Bluehost are definitely removed from my list of recommended hosts (just ask if you want to know who I do recommend, this post isn’t about cashing in). I’ve recommended them to loads of mates in the past becuase they were 1. Cheap 2. Easy to setup new WordPress websites with. They were an ideal beginners host. Except lately I seem to be getting asked to help out a lot with people who are seeing their WordPress websites hacked on Bluehost. “My websites out of Google”. “They’ve suspended my account”. “Adwords won’t accept my ads”.

It’s always the same story, somebody sets up a WordPress website using the CPanel tool for doing it quickly and within a couple of months it’s hacked. I can’t tell you why this is and why it’s only Bluehost but in my experience it is. I don’t get any of the people who I’ve recommended over to Midphase firing e-mails to me shouting “HELLPPP!!”. So what is it? Permissions, probably. Other users on their shared servers, maybe. A total lack of responsibility on their behalf, hmmmmmm.

Do yourself a favour and avoid them until they can sort out why it’s always them, surely it can’t be coincidence?

The first signs something wasn’t right was when I got an e-mail from the host I’d moved the domain onto telling me that the domain was consuming massive resources. It made no sense for a site which was getting at most 50 visitors a day but I put it down to a dodgy script somewhere and moved it onto its own hosting account. This didn’t work, within a week I was noticing how slow the site was and even complained to Bluehost about it, their response was that they have a policy of throttling the CPU for sites that eat resources, that’ll be my domain then!

This was only the start of the problems. How many times have you ever had a website attacked or exploited? If the answer is none then it would be the same as mine as well, until I bought this domain that was. Within 2 months it had been hacked twice and over the last 12 months I’ve lost count of the number of times it’s been put on the Google malicious code black list. It gets really boring clearing out shitty iframe inserts. Eventually I gave up and swapped out the theme to one I knew I had greater control off and removed every single plugin the previous owner had added and only put back what I needed, I spent a whole day making sure the permissions were right and everything was “good to go”. This worked and it’s been clean since but when I think of the amount of time I’ve wasted on this it gets me fucking annoyed. The hacking didn’t end there though, in order to get better value from the hosting I added 2 other domains onto it as add-ons. Within a month they’d both been hacked, despite never being touched in the last EIGHT years. I own 4 bluehost accounts and this one was the only one I’d ever had trouble with. I run sites that get in excess of 2000 unique visitors a day on Bluehost and have never had a problem. The extra domains on this problem account were also incredibly slow to the point where they were useless and I’ve since moved them to a different host. The throttling effects every domain under that account. All this is hassle and non productive work, it’s eating up my time when I have much better things to be doing.

But the story still doesn’t end there. No matter what host I move the domain I bought to it will always get penalised. I have no idea what sort of dodgy neighbourhoods the site has been submitted too but it’s getting anywhere between 1000 and 5000 server requests an HOUR (from the raw log). Remember this is a site that thanks to speed penalties is now averaging less than 20 visitors a day. There’s nothing I can do about it either, these are straight forward requests on the server from multiple IPs, lots are bots trying to login to wordpress, many are from attempted requests to post content using the xml-rpc protocol but it’s worked to render that domain totally useless. Even if I move it off the WordPress platform it’s just going to be generating thousands of errors and hosts will go apeshit about it, I wouldn’t blame them one bit.

To be honest the only possible use for that domain is as a redirect for traffic to a related domain. Unfortunately I don’t own or am planning on owning any more poker websites so from now on it’s going to be left to rot as a parked domain. Like I said I’ve never seen anything even remotely like this from any website I’ve ever setup. And that endeth my experience of buying websites, from now on I’ll stick to building my own.

“I was just like you a few years ago search (sic) for something
legit online that was going to bring me an extra stream
of dough….”

1. I can promise you that you have never been anything like me, if you were you wouldn’t need to resort to spamming MMO crap to make a living.

2. I have NEVER seen anything “legit online that was going to make me an extra stream of dough” delivered via my inbox. Never ever ever. I’m prepared to wager £10 that I never will either.

And where does this amazing piece of e-mail marketing take you? To a page that tries to sell you with “All you need…is basic typing skills and internet access to start your own successful online business!” – Remember the affiliate spamming this crap says it’s legit!!! They are either thick or can’t grasp the concept of legit. You possibly could make “some” money (see Swagbucks or writing articles) but to stretch that to “your own successful online business” is a bit of a step too far.

It’s about as legit as my next business opportunity. “All you need is a white coat and sharpe knife and you too can make money by being a brain surgeon.” (You can’t by the way, but don’t let that stop me selling you your sharpe knife for the bargain price of just $197)

The really annoying thing is that there are still large numbers of people falling for this rubbish, every single MMO “expert” has pushed a concept in that last 12-18 months that revolves around building a mailing list then sending offers to them as a great way of making money. In order for this to work there have to be enough suckers out there who do actually give in on the 3rd or 4th or whatever e-mail.

Don’t get me wrong, there are legitimate uses for list marketing, I was list marketing in-house for one of the large online bookmakers before people like Shoemoney and John Chow had made their first dollar online. A long time before companies like Aweber and Constant Contact even existed. More recently a real estate friend has had great success utilizing a mailing list. But these were legitimate businesses. They didn’t entice people onto their e-mail list by giving away free (it took me 5 minutes to write) reports or other gimmicks just so that they could spam them endless links. Nor did they get into a circle jerk and start mutually masturbating offers to each others lists. You see there is nothing wrong with keeping in touch with a list of people that choose to let you contact them, however this is a world away from the “legitimate” online business that so many MMO gurus are trying to get people involved in right now by flogging $997 courses on how to build a list. I have no doubt that the cock-knocker who sent me the original quote in this post is a student of one such course and actually believes they are running a legitimate online business. You’re not, you’re sending junk to peoples inboxes.

