You can get yourself a highly trusted link from a site with a pagerank 8 homepage for absolutely no cost – and you get to support a charity whilst doing it.

Sounds good? Well all you need to do is head over to Kiva.org and sign up for an account. Kiva is an organisation that partners up with entrepeneurs in the 3rd world, giving them loans to set themselves up in business.

This is where you come in – you just need to create a profile, choose one lender and give them a minimum of $25. Once you have done this, you will be able to add a backlink to your profile.

This money will go towards setting someone up in business. Whether its to set up a fruit stall in Liberia or to help fund a flour selling business in Togo, you will get the cash returned to you in full once the person you are helping is in profit.

Its an absolutely brilliant system – you make one small payment which you get back later anyway, and you know you have helped make a massive change to a families quality of life.

You can check out an example profile with a link in it here.

So why not do a good deed today, head on over to Kiva and get a little thank you backlink into the bargain!

If you are interested in getting more details, please fill in the contact form below.

We decided to list our site on business.com (listing page here). Seems they have ever so helpfully decided to change our listing title from optimiSation to optimiZation – even although the correct version is in our url.

We are a UK Company, we offer optimisation, not optimization. I don’t think its fair for someone else to change the spelling for us.

Maybe its just an oversight. If someone from business.com sees this and wants to clarify whether this is policy or not, I will be happy to update with their thoughts.

The BBC currently seem happy to let spammers over run their blogs, and will happily give them dofollow links to absolutely any site they want.

It looks awful, and its discouraging real chat on their blog posts.

The thing that really annoys me, with it being the BBC, is that my licence money pays for all the high quality content that generates all those links and pagerank, to have it potentially flowing back out to my competitors who don’t care about etiquette and will happily just drop links wherever they know they aren’t going to be moderated.

Lets take a look at an example, on Zane Lowes pages.  I’ll quote some comments below. The links will be coloured blue but of course not live links. The last thing I want to do is give them more credit

This album of Kano is astonishing and awesome. This album release cannot be claimed as a conventional single full scale release. More than one way can be termed as a winter warmer release to keep us better in this beautiful season. For many people Kano would be new, he has to get into more of the music lovers heart with his wonderful music and albums. This music would help to be a soothing tone for our ears. Its one of the hottest songs in radio. Regards Swing Sets | Call Center Manager| Masters Tickets

Someone sets the ball rolling with 3 completely unrelated commercial links.

Delivering another passionate stream of consciousness that fans have come to know and appreciate. Check em out. Online biology degree AND Online cyber crime degree AND Online Teaching Assistant degree
Online adult education degree AND Online university

(yes, that one was 5 spam links with AND between them!)

aMAZING
Associate Degree Psychology

Wow, a lot of thought went into that aMAZING comment.

I love Kano usually n im American. but im not feelin this that much. the 2nd verse is hot though. he needs like a DaVinChe track. I wanna hear the shyt that was on 140 grime street. Voucher Codes | FM jobs | Seo Company

Multiple links to commerical sites? Nice.

Really interesting articles.I enjoyed reading it.Are these genuine images or has the artwork been touched up they are truly .Thanks for sharing a nice info viagra

This commentor above goes on to spam the exact same comment but with “viagra” switched out for “levitra”.

This album of Kano is astonishing and awesome. This album release cannot be claimed as a conventional single full scale release. More than one way can be termed as a winter warmer release to keep us better in this beautiful season. parks and recreation season 2 episode 16 | the office season 6 episode 16 | 30 rock season 4 episode 13 | the vampire diaries season 1 episode 14 | supernatural season 5 episode 14

Another person trying to break the record for most spam links in a post.

The page in question is a pagerank 6 page, so I can see why it attracts the spammers like flies to shit moths to a lightbulb, but its extremely unfair that BBC are allowing this to go on.  Its not like it would be hard to deal with – simply nofollow links, don’t allow links in comments, or moderate them.  The first and second option would take absolutely no man power on the BBC’s part.

So what do you think, fair game to spam BBC’s pages, or should this be stopped?

There is really no excuse for not keeping proper backups of your site – relying on your host to be carrying out suitable backups is not a solution either.

This plugin gives you 50mb of free space – more than enough for the average blog.  Its extremely easy to use:

Step 1: Download the plugin here.

Step 2: Upload the plugin to your blog using the Plugins > Add New > Upload feature in your WordPress Dashboard.

Step 3: Register for your 50 MiB of free space on our backup portal.

Step 4: Configure your plugin to enable encryption and provide the login details of your online account by clicking Change Settings on the Tools > Online Backup page.

Step 5: Schedule your backup by clicking Change Schedule on the same page!

For the 5 minutes to install and set up its definitely worth the peace of mind!

The largest previous sale for a .org domain was engineering.org for $198,000 (and is currently 301′ing to what could be called a low value .info domain!)

It will be interesting to follow the site development on poker.org, as well as its journey through the rankings to page 1 in Google for “poker”.

