.
Maybe I am just bad at buying domains…. what purchases have you ended up regretting or laughing at later?
* PS. I am much better at buying domains now. ;-)
Is Tramadol the new Mesothelioma? I have been seeing lots of Tramadol spam on my sites the last few monthes. I think its more popular than dick pills for spammers at this point. I had no clue what it was so I decided to take a look.
What is Tramadol?
Tramadol is a pain medication. It is an opiate. It apparently isn’t as addictive as other opiates so its not a controlled substance in the USA. Its used to treat moderate to severe pain. There are lots of off label uses for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramadol
NIH says that Tramadol comes in tablet form and should not be crushed or snorted. I am wondering if thats a way to abuse it. Would they mention it if people werenlt doing it? Its supposed to be weaned off of so you don’t experience withdrawals. Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/medmaster/a695011.html
The brand names of Tramadol are:
- Ultratram
- Ultratram ER
- Ultracet ( has acetaminophen in it )
How do spammers make money with Tramadol?
Types of Sites
Affiliates and direct advertisement sales seem to be the only way they are making money. I haven’t seen any adsense setups. I have seen two types of setups. The first they collect all the lead information, I assume they then pass it on to the pharmacy. These types of setups are generally appear to look like online pharmacies.
The next types are basically link farms that refer the user to a site that can fill their need. These are generally information type sites with links to the online pharmacy. Some though also appear to be online pharmacy as well but when you click a link on a particular drug they take you to the pharmacy site.
Adsense:
I didn’t see any made for Adsense type sites for pharmacy. Checking Adwords budget creator the terms cost around 70 to 90 cents. That could convert to clicks worth as much as 45 cents, though its likely less with smart pricing and splitting of budgets between content and search networks.
Affiliate Programs
Payouts for affiliate programs tend to be around 40% for something like 6 to 27 dollars a sale. I have no idea what the average sale volume is no do I know if the programs share future revenue per signup. Seems like a pretty crappy deal to me if they don’t share revenue for the life of the customer. All and all payouts are pretty good though.
Some programs that I read good things about:
- http://www.glavmed.com/ 30% to 40% (revshare recommended on syndk8)
- http://www.rxpayouts.com/ (recommended on syndk8 and digitalpoint )\
Pitfalls:
There are lots of warnings though about promoting pharmacy related affiliate programs and being in the US. News on the street has it you can be held liable if the pharmacy ships drugs with out valid prescriptions. There are several related news stories reporting just that.
Once recent story thats getting a lot of attention is the saga of AffPower.
… Covino and Prasad are just two of 18 defendants charged by indictment on July 27, 2007, for their involvement in the Affpower online pharmaceutical business. Defendants include: three physicians (including Prasad), two pharmacists, a pharmacy owner (Covino), an administrator and manager, two recruiters of physicians and pharmacies, a credit card processor, and eight affiliate website operators. … via networkworld.com
Relevent information on promoting pharmacy affiliates
Overall it seems risky but extremely profitable. The monetary figures quoted on the news stories were as much as $5,000 to $10,000 a day for the top of the line. With the threat of jail time I wouldn’t do it with out talking to a lawyer first.
What are they doing to promote their Tramadol sites?
Some examples: ( from “online tramadol” )
On Google:
Lots of parasitic pages are being posted on “trusted sites” to promote their particular sites.
http://www1.epinions.com/user-matthewseiler/show_~View_Profile - currently #1
- Not seeing any backlinks for this page anywhere.
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=profile;u=145742 - currently #3
www.youtube.com/PaulTaylort - currently # 4
Once result that I thought was particularly interesting was this page on harvard.edu. The cached version of the page and the current version show no “tramadol” terms on the page. To make it rank for tramadol the page had to be referred to with anchor text or on page text from other locations. Checking the backlinks to that page via Yahoo site explorer we see Doc Searls old blog is overrun with spam and a majority of the links come from there. His old blog is also still indexed demonstrating again the power of parasitic links on a trusted domain. Also this points out the power of anchor text thats still in effect with Google.
On Yahoo:
Top result is a “legit” wikipedia entry everything else is I am seeing is just crud. Yahoo is susceptible to the same parasitic pages that Google is with one difference. Yahoo doesn’t detect redirects as well as Google so many of the results automatically take you to the target pharmacy site. I guess thats a good enduser experience (lol). Considering that only one site is good and the rest junk I suspect the Wikipedia entry is a hand job.
One interesting site was the CBS search page… looks like someone is linking in to a search page on CBS in such a way to produce Tramadol results that highlights their site. The search page is a Google site search page and the spammer used the “intitle:” and “site:” commands. It looks like it worked for sometime but the “intitle” command no longer works for Google site search on CBS. The search page isn’t blocked via robots.txt or meta robots. Its notable that Yahoo can’t detect and remove Google site search pages.
[note] Advanced search operators for Google
On Live:
Live is pretty much over run with spam too. The only difference in the spam with Live is that they seem to trust “groups” sites. Yahoo groups and MSN groups dedicated to Tramadol are at the top.
An interesting site that I guess is a legit result is http://www.onlinetramadol.org/. I have always noticed how domain names affect MSN rankings. If your domain is exactly what the term is it seems that you will always rank for that in MSN. (Please note thats anecdotal only ) .
Overall:
I am not seeing much in thats legitimate in the search engines that isn’t paid for. Google seemed to do the best ot of all of them but thats relative. Its almost as if they all have just decided to fly the white flag and surrender the serps for these terms. The only difference in the spam from engine to engine is that Yahoo can’t catch sites with redirects.
In conclusion
There are lots of things I haven’t looked at here like:
- Where are these guys located?
- who are they?
- where are they spamming from?
- how deep are the levels of their parasitic link networks?
Its easy to see why the spammers are promoting this. Its really good money for the most successful. It doesn’t seem to be worth the same as the good old “meso” days. Mesothelioma was an adsense fueled spam phenomena which made it easy and fairly low risk. In comparison this spam craze is fueled by selling something that can earn you serious jail time.
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Filed under: Misc, Tools — Scott @ May 14, 2008 10:36 am |
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Doug Heil the Don Quixote of search. Forever ranting about whats not ethical in search optimization. He also happens to be a SEO professional providing services via his site ihelpyou.com
Lets see what he ranks for….
- doug heil
- ihelpyou
- 301 redirect penalty manual
- persuasive online copywriting pdf
- spam-whackers.com
Would you trust advice an SEO firm that didn’t rankfor anything relevent?
Yeah me neither.
AJAX… pointless… most web apps using it don’t need it. Its just the latest bit of technology porn for developers to masturbate to. Honestly are all those libraries needed to validate some forms? To make some single page desktop like app? The way I see it being used most of the time AJAX is crippling the site.
How is a mobile browser going to deal with it? How is a blind user going to use it? How are the people that are still on dial up going to use it?
Their not…. their going to use the Craigslist-like sites.
Simple to the point web sites will always win.
