SEO Tools Reviews » Uncategorized

Domain Appraisal Scam – I almost fell for it

admin — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:02:35 +0000

After listing my domain for sale in Sedo, I was contacted by someone on my email, offering me a lot of money (5000 USD) for my domain. On the same email, he mentioned that he is a businessman, and in order to avoid risk, he needs me to get an “Manual Appraisal” for the domain. This sounded suspicious already. When people offer you a lot of money, but first you have to pay a small amount, you have to suspect that they’re going to disappear after they you paid this small amount.

Since I suspected, I told him that I am not sure I’m ready to pay for a an appraisal service, and he responded that it is a must. He also referred me to a link of a bogus forum thread about domain appraisals in which they recommend a specific domain appraisal service company. At that point I started searching Google for some sentences he wrote in my email and found several blog posts warning about this scam. I also looked for the company name on the signature of the email, and found nothing.

If you got similar emails,please post them here as a comment to help people find this post in google and warn them about this scam.

_________________________________________________________________________

Here are the emails we corresponded:

_________________________________________________________________________

It’s a standard practice to show independent valuation to buyers/resellers.
Nobody will do business without it. I’m a businessman and have no intention
of changing rules which help both parties to avoid additional risks.

Of course, investors never take into account auto-generated valuations. So
manual valuation is a “must” too.

I read the following information about appraisals at:

http://www.domainexplorer.org/Archive/85162904.htm

Without the independent valuation from a trusted source we don’t spend a
penny. This is our financial policy. So our offer is just a rought estimate.
If the appraisal comes higher we are ready to offer a bit more. If it comes
lower we will discuss the price with you again.

Thank you for understanding. I’m looking forward to do business with you.

—– Original Message —–

From: Eran

To: ‘Pendzinski’

Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2010 4:29 PM

Subject: RE: pageslanding.com (sent 03/10/10)

I am not sure I’m ready to pay for an appraisal, but these 2 pieces of information might give us the right neighborhood:

1. I saw that landingpages.com is on sale for $15,000.

2. I also saw that landingpageoptimization.com was sold for $4,006.00 on May 7,2009.

I’m willing to sell these 2 domains below for $13,000 together:

pageslanding.com

alandingpage.com

Regards,

Eran.

From: Pendzinski [mailto:pendzinski@thedomaininvestors.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2010 10:40 AM
To: Eran
Subject: Re: pageslanding.com (sent 03/10/10)

Can you accept 5,000 USD?

Do you sell domain with a web site or just the name?

Domain without content is ok with me. Web site is not necessary.

Have you had your domain names evaluated in the past? I mean domain appraisals. Without valuation we cannot be sure in the sale price. It’s very important for me in terms of reselling too. But we must engage a valuation company with REAL manual service. So I will only accept valuations from independent sources I and my partners trust.

To avoid mistakes I asked domain experts about reputable appraisal companies.

Please check this blog with suggestions from other sellers and buyers:

http://www.domainexplorer.org/Archive/85162904.htm

If, for example, the valuation comes higher you can adjust your asking price accordingly. It will be fair. I also hope you can give me 12% – 15% discount.
After you send me the valuation via email (usually it takes 1-2 days to obtain it) we’ll continue our negotiations.

What is your preferred payment method: Escrow.com, International wire transfer, PayPal.com or something else?
Hope we can come to an agreement fast.

Looking forward to your reply.

—– Original Message —–

From: Eran

To: pendzinski@thedomaininvestors.com

Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2010 1:48 AM

Subject: RE: pageslanding.com (sent 03/10/10)

Hi Frank,

I don’t have a price for it yet, I was thinking of auctioning it.

What would you be willing to pay for it ?

Regards,

Eran.

From: pendzinski@thedomaininvestors.com [mailto:pendzinski@thedomaininvestors.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2010 12:33 AM
To: eran
Subject: pageslanding.com (sent 03/10/10)

Hello,

We buy and sell domains and web pr®jects. What is your price for the domain?

If you have other domains for sale feel free to send your list.

Looking forward to do business with you.

Regards,

Frank Pendzinski

CEO

Smart Internet Investment LLC

SEO – All you need to know

SEO – All you need to know

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:30:26 +0000

I wrote this article to sum up all you need to know about SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

We can divide SEO factors to 2:

1. On-Site SEO – The principles that apply to your website pages

2. Off-Site SEO – The principles that apply to other websites linking to your website.

Since Off-Site SEO is much more important than On-Site (I would say 90% goes to Off-Site), I’ll concentrate on it.

Off-Site SEO

Your site may be full of great and relevant content and your pages may be the best of any site in your niche, but if no one knows of your existence and no one has linked to you as an authoritative source, then how would Google notice? In order to rank at the top, you need a large number of high-quality incoming links, described using keyword-rich anchor text, from other websites.

How Do I get these incoming links?

Link-building activities fall into two groups: passive and active.

1. Passive Link Building

This involves link baiting. Link baiting means you need to create attractive content and thus passively invite others to link back to your website. It may be an interesting article, a funny picture or video, and so on.

2. Active Link Building

If you don’t have a good link bait, (and even if you do) you can actively contact other sites to submit or request a link. A lot of Web 2.0 sites allow you to pose a link with no need to way for a response like forums and blog comments.

A very effective software that helps with active link building is called “DoFellow”. It helps you find blogs that allow adding a link to your website (It also makes sure that it’s a valuable link, since most blogs have put a little tag called ‘nofollow’ which tells the search engine not to pass any authority to the website in the blog comment). For sufficient quantity and quality, I recommend that you actively
build at least 750 unique (one per domain, more than that will not count) inbound links, containing your keywords in the anchor text. This may be done in less than a week using the tool I mentioned above. In any case, even if your niche is very competitive, don’t get more then 1500 links. Google might consider it Link-Spamming, unless it’s done over a very long period of several years!

Another important note about link building is to vary the anchor keywords. This is most important for the same reason. If all links have the exact same anchor-text, Google might treat it as link spamming.

Home Page Links and Deep Links

Deep links are links that point to a page inside your website which is not your home page. It is important to have at least 15% of the links you get as deep-links.

Reciprocal link exchange

Another way to get links is reciprocal link exchange. This means you give a link to get a link. In some cases you can do “3 Way Link Exchange”, which means you give a link from one site to get a link to another site. This is better, because it is less obvious to the search engine that a reciprocal exchange is in place.

A good tool for automatic Reciprocal Link Exchange can be found here

Paying for links

There are a lot of directories that will give you links for money. I do not recommend it since you can buy the tools I mentioned and get many more links (unlimited) for less than what you’ll pay for one year to these directories.

Summary

SEO is mostly about getting incoming links. You can do it passively by creating link baits (great content that people want to link to), or actively by requesting links from other sites (dofollow blogs, forums, reciprocal link exchange).

DoFellow Review – SEO Tool Finds Dofollow Blogs

admin — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 09:18:44 +0000

We found a useful software for finding and commenting in dofollow blogs. It’s called DoFellow.

The way it works is it searches for blogs containing the keywords you feed it, and then it filters out all the “nofollow” blogs.

“Dofollow” and “Nofollow”

Nofollow is meant to prevent commenting spam. It tells the search engines to ignore the link.

“nofollow” blogs are blogs that put the parameter ‘nofollow’ in the the comment links. A nofollow link will look like that:

rel=”nofollow”> Anchor Text

“dofollow” blogs are blogs that do not put the nofollow parameter in the links.

you can read more about DoFellow here