GR-ADS.com, BridgeOfKnowledge.org, GroundUpAdvertising.com, FirstDayAds.org, SmallStepsBigLeaps.org, WebMatchers.net, WeLinkPages.com, WeBuildPages.com, InternetMarketingNinjas.com, Find Your Dreams Inc., and "SEO Specialist" Jim Boykin of Troy or Albany NY.

hey!!
i was checking out your website and I saw on http://www.miqel.com/reading_library/archived_stories/1800s-unknown-crash.html that you mention glasses. i'd like to place a few links on this page. i can send you over exactly what i'm looking for. if you decide it's a good fit, i'll pay you $50 dollars for one year. i can take a second look at your website and see if there are other pages i would like to use as well. i would pay you more money, of course :)i can send you the money through PayPal or by check if we're able to work out a deal. please let me know if you'd like to set something up!
thanks!!
Darcy

To: "Darcy Blakely" <darcy@firstdayads.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2008 3:21:12 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: I want to buy an ad on http://www.miqel.com

Hi Darcy,
Thanks for the call, sorry to be a hassle but you can't be too careful these days, and even if you are 'too careful' it's still not enough, lol.
**Anyhow, the bottom line is this: i'm not sure if $125 is worth potentially lowering my overall page rank and/or turning off some viewers
who know my site has been 'ad free' since 2004.
(I assume we can both agree that your business is anomalous to say the least, such as the lack of contractual agreement, overlapping employee
profiles with slightly different names at groundupadvertising, bridgeofknowledge, firstdayads, etc. and your name is possibly not Darcy 'Blakely' or 'Bond' - but that's your business, i'm sure you have your reasons to maintain anonymity. If we can work something out for larger scale linking for a year that's fine, money is still money)
Best regards,
~ Miqel

and her ridiculous & inept response to serious issues raised about identity fraud, etc ....

Subject: Re: I want to buy an ad on http://www.miqel.com
From: "Darcy Blakely" darcy@firstdayads.org
Date: Wed, August 20, 2008 2:49 pm

Hi Miqel,
Thanks for the response again. I know it seems a little fishy because of our cheesy websites and stuff,
but we are also in the process of growing. :) Would you consider $200 for those same links for a year?
Let me know...
Thanks,
Darcy (it is my real name, but I don't share my last name online. lol)

SO there you have it, she admitted all the front companies are from the same source, and that she's using a fake name. Still the offer is now $200 for adding the links. Sensing she was becoming aware I was playing games with her, I decided to make one more attempt at upping the price and managed to talk her up to $250 for adding the links!
I sent her confirmation I had added the links and a receipt from PayPal for $250 came through in about 45 minutes.
Then I immediately disabled the links with an attribute called [ rel="nofollow" ].

This is a 3 part scam, and I have traced it to a few SEO companies.
first they are using false information to dupe you into adding links to your page,
(you do get paid - that's not the scam, but your agreement is secured by deceptive info)

the Meta-Scam is you are tricked into helping THEM scam SEO CLIENTS of
WeBuildPages.com (WBP) and InternetMarketingNinjas.com (IMN) by HIDING PAID LINKS,
Links originating from these SEO businesses who are hiding behind false sites for a reason ....
Their 'top level' SEO clients are paying BIG MONEY ($6000 and Up). The clients are assured they are paying to get organic or viral links in an 'ethical', honest and transparent manner from WBP & IMN ... Not spam and paid-links.

Also this deceptive practice spams Google's PageRank indexing system, and artificially inflates hit-counts for various sites. The Key to their game is the HARD SELL LINK added to your site, and it's influence on pagerank.

My solution was to TAKE THEIR MONEY and DISABLE THEIR SCAM LINKS,
They assume you will be ignorant of your rights and don't even ask for a real contractual agreement with you. If you've done 'business' with them, please TAKE DOWN THEIR LINKS - you are not in any sort of legally binding agreement!

This is the risk the 'lower level' link-finders take to maintain their anonymity, they wont come after you if it will expose them as scammers or known as connected to WBP or IMN, they don't want to be traceable or contactable.

Therefore there is also no clause against adding the REL="NOFOLLOW" attribute to the links. This excludes a link from being added to Google's PageRank system.

"Google announced in early 2005 that hyperlinks with rel="nofollow" attribute[3] would not influence the link target's PageRank. In addition, the Yahoo and Windows Live search engines also respect this tag." - from Wikipedia page on NOFOLLOW

I added REL="NOFOLLOW" to the links once the PayPal money had cleared, I also removed the 6 additional decoy links, since the PayPal receipt details only mentioned the 3 Hard Sell links. You can also add a "Robots.txt" file that says "No Indexing" for the page in question. You'll find complete link disabling instructions
Here Wikipedia page on NOFOLLOW Link Tag
and here http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html

OTHER SECTIONS:
• The Email Hook,
• The 'False Front' Companies,
• The Bloggers Notice Something Fishy,
• The 'Top Level' Players, A Pattern Emerges,
• The Way The Scam Works,
• The Structure Of The Scam

here's the link and relevant text: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015563.html

"Link Buying
Location: Salon B: To buy or not to buy; that is the question in link building today.
Speakers:
Aaron Wall, Author, SEO Book
Jim Boykin, CEO, Webuildpages
[skip down farther in the page]
Dirty Links
- Make sure they're hidden in the content or organic looking lists without any disclosure
- Run really dirty stuff through your affiliate program
Jim Boykin is up next. He doesn't have a presentation
(thankfully, I don't really want to type from slides anymore) :)
What's already been said? Just about everything. But he reiterates:
- Don't buy links unless you're the Yahoo directory.
- Don't buy reviews unless you're reviewing Google products.
- You can't really get links for free. You have to work for it.
- Stay under the radar. Don't piss off Google."

