Way back in August 2008, eBay took legal action against Shawn Hogan, owner of the popular webmaster forum, Digital Point Forums. You can see the full complaint here.

The original allegation was that Hogan had been stuffing cookies to collect eBay affiliate commission payments. From Revenews:

The short version is that eBay alleges that the affiliates named engaged in “cookie stuffing”, specifically generating hidden forced clicks of their Ebay affiliate links. Hidden forced clicks are when an affiliate link is invoked without a physical click by the end user. Various forms of technology and/or coding are used so that the merchant’s site is not actually seen by the end user. The alleged activities in question occurred between 2003 and mid 2007.  eBay claims measures were taken to hide the activity and that the defendants denied any wrongdoing when questioned by CJ, which at the time was still running  eBay’s program, regarding suspicious traffic.

On the 24th June 2010, a California grand jury handed down indictments again Hogan and an (alleged) partner in crime, Brian Dunning. You can read the Sean Hogan Indictment here, and the Brian Dunning Indictment here. Both have been charged with wire fraud and criminal forfeiture.  Both have since appeared in court and been released, having put up a $100k bond and surrendered their passports. Hogan and Dunning will next appear on th 9th September and August 19th respectively.

I don’t understand American law well enough to comment on the specifics so I’m again going to refer to the Revenews post:

Indictment Specifics

Several interesting specifics were outlined in both of the indictments:

• Between 2006 and June 2007, Shawn Hogan (Digital Point Solutions) earned approximately $15.5 million in commissions from eBay. Hogan was eBay’s number one affiliate.
• Between 2006 and June 2007, Dunning (Kessler’s Flying Circus) earned approximately $5.3 million in commissions from eBay. Dunning was eBay’s number two affiliate.
• Hogan and Dunning are accused of generating hidden forced clicks on both their own web sites as well as sites not connected with the defendants in order to increase the number of computers storing the eBay affiliate tracking cookie.
• The legal criteria for wire fraud was established not on money (commissions) being transferred over the wires, but because of transmission of the tracking cookie between states and internationally.
• The affiliates attempted to hide the activity from eBay and CJ by not engaging in the cookie stuffing on computers located in San Jose (eBay headquarters) or Santa Barbara (CJ’s headquarters). This is geo-targeting and is readily known to be used by affiliates engaging in questionable activity. Of course, not all geo-targeting activity in nefarious.
• Both Hogan (2005) and Dunning (2006) denied any cookie stuffing behavior when questioned by CJ.
• Each individual wire fraud account is related to a particular incident on an IP address outside California (location of eBay servers) where an affiliate cookie for the defendants was set.

There was significant amounts of money involved in this – they were paid more than $20m between them.  It will be interesting to see how this pans out when they next appear in court.

I just added a new “linkbaits” category to the blog, which we will use to hopefully share great examples of link baits. If you’ve created one, or simply seen one, let us know and we’ll consider featuring it.

Jumping on something topical is often the key to success when it comes to link baits, and what could be more topical today than this awesome design BP a new logo competition?

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last month, you have surely heard about the BP Oil spill (also known as the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill or Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill), which has been one of the largest oil spills in history. Every newspaper and TV station has constantly been reporting on BP’s attempt to put a cap on the oil wellhead.

Before that competition link was shown to me, I’d never even heard of Logo My Way, the logo design company behind it. With more than 1200 competition entries and 343,000 competition views this has certainly been a home run from a getting exposure point of view – time will tell if it generates any backlinks. I’ve linked to it here I see Shoemoney also wrote about it, so its off to a start at least!

Some of the entries in the competition are brilliant – their brand name will definitely stick in my mind next time I’m looking to have a logo done, so from a publicity point of view this couldn’t really have been done any better.

The site owner must have put up the $200 prize for the competition, but outside of this there is no costs at all. $200 is going to work out to be an absolute bargain from the exposure the site gets – I’d tell you how much he’s already paid per competition view, but the calculator on my Windows laptop won’t even divide 200 by 343,000 so the number is that small

The beauty of a link bait like this  is the users themselves are providing the content. We’ve created some successful link baits that have taken us more than a week to put the post together from, and they have picked up a lot of links but they have cost us a fair amount to hire people to write all of the content.

