Watshit

We were SHOCKED to have recieved several detailed emails regarding Kim Hughes (an online real estate virtual assistant, owner of kimhughes.com). Kim Hughes has been accused of fraud, scamming users and we will explain exactly what these emails detailed and why we are in disbelief. (We will also contact KimHuges.com and ask for clarification on this serious matter)

The emails consisted of email snippets and screenshots, detailing conversations between clients (4 in total emailed us this week) and KimHuges.com (we wont disclose email address, screenshots, or private info until we have heard from Kim Huges on this matter.)

After the clients consulted with kimhughes.com about Branding and Marketing packages, one also asked about Blog marketing/design/installation, these clients were presented with a quote, for the fees. As per the emails received, that will go on record if need be, The clients were all asked to pay 30% of the sum to start off with, which they all did as they felt comfortable dealing with this online real estate virtual assistant! Suprise suprise, after that, their emails were ignored, calls ignored also and when someone did answer, they were informed that ‘Kim’ would get back to them, and to leave a message?? Come on people…are you serious? They would inform the clients that it would take time for their orders to be processed (right, how that is possible we don’t know) - only to wait several days with no reply.

This is not good news for the Online Real Estate Virtual Assistant community, because up until now they have held a clean record as being honest hard working individuals/companies. Never have we heard of such complaint.

We hope Kim finds the time to email us or comment back in a reply to these 4 individuals, who’s personal information we are only willing to disclose with Kim herself for clarification reasons.

A sad day on the web, to know that Scam’s happen in all fields online, not just the well known ones. Here I was thinking of hiring an online real estate agent next month.

If you feel a user is exploiting Digg in some way, please report them by shooting Digg an email at abuse@digg.com.

It is a well known fact that social bookmarking networks have been an increasingly popular target for blackhatters, Digg is one of these networks being exploited time and time again.

The popular BlackHat blogger QuadsZilla had even blogged about DaveN’s blog on ‘messing with Digg’ . What this does is spark interest, and we’re not talking about the interest to get creative and constructive. A lot of people read these blog posts and think that if these guys are doing it, why shouldn’t they, which leads to the practice of going about getting Diggs the wrong way. The funny thing here is, you’re not only cheating Digg you’re cheating your loyal readers! By doing such acts, as creating a 301 redirect, you’re simple misleading your readers.

Now it seems that most of these sites have not read the obvious TOS;

with the intention of artificially inflating or altering the ‘digg count’, blog count, comments, or any other Digg service, including by way of creating separate user accounts for the purpose of artificially altering Digg’s services; giving or receiving money or other remuneration in exchange for votes; or participating in any other organized effort that in any way artificially alters the results of Digg’s services; - Digg

It has come to our attention that many users have opted to doing things the BlackHat way. They have gone and used a proxy server to register many, many times (In some cases as many as 150 times) and then go on to Digg’ing their own articles and such. Most are not smart enough to Digg other articles too and not log in and out of accounts using these fixed IP addresses while just Digg’ing their one article. Some do this over a certain period of time, and add friends using these different accounts so as to blend in nicely. Which in truth is simply deceiving. We would post a list of such user names involved in such acts but we’ll leave it to Digg to sort this issue out.

Another popular tactic that is being abused more and more is the Digg mine I’ll Digg yours communities popping up all over the place. Popular places such as Blog Catalog and the likes have communities up where people post each others articles to be Dugg by other members in return for an exchange of Digg requests.

We believe Digg.com provides us with a really useful service, whereby users go to read popular articles, well written ones and even interesting ones. By cheating your Digg count users are simply fooling us to read rubbish, pushing up their articles to the front page in order to get read is ridiculous and more should be done to stop them. Some of these users who practice such acts do so to sell a product, advertise a service, some just do it because they know how, if you suspect someone of tampering with their post count or asking to be part of a Digg exchange program for the sake of ranking higher, please report them today to abuse@digg.com

For years people have been trying to rank their businesses high up in the search engines in hopes of widening their potential client base and gaining more exposure. Somewhere along the lines, early on that is, people started to give up with original content, related link building and quality blog posts as well as real unique articles and so forth, basically all that used to help in ranking sites for certain keywords. SEO became hot and with anything hot like that, it started to get abused.

With what first started out as fixing headers, site titles, targeting certain keywords in anchor text, optimizing a page and it’s navigation to push up a site in the Search Engines, turned into a keyword stuffing, web page cloaking spam fest. The practice of Search Engine Optimization took a 90 degree turn and headed into the realm of no return, the realm that we now call Black Hat SEO. With more and more webmasters and business owners realizing that Black Hat SEO worked better with a faster response time when it came to ranking, it spread like a plague.

So what about all those companies claiming to be able to handle YOUR SEO work for you, and they claim to do this the WhiteHat way, the old fashioned legal way, how can you be sure these companies wont cause you heart ache in the long run and get your site or business banned from ranking in any Search Engine?

Below is a list of common and not so common Black Hat Techniques.

• First, and one of the best known BlackHat Techniques a BH SEO uses, is Spam, and lots of it. Here’s an example, WideCircles. Now these guys are not even original, barely note worthy,  scavenging the internet registering on Black Hat forums, BH networks even on Web Master communities to spam their site and claim to be the best in the world. They claim to be an SEO company that can do wonders for you and also go on to claim they will rank your site high up in the search engines for almost any keyword you want. With sites outranking them for almost every keyword known to man, even their own domain name keyword ‘Wide Circles’ these crooks, these scam artists, these fake SEOs prove only one thing, that even when it comes to spam, they fail…miserably.