What sort of crap you ask, this sort of crap.

I recently received an e-mail in the guise of an invoice (even including an invoice number FFS) telling me that payment was due on a domain renewal. They wanted $75 for a .com domain! Do they think I was born yesterday? Here’s the actual text of the “invoice” body:-

“Attn

Your registration includes search engine submission for *******.COM for 1 year. You are under no obligation to pay the amount stated above unless you accept this offer by Dec 23, 2010. This notice is not an invoice. It is a courtesy reminder to register *******.COM for search engine listing so that your customers can locate you on the web.”

It’s a scam, don’t fall for it! Whether they renew the domain or not (which will need a registrar transfer at the least) no way should you be be paying more than $10 per year ever for a .com domain. The whole thing seems to be run through the domainregistrat.com domain. If you get an e-mail like this please just ignore it and renew through your existing registrar. Maybe governments would like to spend more time cutting out thise sort of blatant fraud and less time chasing people who do nothing more than post the truth online.

The type of report you’ll get usually contains some nonsense about on-the-page factors that you are missing, some directories that they can “guarantee” you an entry in and how few links you have showing in Yahoo. If you don’t know what you’re doing I can see how you could get caught up in this, don’t. All that matters in SEO is rankings and traffic. Your site has 2 backlinks but you’re number 1 – who cares! You want to rank for relevant phrases that deliver traffic.

Just to stir the pot a little, yesterday I took the liberty of replying to one of these spam mails (Background – the website in question ranks top in Google for all it’s target phrases and gets somewhere in the region of 3000 unique visitors a day).

My reply went like this:-

“Thanks for your mail, I am really interested in ranking better for the search phrases xxxxx xxxxx, xxx xxxxxxx, xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx and xx xxxxxx. Could you please let me know how you plan on improving my rankings in Google for those phrases and any costs that may be involved.”

From Their Reply:-

“…We guarantee that we will be able to rank you at number 1 for all the searches you have given. We will achieve this by increasing your backlink count and reviewing your page content…”

Cheers lads, don’t go into too much detail now. Whilst you’re at it would you like to explain how the hell you’re going to improve the rankings for a site that already ranks number 1 for those phrases. You didn’t even bother to check the current position did you? Or maybe you did and just assumed that I didn’t know? You were going to take my money and then take the credit for something that was already in place you leachy bastards.

Don’t fall for it, if you’re not happy with your rankings and don’t want to spend the time learning how you can improve them be sure to treat SEO the same as you would any expensive service. Combine the search engines with any local recommendations you can get. Shop around, never respond to spam SEO e-mails promising this and that, anymore than you would respond to something that was promising to double the size of your schlong. There are legitimate SEO specialists out there, I don’t know any that use e-mail marketing to promote their SEO services.

Update: To prove that this isn’t just something originating from Indian SEO companies I’ve just contacted several UK firms. The criteria I used to select them was simple, “SEO” companies that were taking full advantage of Adwords yet had no natural rankings. Why these? Because if they are hammering Adwords then there is obviously a return in it for them, however, if they have no rankings then they have no real skills or SEO knowledge to speak off. They are selling smoke and mirrors. When questioned why they were using PPC to advertise SEO services the reply varied from “Sorry I’m not the best person to speak to” all the way to “fuck off”. It’s not like I was looking for global rankings, I drilled down to their local areas for relevant searches and still nothing. If an SEO company can’t rank for long tail SEO terms in their own town then what the hell does that say? I don’t even know why I’m letting this bother me, perhaps I just hate seeing people ripped off.

If you go into ClickBank post refund request you’ll see your subscription status as cancelled but no way of requesting a refund on that first payment. I hope you have more joy asking ClickBank than what I had. I’ve given up and will put it down to experience. As this is being handled by ClickBank I can’t say that it is Shoemoney at fault but even so it’s not quite a 60 day no questions asked 100% refund is it? Unless the course got better than setting up a Facebook Fan page after I left I’m guessing there could be some angry punters out there.

As an aside how is everybody finding the system, the whole blogosphere has gone very quite about it, I was expecting to see several reviews from people who were well on their way to 4 figures (if not a lot more by now)?

Who am I to argue with the VERY CLEVER people that wrote Thunderbird?

Twitter have issued a Cease & Desist to John, it’ll be really interesting to see how this one pans out (there are certainly plenty of cases in John’s favour for this one)?

Oh and by the way there is also a very real chance that this could be just link bait by Mr Chow himself. If it is it’ll be a shame, I’d really like to see how the courts would see something like this.

“Thank you for your interest in our CPC program. We truly appreciate your enthusiasm! However, we have noted that you obtained many clicks for your CPC Opportunities from an outside marketing platform, http://revtwt.com which is in violation of our Terms Of Service sect. 3.8.

Please note that IZEA is committed to maintaining authenticity and quality in all of our programs by enforcing disclosure and providing freedom of voice. We have found that much of the traffic from third parties is low quality, lacks disclosure and comes from Twitter accounts that are less than desirable.

We are open to working with publishers that want to resell our links who agree to meet our criteria. Please feel free to view this post on our Blog for additional information and don’t hesitate to reach out with additional questions or concerns.

For now you have been suspended from the Affiliate Server in SocialSpark. This means you are no longer able to take Cost Per Click or Cost Per Action Opportunities until we understand your intent moving forward. Also, any CPC/CPA Opportunities you were currently participating in have been ended and any fraudulent clicks that have come from this site that have not yet been paid, will not be.”

And pointed to this post:-
Please Don’t Arb Our Offers!

You’d think that maybe somebody at Izea should of noticed that one of their board of advisers was actually the first person to go public on this! Oops.