Why you should always look a gift-horse in the mouth

Why is it that people never question a freebie?

Is it because people, in their greed and haste, don't take the time to do proper research? Perhaps it’s because there are many people who are just naïve?  I think it’s a bit of a combination of both.  Regardless, it seems to me that when you give away something for free, people rarely consider what strings might be attached.

Think of all the millions of searches happening everyday with “free” or “download” in them. There are millions of people out there looking to get something for nothing. And in response to this worldwide demand for hand-outs, there are ample numbers of suppliers filling that demand. But stop and think for a second, and ask yourself, “What’s in it for the suppliers?”

No business model succeeds around giving something away for nothing, hence the old adage, “what’s the catch?” Sometimes the catch is obvious, like getting a piece of software for a free trial month before paying full price. And then, sometimes the catch is not quite so clear. For example, why is Facebook free? Well beyond the obvious fact that if it wasn’t free it wouldn’t be nearly so popular, there’s another underlying reason: They want your social data. Their business model is built on advertising to users based on the collected social data. Another example would be the slew of Google applications out there that are free to use…Google Analytics, for example, provides free statistical analysis of your website traffic. The catch to Google Analytics is the same as Facebook: they want your data. Now to what extent Google actually leverages the data provided from Analytics is an ongoing topic of discussion that I won’t get into here, but the fact remains: Nothing is truly free; there is always a catch.

Now, to many of you, Facebook and the like using your data for their own purposes is neither a startling revelation, nor a contentious issue; it’s simply a fact of life on the internet. There are, however, many others out there who seek to use people’s naivety for their own gain. I touched on this oh so briefly when I posted 18 nasty ways to get backlinks.

At the end of the post I threw out the idea to package and distribute free Wordpress themes with a small piece of code in the footer that would disguise backlinks to your own moneymaking sites. Concepts such as this are great for easily securing large amounts of backlinks with little effort on your part. All one really has to do is recognize a niche where people demand freebies, and then find a way to exploit that demand.

This is quite an old practice, but people are still falling for it! I’d like to use a reasonably dated case for an example, as I don’t want to out someone who hasn’t already been outed by others….My goal here is to educate and enlighten. I am certainly not interested in messing with anyone’s profits. Lets look at the Buy Viagra SERPs, for which the top position has been occupied - for most of this month - by studmed.com. One could write an entire thesis on the various salient elements of the site, but for the sake of this post, let’s just focus on the backlinks.

Going through their links, we see a bunch of seemingly unrelated yet high quality blogs. One might be tempted to think that these are all part of a sophisticated blog farm, but upon a close inspection its clear that these are in fact legitimate blogs who have been fooled by their own haste and greed into supplying backlinks to studmed.com. How?

Let’s look at the source code for a few of the blogs:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.statcounter.com/counter/counter_xhtml.js"></script>
<noscript>
<div class="statcounter">
<a class="statcounter" href="http://www.studmed.com/">
<img class="statcounter" src="http://c33.statcounter.com/3025045/0/e31a3548/0/" alt="buy viagra"/></a>
</div>
</noscript> 

A little research turns up the blog of another fellow who was taken in by this little scheme and later caught on to what was happening. He posts: 

“…so I did a quick “view source” on my blog and sure enough the offending code was tucked away at the bottom on my HTML, right after my footer…. The root of the problem is that apparently TemplateBrowser.com, where I got my theme from, is injecting themes with this additional, unwanted code…”

And there you have it. TemplateBrowser.com (which is now showing just a parking page) seems to have been the delivery point for at least some of these doctored templates.

There is absolutely no reason why you can’t use this lesson to your own advantage. Find a niche where people demand freebies, and then exploit that demand to your own benefit.