If you can have your users do it for you, you save those costs as well as having the other massive benefit that some of those 1200 entrants will be tweeting their entries, leaving them as Facebook updates etc to try and pick up votes to win the cash prize.

So well done to Logomyway.com, if you are in need of logo design I’d check them out.

I received an email from Tradedoubler, who run the Manchester United Credit Card program which is a credit card issued by MBNA.

I hope you had a good weekend.

Throughout the year we have had a number of conversations with MBNA about affiliates appearing on mbna and it?s endorsed partners brand terms. Although we appreciate in most cases this is due to broad matching, affiliates appearing on these terms can negatively affect the performance of mbna?s own brand bidding strategy.

We have finalised a list of negatives which you can download from here:
http://hst.tradedoubler.com/file/172823/mbnanegatives.xlsx This should be easy for you to add into your accounts. Please would you ensure these have been added as negatives across all engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) by end of play Wednesday 19th July?

We’re using tools to monitor coverage over a large number of these keywords so we have a map exactly who has been bidding on these brand terms. Any affiliates found appearing on these terms after Wednesday 19th July will have commission for the relevant card reversed until the problem is rectified.

I don’t want to sound heavy handed but hope you appreciate the business rational around this decision.

If you could please confirm when the full list has been added across all it would be appreciated.

Many thanks,

I was amazed that they would attempt this – it wipes out any chance of a PPC affiliate managing to run these campaigns profitably. These are the keywords they want blocking on a Broad, Negative match for the Manchester Utd Credit Card:

There is absolutely no way that we could run a profitable campaign promoting Manchester Utd credit cards, without bidding on terms related to Manchester United.  I think whoever is setting this up has no idea about the concept of football fans.

If I was forced to only bid on terms like “credit cards” I would be paying far too much and already be out of the game. But for talking sake, lets say I could buy traffic for “credit cards”.  Since I can’t bid on anything related to Man utd, Manchester, Red Devils etc,  these are all just going to be people searching for credit card related things etc.

From those, a massive proportion of them will have no interest in football whatsoever. Unless you are offering them a great APR or bonus for signing up, they are simply not going to be interested in having a football logo on their card and paying extra for it – which you’re doing here since the APR is 16.9%.

So we’ve already lost a massive portion of the traffic we bought, purely because they have no interest in football. But it only gets worse from here, since of all the football fans we have left, many of them are Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea and so on fans – offer them a Manchester Utd credit card with 0% APR for life, free balance transfers, no penalty for missing payments and the card personally delivered by a page 3 model of their choice and the conversion rate is still going to be horrendous.

The very concept of a (specific) football club credit card is polarising – the chances are someone is either going to absolutely love it, or completely detest it. There is no way you can make money buying expensive page views from the haters just to get a handful of prospects.

If anyone has any idea of how you go about profiting in this situation, I’d love to hear them in the comments and I’ll update the main post with your thoughts (and credit links).

Of course if you wanted to target Manchester United fans, you could use geo targeting only to show your adverts from any location south of London…

MBNA have cited brand issues for implementing this, but in this situation that is simply not correct in my opinion. For a start we’re not attempting to bid on MBNA terms, merely things related to Manchester.

Since this campaign can no longer possibly be profitable, we’re running ads like these:

If someone is searching for “manchester united credit card” I would far rather take the easiest path to an affiliate payment and sell them what they are looking for. Instead because of the restrictive terms, I need to actively trash what they are searching for to poison them to it, then sell them an alternative.

The one silver lining to something like this, is it drastically lowers the competition since all the people who choose to stay with the MBNA program can’t bid on the keywords that I can.  Sometimes its far more profitable to simply leave affiliate offers that are becoming too restrictive, bid on whatever you like, and send the traffic to a direct competitor.

Optimize.co.uk – Please stop it with the spam.

I’m not sure why you think its good business practice to repeatedly send this email:

Rajesh () wrote:
Home Contact Us
Contact Details

If you'd like to know more about Optimize and how we could help you then please
contact us at:

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8879 3180
Email: admindept@optimize.co.uk

Optimize Search Marketing
25 Crescent Road
London
SW20 8HA

You can view our Privacy Policy here.

