MoreDigital: Promoting links to Spammers. I’ve always believed that you shouldn’t link to sites that practice spammy SEO (keyword stuffing, hidden links/text, etc.) or that take part in dubious tactics or have malware issues.
But really, how does the common person know who’s spammy and who’s not? People should understand the concept of “guilty by association.” It’s just like any personal relationship in that who you hang out with says a lot about who you are. Live by that understanding, and you should be fine.
Matt Cutts puts it this way, “The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?”
Google goes on to say, “Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as — Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the “a” tag — or Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file.”
This evening I received a linking request suggesting that I accept money for a text link.
This is the email I received:
Hi,
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.
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.
Would you be interested in placing a small text-based ad on any of your websites?
Kind regards,
—
I get all kinds of email, mostly from India, claiming this, that, and the other with regard to web development, so I’ve been in the habit of reading email headers now for a number of years. This particular email was suspect, so I took a look at the header. It wasn’t from India at all. It was from the U.K..
My curiosity was spiked by now, so I looked into this a little further. Was someone actually trying to purchase ad space on the site?
I asked this of myself because relations with the U.K. are generally positive and above the board. Sure, here’s the mail server [mail.moredigital.com]. Everything matched up. But even still, the email didn’t quite measure up. I’ve been in ads for a number of years and usually, ads are paid for before being posted. Media kits are often times sent out, agreements are reached, contracts are signed among other what-nots. This email however, had the ad being placed before payment, which is not exactly how it’s done in the real world of advertising.
At any rate, I looked into this a little more and Googled some terms. It appears that these guys are old hat with regard to they’ve been sending out these exactly worded emails for a number of years now. I wasn’t the first one, and from what I can tell, I certainly won’t be the last to get just such an email from these people.
I found a few other places online that discusses this very same organization:
Piotr Krzyzek of piotrkrzyzek.com had this to say, “So, lets take a look at the company MoreDigital. They are up on Web Of Trust: http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/moredigital.com. They got a lot of complaints of spam, presumably from the mass e-mails they sent out. It doesn’t look too good from Site Advisor either: http://www.siteadvisor.cn/sites/moredigital.com/msgpage. There is a small discussion on this forum about it: http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/domain-name-scams/69141-real-deal.html.”
Travis Weston had this to say about MoreDigital, “It’s been 2 days now, and I’ve not heard back from them. I don’t believe I will. What’s the lesson in all this? Do your due diligence. Don’t just get blinded by the opportunity, because if you do you’re bound to be used. Put the work in, ask around, do a simple Google search. Decide after all that if you still want to do business with the person, or company, that you’re considering. You might end up with someone like More Digital. Or you might end up with someone awesome, and have an excellent business relationship that can skyrocket your site to stardom.”
And Steven Wright over on junkpit.net had this to say, “They approached me with a request to add a link to an online gaming platform for a cash sum of *125USD* on my personal web domain. It didn’t quite smell right, but I was curious about the detail, so I replied. After an email reply, more for my curiosity of the detail, ‘online gaming’ is really for ‘PartyCasino dot com’, and when I found this out, I replied with a “thanks, but no thanks”.
At any rate, here was my response to More Digital.
—
Thank you for contacting us.
We do have a media kit available for anyone who wishes to advertise on any of our internet web properties. If you like, I can send you one. Just write back with your address and current daytime/business phone number and I would be more than happy to send it out right away.
Included in our media kit are the prices for advertising on our web properties.
Quick overview of pricing schedules:
Primary pages: $150.00 USD per month
Secondary pages: $90.00 USD per month
Others: $45.00 USD per month
All ad space sales are to be paid in advance, there are no exceptions.
Ads are placed solely at our discretion, and all ad links include the rel=”nofollow” attribute.
We reserve the right to edit and/or delete advertisements that are not relevant to the url being presented in the ad and the placement of ads on our web properties are subject to our Acceptable Use Policy and our Privacy Policy.
An advertising contract is required (included in our media kit) and must be signed and returned with your full payment for the type of account selected before any ads can be placed on any of our internet web properties. All ads for adult, gambling, gaming, dating, Viagra or other sex enhancing sites will be rejected and your money returned to you minus a 30% assessment fee.
I do hope that I have made myself fairly clear on some of the rules.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions, I look forward to working with you.
Thank you for your interest in advertising with us.
Have a wonderful day
—
I left it at that.
I thought it best to respond in the most appropriate way possible — if not for any other reason than to let them know that advertising is a serious business and something that shouldn’t ever really be messed about with, either online or off. If More Digital wants a working ads relationship with us (which I doubt they do) then we’ll be more than happy to provide them with one, but only on the terms that the industry itself determines.
