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Today I received an email from a woman named Daisy Morris who apparently works for a black hat search engine marketing company. If you look at the screen shot of the email I received you will see that she is trying to get people to do a “three way link exchange”. This is heavily frowned on by Google. Many websites do link exchanges (You link to mine, I’ll link to yours) but they don’t hold much weight for Search Engine Optimization because Google and others know you are linking to each other. This woman is offering a link from a “pagerank 5″ website if you link to a different website. This way it would appear to not be a link exchange. This practice can get you de-indexed in Google which can put you out of business. Of course, it’s not easy for them to catch you.

My SEO Quake Toolbar Says It (Click To Enlarge)

The kicker is this woman and this company are scammers. They have a fake Pagerank! Click here to learn about how people fake their pagerank. She is emailing thousands of people trying to get links to a site that Honda owns. I highly doubt this company works for free, so I am assuming they were hired by Honda.

Amateur webmasters who don’t stay up with the latest still think having a massive pagerank will help you in Google. Well, it will a little bit but not like it used to. Do a search for anything in Google then check the pagerank of the first 5 pages that come up and you will see what I mean.

So what this woman is saying is she will give your website a link from her “Pagerank 5 Website” if you link to a Honda site (you can see the url on that email). It would be a great deal if she was legit, but she’s a fraud preying on the naive.

Busted! (Click To Enlarge)

How could I tell? The first thing I look at on any website like that is how many links are pointing to that site. There are “0″ so it’s impossible to have a pagerank so I dug a little deeper and checked it’s PR out on a fake Pagerank Checker website (for lack of a better word).

To dig even more deeper I wanted to know who they were working for. That’s an easy task these days thanks to the WHOIS. If you look at the website that the fraudster wanted me to link to, you will see it’s owned by Honda Motor Europe LTD. I wonder if Honda knows they have a pirate marketing firm working for them scamming people into linking to a Honda owned website?

There is nothing I hate more than black hat SEO tactics, but when this company is also committing fraud against people with false pretenses, I think it’s a shame.

Whois Record For Domain In Question

Notice I didn’t link to any of the sites I was talking about. Why? I’m not going to provide them with any links. You can look at the URL’s on the email and type them in and you’ll see what I mean.

To learn more about Black Hat SEO, read my other article here.