IP:                 10.0.0.58
Referer 1:          Type-in or bookmark
Referer 2:          Type-in or bookmark
Referer 3:          Type-in or bookmark

Page visited 1:     http://www.searchengineoptimisation.org/
Page visited 2:     http://www.searchengineoptimisation.org/favicon.ico
Page visited 3:     http://www.searchengineoptimisation.org/contact-us/

If you want to send it, at least check where you are sending it to. Do you really think a high ranking seo blog is going to hire a fly by night spammer to do SEO for them? Dream on…

We’ve released this plugin to allow blog owners to reward regular posters with a backlink. You can see it in action by looking to the right, we’re displaying it under “contributors”.

You can choose in the options what it takes for a writer to appear, by selecting x posts in y days. Maybe you want 1 post in the last week, 3 in the last month, 12 in the last year – its completely up to you.

Everything is automated. When a writer qualifies, their link will appear without any input from you. If they ever no longer qualify, their link will simply vanish until they qualify again.

In the settings you can select any writers that you want to block from the list. You can also choose whether it displays sitewide or homepage only.

To install it, simply copy the php file to your “plugins” folder. Activate it as a plugin, then go to Widgets (under Appearance) and drag it to where it needs to go. You can change any settings under “WP Contributors” in Settings.

The “powered by” credit link is completely optional.  It is Off as standard, but if you’d like to help support us then feel free to tick the box to display the link

You can download the plugin here. I’ll leave comments on for this one, feel free to ask any questions or leave any feedback.

Groupola.com, the bulk buying discount website, created a publicity stunt this week offering iPhone4’s for £99 – more than £400 off the retail price.

This was the message they were sending out:

The ultimate Groupola summer special: £99 instead of £499 for a sim-free iPhone4 handset

To secure an iPhone 4 for you click on this link on the 2 July
REMEMBER This link will only activate on the 2 July 2010 at 9.30am.
The offer is subject to stock availability and is likely to go very fast. Make sure you are one of the first people to visit Groupola.com this Friday.

With iPhone4’s constantly sold out, and in massive demand, there is simply no group discount to be had. Any website running an offer like this is swallowing a £400 loss on each phone. Groupola have refused to answer questions on how many phones they actually had for sale, so how much it cost them to run this publicity stunt is unknown.

The only way you could get the link to visit when the phones went on sale was to subscribe to their email list. I am assuming this would have generated a massive amount of email signups.

When the deal opened this morning, their website immediately crashed. You are going to need an extremely good server setup to send an email to hundreds of thousands of people at one time, basically telling them “Visit this link RIGHT NOW or you will miss out on getting the hottest phone ever for 20% of its real value” and be able to keep the site live.

The bad feedback has already started. There are hundreds of negative comments on the official Facebook page of Groupola:

Ammarah Ahmad Honestly Groupola.
I’ve been trying since 9.29am.
And as with everyone else, still no luck.
How about you ensure that this deal is actually available instead of advertising your fake ass scams?

Tom Philpotts @Groupola you should have made sure that your servers were able to cope. That was a massive error on your part, now you have many unhappy people who will not use your site. I think just by giving the people the chance that would have been satisfied with that.

Eddie Milner https://secure.consumerdirect.gov.uk/reportascam.aspx

Charlie ‘Dave’ Stevens I can’t complain to consumer direct, as the groupola website won’t load to get their address

Pasquale Biscardi shame on you ! still not saying how many iphones they had…. they need more time to make it up……

Debbie Miller So now they claim they have sold out. yeah right. never had them in the first place.

Matt Game Wasted our time, thanks a lot.

Maggie Bruce GROUPOLA! PLEASE PROVIDE A WORKING UNSUBSCRIBE LINK NOW _ I WANT NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU IN THE FUTURE AT ALL

As I write this, its only 10.30am UK time, and the above are just a tiny selection of the negative comments left on the Facebook page.

The deal is certainly picking up some good backlinks though. The Guardian ran the “story” here, much to the annoyance of their readers, who have left comments such as:

Jameswales There are already so many scammy “win an iPhone/iPad” competitions out there. Why does the Guardian believe this one is worthy of a news story. You should be ashamed to be running this.

Chrisbeach Lost a lot of respect for the Guardian’s Money section after reading this “article”

Fifeman58 How to get a free ad in the Guardian

1. Buy an iPhone for £499
2. Advertise it for £99
3. Get free publicity in the Guardian and a slew of email subscribers – total cost £400.