• Which brings us to the second technique used by these SEOs, duplicate content. It’s easily caught by Search Engines these days but surprisingly it’s still widely used. WideCircles for example spam forums with the same phrase in hopes of ranking for a combination f the same keywords they stuff into this phrase.

• Now duplicate content is not only posts, it’s blogs, articles and even multiple sites. Some submit the same keyword stuffed articles to hundreds and hundreds of article sites in hopes of not only ranking for such keywords and key phrases but also scoring extra backlinks. This does not help, these backlinks are devalued due to the nature of the duplicate article. Best submit it to one or two strong article sites and write new articles with unique content!

• Beware of domains  registered through a proxy domain server as this usually means the site owners are hiding and don’t want to be found. Only logical reason is they plan to pull a scam then drop the name and run.

• Backlinks, these days BH SEOs will do anything for extra backlinks, they will just about go to any length to add keyword rich anchor text links that will help them. Some look for exploits on .edu related sites, some even hunt .gov sites because they know, a backlink from either one will help them. These blackhats make simple searches using google to find exploits in blogging scripts used by these .edu and .gov sites.

Link selling is now pretty much against SE regulations and rules, but new Black Hat Techniques are still found and used that outsmart Search Engines, and even manual inspections, one such technique that is being used more and more is the fake adsense.

Passing off a link as if it were part of an adsense box, when in truth it was simply a paid link posting with not only anchor text but a little description to make it that more valuable.

• Cookie stuffing is something BlackHaters do to get referral fee’s and commission for users they did not really refer. How they do this is simple, they load the site on a page they lure the user on, with several different hidden frames that contain the said referral web pages, this stores the affiliate cookie in the users browser and if they end up buyng things from those said affiliates, the Black Hat will get the commission. It’s pretty much day light robbery. To help you spot this iframe, some black hats slip up and don’t cover their tracks well, this leaves a mark such as the one circled bellow, that is a mini window with the referral url loaded in it!!!

There are hundreds, possibly thousands other Black Hat Techniques being used as we speak, the important thing is not to fall victim for any of them. Please, whenever you do business with an online company of any sort, check their contact page and make sure their is a real address there, check their #’s and if they are providing a service that requires some sort of license then check with the proper authorities to make sure they are actually registered. Never fall for an online scammer who is too afraid to give his/her/their contact details. They expect you to trust them enough to pay, you should accept nothing less than a phone number to confirm they are real or who they say they are.

The so called WhiteHat SEO blog has been caught with their hand in the cookie jar, caught with their pants down, caught molesting cookies! They were caught cookie stuffing!
These so called professional WhiteHat Search Engine Optimizers were caught stuffing links to an affiliate they had an account with www.auctionads.com

[iframe src=”http:///refer_f1ac5f82a479affb2274″ name=”Auctionads” frameborder=”0px” height=”1″ scrolling=”no” width=”1″][/iframe]

The practice of cookie stuffing is as blackhat as you can get, and it’s illegal. SEOFM.com once called those that practice Black Hat SEO techniques Scum, what do we call them? Nothing, we just call them out on their illegal activities, and ask you to stay away from their site. The cookie stuffing attempts have been forwarded to Auctionads, hopefully they’ll do something bout it.

This is a fine example of a Scam site. It’s easy to see when you know what you’re looking for.  Antonio, so called owner of TrafficColeman.com, and African American college drop out, who can barely pronounce his name let alone discuss anything web related is your average pin up poster scammer. This site targets young people, and those that have less education in hopes of selling them the “Make as much money as me without spending ‘much’ in no time!”. Little do the users know that Antonio probably lives out of his parents place and works for a spam company selling books and working those affiliate links. This guy can really pitch a sale, he’s a fine example of why you SHOULD go to school and get an education. Check his video to the right!

The site layout itself is a known ebook selling, ad infested, iframe cookies stuffed template. Anything that looks like that should trigger off red flags and warn you of a potential scam or bad service. Don’t fall for the ‘You can do it too’ scam.

thehorizonoutlet.com/horizoncardservices.com is a clever SCAM!

Nothing new here, but it baffles us how this site seems to still practice its scamming campaign even though it has been published that this site and those running it are scamming people. Why has no one done anything about this or taken down the site? Well because these guys are smart.

They cover their tails in the not so easy to find Terms and Conditions but that’s not to say they are not scamming people. Be careful when approached by this company, they’re a lousy credit card company that’s not really a credit card company. They offer you an online credit card that’s not really an online credit card because it can only be used in their online store, which is not really an online store.

Funny, scam artists are smarter these days, not only that but they seem to be finding loopholes in covering their asses legally. Insane.

Oh and searching online you land on supposedly PRIVATE user information such as this.

Don’t be surprised, why should scammers care about the privacy of your personal information?

State has filed a lawsuit against these online criminals, but for now their site remains up and active, so beware. It’s a shame people go as low as this to scam others. Just goes to show you how far online scammers will go for an extra buck or two.

Domain Name………. helpingouramericanheroes.com
Creation Date…….. 2007-11-17
Expiry Date………. 2008-11-17
Domain was registered by…. Timothy Divers
Organisation Address;

9407 E. US 40 Highway
Independence
64055
MO
UNITED STATES

Admin Name……….. Timothy Divers
Admin Address…….. 9407 E. US 40 Highway
Admin Phone………. +1.8163564090

Please black list this site/individual and spread the word online of this sites illegal actions if you can.