Gone Phishing

My name is Dr William Monroe, a staff of a well-known bank, here in London, England. One of our accounts, with holding balance of £15,000,000 has been dormant and last operated three years ago. From my investigations and confirmation, the owner of the said account, a foreigner by name John Shumejda died on the 4th of January 2002 in a plane crash in Birmingham...

In Internet speak phishing is the luring of unsuspecting users in your scams. Whether that scam is buying a product that doesn't work or convincing them that you're a rich refugee from Nigeria. Whatever the ends are, the beginning parts of the scam is commonly done through phishing. Nigerian e-mail phishing aside, one of the best ways for companies to sell their garbage products on the Internet is raise their Google ranking.

The more people that link to a website, the more popular the website is, the higher ranked it will be by Google. Thus, the more likely it will be seen on the first page of searches for whatever product they sell. In the world of Internet marketing, search engine hits are the reigning lord. As such many companies are paying for links from blogs and websites. Websites with decent Google rankings. I was the proud owner of two sites that, until very recently, met those requirements.

And so for the past 16 months I've been a dirty nasty phishing blogger. The soiled companies paid me well to do it. I did it with a smile on my face and growing black spot on my filthy soul. In fact for the 232 posts that I typed up, while prostituting links from my websites, I was paid over $1800. It's not that its wrong, so much as it's despised. See, I'm still trying to to justify my habits! Okay... In general, it really is a low practice. I don't know anything about company xyz, and yet here I am, peddling their product and linking to a black hole website. All for a few bucks.

A few bucks that I took a vacation with, bought a new router, dovetail jig and table saw with, paid some bills with and still had some left over for investing with. Hum....I seem to be teeter-tottering here. Okay, I'm not going to pretend I didn't like having the extra cash. It's been really fun to know that I could spend money without guilt. I wanted it, I save for a couple weeks and bought it. It's hard not to like that! In the end though, it was tainted.

So called Internet morality aside... I've stopped. I've stopped for two reasons. One, well in all honesty, the market for my services dropped through the floor, at the same time both of my websites lost their high Google score. I was a little disappointed at first, but now I feel like it's a good thing. Because we then get to point number two. I really wasn't very proud of it. That of course was squashed out by my desire for 'free funds'. What can I say, I like spending money. It's always been a hobby of mine.

So I might not be able to buy that lunchbox planer next month, but at least I can rest in the knowledge that I am no longer sending poor unsuspecting grandmothers to their doom while searching for 'cheap mortgages' or 'quality online furniture". Anyone know what the next big Internet fad will be?

One good thing to come of this, is now I have two pretty cool websites recently cleaned of all my old paid postings. FusionRing my gadget site, and Legal Addictive Stimulants my caffeine blog.