Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Blog SPAM from. . . GE?

Periodically, I get a comment from an old post. This morning, this comment came through from "Jared" on one of my old posts about Centricity upgrades:


Great post. I especially found it interesting. For this matter, once I discussed with one of my friends, http://www.geonlineservicesite.com/ not only about the content you talked about, but also to how to improve and develop, but no results. So I am deeply moved by what you said today.
There's only one problem. "GE Online Service" has nothing to do with PACS. It doesn't even come from GE, but it seems to front for GE Money, GE's loan division.

Running a WHOIS on GEonlineservice.com, which is the site that is prominently advertised on geonlineservicesite.com, shows:

Domain Discreet

ATTN: geonlineservice.com

Funchal, Madeira 9000-039 PT

AND a WHOIS on geonlineservicesite.com yields names which I ought not publish.

So... geonlineservicesite.com and geonlineservice.com may not really belong to GE at all, and therefore the spam might not be GE's fault. Could they actually be paying for low-quality spam-type advertising? A little digging by my friend Mike Cannavo, the One and Only PACSMan, found this link:

KETTERING, Ohio — July 14, 2008 — GE Money and Brother International Corporation, a leading manufacturer of home sewing and embroidery products, today announced a new multi-year relationship to provide consumer credit through the Home Design program offered by GE Money’s Sales Finance unit.

The private label credit card, available at participating Authorized Brother Innov-ís Dealers nationwide, offers special financing options, including no payment and deferred interest promotions. Longer term promotions are available seasonally. Additionally, cardholders can view their accounts and pay bills online via http://www.geonlineservice.com/.

Tell me why Brother and GE are united behind a website with domain registered to someone in Portugal, with some rather spammy links elsewhere?

I expect GE to track these sites and do something with them, because this is VERY poor advertising for GE, especially the part where I get spammed. They do care about that sort of thing, I think. They could give me a 0% loan for my troubles, by the way.

1 comment :

Ryan L said...

http://www-dot-geonlineservicesite-dot-com/about

still shows the default text from the wordpress software.

Whatcha got there is probably a skimmed MFA (made for adwords) blackhat site. Probably not affiliated with GE in any way/shape or form.

Most likely a piece of code or script scrapes content from sites affiliated with high value adword keywords and "creates" a thin site with little more than regurgitated content and adword advertising.

Once the site is created the spammer sends out a bot to scan for topics that are relevant and creates comment backlinks to try and boost the ranking for his MFA site for specific keywords.

Keep doing this till you have 100,000 sites like this automatically created that cost roughly $3/year for the domain/hosting and if each site makes just $.50 per month in clicks(adsense) thats 300 large per year..not bad.