I would expect them to follow the design and link building of their other similar properties, blackjack.org and craps.net.

We had a domain with them, they emailed us to renew it which we done with Paypal. They are refusing to answer emails, and if you click the support tab on their site all it says is

Great Success
Apache is working on your cPanel and WHM™ Server

So there is absolutely no way to contact them, my domain is going to go through the expiry process then be caught by someone else because it has pagerank and lots of links…

Avoid Dotstrar.com as they will effectively steal your site and domain.

Its starting to get a little annoying that some directory owners are demanding far more from sites submitted to them than they are willing to provide themselves. I’m not going to out the directory in question here, but I sent this email to one yesterday:

Hi,

I’m not sure if my site would be accepted or not, can you please tell me before I submit so I don”t need to waste your time or mine (i’ve been refused from some other directories).

I don’t list any contact info at all on my site, and I use quite spammy adsense placement. I’ve also stuffed in a banner ad, and I put some sitewide links to unrelated sites using some nice anchor text links – I own the other sites though.

Can I get in with a site like this?

Basically I gave them an exact description of their own directory.

In reply they sent this:

Hi,

I think you’ve just answered your own question. It certainly sounds from the description you’ve given of your site that it wouldn’t meet the submission requirements of our directory.

Regards,
removed

So they can use all these spammy looking techniques but I can’t?  I was assuming the directory owner would realise the hypocrisy of replying back with that, but obviously not

Feel free to comment but no mentioning of url’s if you can work out who it is.

Your payment of $XX.XX has been returned to you. If you sent the payment with a bank account, the funds will be returned to your PayPal balance. If you paid with a credit card, the amount will be credited back to your card.

We returned the payment to you because we have stopped allowing personal payments to be sent to or from India.

If this was a payment for a purchase of goods or services, and not a personal payment, then you may resend the payment to the seller by following these steps on the PayPal website: (a) click the Send Money tab, (b) select “Goods,” and (c) provide a shipping address.

If this payment was a personal payment, such as a gift to a friend or family member, then we request that you find another payment method until we restore personal payments to and from India.

We are trying to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and we’re sorry for any inconvenience.

Thank you,

PayPal

The reason for this is simple – if you send someone a “gift” through Paypal, there is no fees for the receiver. If you send a payment for goods or services, Paypal takes a small fee – that’s obviously how they make their money.

Up till now you could of course send payments for goods or services as a “gift”, allowing the the seller to receive their money without paying the rightful fee. Of course this involves a certain amount of trust – you can’t send $100 as a gift then do a chargeback because the seller never sent you something – the money was a gift after all.

It seems hundreds/thousands of Indian webmasters have taken this too far and ruined it for everyone. Paypal have had enough and brought in a blanket ban, no more gift payments to or from an Indian registered Paypal account.

Its not hard to see why. There is no realistic way that any Delhi account holder can say that $1000 that came from 5 different uk seo companies were all gifts and not payments for services

One Indian news website said:

Millions of Indian Freelancers, who rely on online money-transfer service, PayPal, has urged the government and media to step in and take up their issue at the highest level. Freelancers such as Web Developers, Web Designers, Coders, Writers and SEOs are worst-affected.

The freelancers are outraged that PayPal is causing them high inconvenience and loss of money because of this unilateral decision to stop all personal/gift payments to and from India without any notice.

This statement is bordering on ridiculous.  How can they say in the first paragraph that all the people affected are web designers and seo’s, then in the 2nd paragraph say that they are “outraged” that they can’t continue to steal Paypals fees by sending the funds as gifts?  A bit cheeky to complain about “loss of money” when they have been getting away with defrauding Paypal for so long…

Feel free to leave your feedback, positive or negative, in the comments.

I was contacted recently By Jim Wilson at seoppc.co.uk. He asked me for a couple of business related things, I wasn’t interested and turned it down.

I then agreed I would let him publish a guest article on this blog in return for a credit link. He provided an article titled “Five SEO developments we can expect to see in 2010″ which was published here on this blog.

Yesterday I was testing a Copyscape api and ran it on this site – which flagged up seoppc.co.uk’s article as a word for word copy of an article on Coast Digital’s site.

After contacting them they confirmed that it was indeed their copyright. I got in touch with seoppc.co.uk. His response:

I can only apologise. The article was written for me (good ol’ Indians). I will be having words. Do you have any correspondance from them that I can forward ?

I am sorry but anyone with any sense would run copyscape on any articles that were writting in perfect English by a supposed Indian outsourcer. This excuse is just outright lies.

If this was true, then it has been brought to his attention. So why is he still hosting stolen content?

• Here
• and here
• etc… I could go on and on. Basically all of his news articles are “borrowed” with all credit links and sources stripped out.

If you want to read the original article, you can read it over on Coast Digital.

I would not trust seoppc.co.uk for anything related to search engine optimisation or ppc. If they are willing to steal content from one site and have it published on another purely to gain a backlink, why would you want to trust them with your business?