So that quote above confirms that Boykin & WeBuildPages are attempting to 'stay under the radar' and the previous speaker mentions using affiliate programs to launder 'dirty stuff' (meaning the inappropriately obtained links / Black Hat SEO stuff). This sounds like just what is happening at GroundUpAdvertising, which is directly linked to WeBuildPages by way of "Find Your Dreams Inc.", who is the actual payer for these links.
..... I Have the RECEIPT Proving It!. Case Closed!
The links are sold through deceptive sales (lying about the motive for the purchasing the ads) and fraudulent practices (false companies, fake names and misleading email origins)

Below is a Brilliant analysis of what they are doing, why & who benefits from the links ...

ANALYSIS FROM - Geek Hideout
25-July-2008
http://www.geekhideout.com/whatsnew.shtml

"Yesterday I received an interesting email from some folks at webmatchers.net who said they'd like to buy some ad space here at the old Geek Hideout. As you may have noticed, I'm not opposed to pocketing some change to promote quality goods and services, so I replied back to them, asking what they were interested in.

Their response was that all they wanted me to do was mark up some of the text on three of my pages IO.DLL, Ant Story, and iPod Shuffle Woes. If I did that and promised to keep the pages up for a year, $125 would be mine. From the context of the words they wanted linked, it seemed that they were looking to direct people to sites that related to laptops, personal loans, and credit cards, respectively.

It was the sort of thing that felt harmless and straightforward and almost had a pre-1995 charm to it. But, this isn't 1995 and there is almost always an ulterior motive for this sort of thing. Checking out the company, I saw that the webmatchers website was registered on July 8th, 2008, not even 20 days ago. I found it to be a contradiction that their FAQ mentions that they were founded in 2005. Asking about it, I was told that, yes, their website had just gone online but they've been around for much longer than that. They run their internet business by repeat business and word of mouth, apparently.

Google also failed to provide any meaningful information about the company. No glowing reviews, no scathing reviews, no reviews whatsoever. The names of the owner and the employees are rather generic, making searches for them difficult as well.

Browsing the websites that webmatchers wanted me to link to, I noticed that many of them had contact information. I figured that I would drop some of these owners a note and ask if they could say anything good or bad about the webmatchers. One fellow got back to me immediately and said that he never heard of them. This was the author of the page in question. If anyone was going to be promoting it, it would surely be him.

It seemed clear to me that traditional internet investigation methods were not going to provide any answers to this puzzle. I decided to step back and try to fit the pieces of the puzzle together using my head instead.

What I knew was that webmatchers wanted me to put several links on three different pages. The links were such that they highlighted laptops, credit cards, and personal loans, even though the pages themselves did not pertain to these subjects whatsoever and mentioned them only in passing. It seemed unlikely that a person doing a search for one of the topics would land on my page and, if for some reason they did, that they would linger long enough to click on a link on the off chance that it would be what they were looking for. It was becoming obvious that these links were not meant for human consumption.

If not human than surely search engine. We've all seen sites, mostly long forgotten message boards and abused guest books that are loaded with links for various enhancers and whatnot. It's link after link to the same sort of sites with cheesy names and unsavory products. But, looking at the links that I was provided, this was not the case here. The links were on the up and up. I looked at several of them and even contacted people from them. They weren't deceitful or selling anything questionable. They were largely helpful, offering advice on what to look for in a laptop and how to responsibly manage your personal finances. They were mostly government and educational sites... Hang on a moment, government and education sites don't advertise like this!

Looking more carefully at the links that were provided for each of the three categories, there were two clean divisions: The bulk of the sites for a category were either a .gov or a .edu. For each category there was one site that stood out--a true commercial interest that was selling something and dearly wanted people to buy it.

The sites that I mentioned, the ones where its link after link of unsavory goods, the idea is to feed keywords to the search engines which raises the rank of the site as well as all of the sites it links to. But the combination of human intervention and clever search engine algorithms causes such sites to quickly drop off the search engine radar, thereby nullifying the very effect that was desired in the first place.

The trick to sucessful search engine placement is to be mentioned on a lot of useful and upstanding sites (or you can buy good placement, but that's a different discussion). But the site has to be mentioned in proper context. The search engines examine a page's text and the links in that text when they assign a ranking to a site. If the context isn't there, the relationship will a poor one.

I believe that including all of the .edu and .gov links in my web page, webmatchers was trying to achieve legitimacy for the commercial link that was also included. I also suspect that .edu and .gov links are scored a little higher by the search engines. If you were to search for laptops, credit cards, or personal loans, my site would be ever so higher in the search engines. As I pointed out, my site isn't going to attract people looking for these things, so there must have been something else to be gained by increasing my ranking.

It turns out that if the rank of what the search engines deem to be a useful page increases, so, in turn, do all of the pages it links to that are of the same topic. It's a scenario that makes me think of a dog chasing its tail: Site A links to Site B and Site B's rank increases. This, in turn, increases Site A's rank. And repeat

So this was it, the core of the matter. By linking to reputable sites, I was increasing the search engine ranking of webmatcher's customer's site. If you have enough people doing this, it undoubtedly will produce a more-than-tangible effect.

It's legal to do this, of course, but it's deviously manipulative and designed solely to fool search engines. It definitely gets a shaking head of disapproval from me."
http://www.geekhideout.com/whatsnew.shtml