I thought I had stumbled onto the Daily Express or Daily Mail site for a nanosecond!

Hiphoppopotamus Holy fucking shit. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

It’s like one of those flashing ‘you are our 1 millionth customer – click for a free laptop!’ banner ads, only in credulous newspaper item form.

I’ll make 2 iPhones (for that is probably what they mean by ‘limited’) available for £99 if it buys me an article on a formerly respected national newspaper’s website.

I’d be interested in knowing exactly how many phones they had available at the price. But that’s something that an actual fucking journalist would try to find out, isn’t it?

I’m done with this toilet of a website. Hippo out.

Whoever it was in the Groupola team that managed to get that fluff piece article published in The Guardian certainly deserves a pay rise I don’t think its unreasonable to describe it as nothing more than a glorified advert. It certainly didn’t go down well with The Guardian readers, that’s for sure.

RealBusiness.co.uk have also reported on this, with an article titled Groupola: iPhone deal backfires. From their article:

Groupola’s website has crashed under the strain of web traffic, and rumours are circulating on Twitter that the whole deal may have been a con.

While we’re not suggesting this is the case, Groupola and Mark Pearson are certainly now feeling the wrath of the Twittersphere.

Here’s a representative sample of comments on Groupola:

“You shouldn’t run these deals if you can’t hack it!” - @iamsimonallen

“Spoke to @groupola over the phone, seems all the iphones have been sold. Surprising as no one can get through” – @Dean_Malik

“Everybody knows it was a CON. Watch your followers DWINDLE. CHEATS.” – @Gaspodesm8

“After today’s email harvesting scam, I pledge to cancel my @groupola membership & unsub.” - lee_baines

Update: Groupola have now released a statement:

Groupola is currently experiencing a number of website issues which means that it appears down to a high number of users. This is because of the sheer volume of people that are trying to access the website to take advantage of the iPhone4 deal.

Between 9 and 9.30am this morning more than five million people have attempted to log on to the site, far more than was anticipated. We can confirm that a number of people have already bought iPhones for £99. We are working hard to get the site back to its optimum and the iPhone4 deal will continue to run until stocks run out.

I find it hard to believe that the stocks have not already ran out, but they don’t want to stop sending traffic to their site I am sure.

So when the dust settles, was this all worth it for Groupola? They’ve got some great backlinks and a massively inflated email subscriber list, but on the other hand they have a temporarily non-loading site, a lot of annoyed customers, and their own Facebook page currently looks like a disaster.

Is the statement “no such thing as bad publicity” no longer true in the age of Twitter, Facebook and blogs? Or do these things in fact make it even more correct?

I was reading PPC Blog this morning and came across this great infographic on how Google works for search:

Click the image to see the full size version, this is just a small sample!

Infographic by PPC Blog

I’ve decided in the coming month we will be reviewing some of the more well known Wordpress Themes and clubs. I’ve already reviewed the Thesis Theme, so now its time to take a look at Elegant Themes. If you want to take a peek at their site before reading on, just click here (opens in new window).  As with all my reviews, this will not feature affiliate links, so you can relax in the knowledge I have nothing to gain by going one way or the other.

ElegantThemes.com – What am I getting?

Elegant Themes is a membership site, so you are paying for yearly access to all the themes. New themes are regularly added. The price is only $19.99 a year, paid by Paypal. There are currently 39 themes available for download. In addition to the themes, you get full access to the photoshop files for the themes, and a photoshop file for the logo itself.

Quality of the themes

The quality of some of his latest releases is nothing short of amazing.  Take a look at Personal Press, Glow Theme and Lumin as an example of what Elegantthemes.com can do. I love the way the thumbnail images are framed on Personal Press. Its extremely user friendly too, as you just upload whatever image you want, tag it as “Thumbnail” and the theme will resize it for you and frame it.

If you take a look at Glow and Lumin, you will see the impressive sliders with featured posts. These are extremely easy to set up from the admin area – again the themes will automatically resize your images for the featured part. You just need to select what category of posts you want to use for the sliders. You can also modify the slider speed, and set whether it should rotate through them automatically (which I would always recommend activating, I think it looks a lot more professional).

