Stopping a Blog Scam

Power pundit has a good post about his avoiding a scam that has taken Captain's Quarters and Just Say Anything off of the Google Search engine.

The scam works like this:  A company (in this case Business Barn LLC) offers a well-ranked blogger $300 a month to put a link on their subdomain for advertising.  As Say Anything describes:

"I would point the subdomain to a page of advertising hosted on their servers and they’d send me the money via Pay Pal. I checked out the advertising and there was no porn or anything involved so I agreed. Seemed like a good deal to me and with hosting costs rising as this page gets more and more popular I’m not much inclined to turn down opportunities to make money from this page.

Turns out this was a mistake. This company is involved in something called link farming, a practice Google frowns upon. They frown upon it so much, in fact, that Say Anything has now been removed from that search engine’s indexes.

Coinciding almost exactly with this removal from Google was an email from Business Barn stating that they were ending our arrangement together. Which makes perfect sense. They were after my Google page rank. Now that I have no Google page rank I’m of no use to them."

This scam is angering.  Bloggers work hard to build a good site.  Google, being the 800-pound search engine, provides a good deal of referrals.  Being banned from Google because of a link farm scam is devastating.  Hopefully Google will do the right thing and restore the rankings for the affected bloggers.