Are they good for SEO?

If you’re reading my blog in the first place, then you obviously have an interested not only in pretty sites, but making them rank. Elegant Themes have some SEO options built in, such as changing page titles, meta tags etc on a page by page basis. This is obviously nothing that you couldn’t do with external plugins, but certainly nice to have it baked into the theme. One less thing to worry about that could break or need updating etc.

Admin Panel – Any good?

All of the ElegantThemes.com themes work from the same layout of admin area, called the “epanel”. Once you have used one, you have used them all which is great from a time saving point of view.

Its a simple task to click on the tabs, edit your options and make alterations to your site. The epanel might take you 20 minutes to get used to as its certainly different from most other admin areas but once you pick it up its very quick to use to make changes to your site that in a lot of other templates would involve editing php.

There is options to add code to the header or footer, which would be ideal for adding your tracking codes.

I couldn’t take a larger screenshot on this small laptop, but on that screen you can use the visualizer to see exactly what colours you want, then simple scroll down and paste the colour code into boxes. So you can change the colours of pretty much everything from inside the admin panel.

Another part I love is the ability to turn on/off Author, Date, Categories, Comments – in too many themes you need to go digging in the source code to comment them out. No such problem here. You can also alter the settings for Thumbnails and choose whether you also want them added to individual posts or not (tip: enable this! Looks so much better). If you know you don’t want comments on the site, you can also kill them from every post with one click here too.

Support – is it included?

You get full access to a support forum while you remain a member.  The forum is broken down into a sub forum for each theme.  The themes are pretty easy to use out of the box, so to be honest I’ve not really ventured into the forum much. For the purpose of this review I’ve just taken a look, and some people seem to be asking questions about how to do very specific edits, and moderators are really going out their way to help – usually creating and posting the exact code they need to change. The support looks very impressive.

Is it worth the money?

Without doubt, Elegant Themes is the most underpriced theme package you can buy.  Its unreal to think if you sign up now you would be getting all the themes for 50 cents each, plus whatever else is released in the next year. At $20 a year, its a bargain. At $200 a year, I’d say the same.

I honestly think their price point is too low to make their affiliate program effective. They do have an affiliate scheme with a 50% payout (again I want to point out this review doesn’t use affil links). 50% is higher than industry average, but 50% of $20 is still only $10. It’s far more profitable for webmasters to promote Woo Themes or Thesis (Which are both still great themes/packages) than it is to promote the Elegant ones.

Conclusion

If you are working with Wordpress in any way whatsoever, you need to spend $20 and pick these templates up.  My blog seems to be getting known for scathing reviews, and since I refuse to use affiliate links I just tell it like it is. If I had used affil links in this post, I’d almost be embarrassed to hit the “Publish” button since its definitely the most positive review I’ve done so far

I’m trying to think of a negative point to finish off with, and pretty much the only one I can come up with is in comparison to some of his newer templates,  the first 5 he released are looking a bit dated. But hell, just ignore those 5 and you’re getting 34 templates for a bargain price. Not even like they are bad templates, they have just became a victim of the success of his later (more) awesome stuff.

If you want to check them out, click here to visit. Any questions feel free to post them and I’ll do my best to answer.

UKbanners.com, a popular banner exchange system, has found itself at the centre of a massive information leak after accidently posting its customers email addresses, websites and passwords online.

(click to enlarge)

All that anyone has to do to view all this personal information is visit this url – http://ukbanners.com/cgibin/shortfall.cgi

Looks like a massive own goal to leave all this information out in the public.  The same security issue also affects their other websites – ukbuttons.com and cheekybanners.com.

Hovering over the username on that page showed their login name and password. Its unbelievable that they would show all this information on a publicly accessible page, but to then store passwords unencrypted is simply bizarre.

With those login details anyone can login and request payments, edit banners etc.  Lets see if they fix it before this post goes live (I’m emailing them and warning them this has been published to appear tomorrow, 4th June)

This question was asked recently on Google Webmaster Forums:

Is there such a thing as building too many links if you’re following Google guidelines exactly? Too many that you would get banned, even if you were following the rules?

Matt Cutts response:

So basically Matt is saying you can never have too many links – provided they look are natural.