LeapFish Sells Keyword “Viagra” For $7,104?

UPDATE May13, 2010: Things pertaining to LeapFish.com, their founders and management, along with related startups are no longer of interest to me, therefore no further comments are allowed on this post. There are also more reliable sources out there (such as Better Business Bureau) to help you make an informed decision about LeapFish.

***You may also want to know that the Law Firm of Daniel Bakondi, in San Francisco, CA, is investigating a possible Class Action Law Suit Against LeapFish.

During the past few months LeapFish.com, a meta search engine, suffered from an unfortunate streak of “being caught doing naughty things” incidents. The LeapFish employees were caught astroturfing on TechChruch and one of their employees was caught committing a click fraud. The official respond from LeapFish was always consistent- company disapproves of such behaviour.

Unfortunately the streak of unfortunate incidents continues…

If you are an unsuspecting target of cold calls from LeapFish, you might be presented with an array of arguments aimed to impress you. Lets take the list of recently sold keywords for example:
LeapFish Claims These Kewords Were Sold Recently

Quiet an impressive list! There is however one problem with it, it is deceiving. It tells us that keyword “viagra” was recently sold for $7,104:
LeapFish Claims To Have Sold Keyword Viagra For $7,104
When you search “viagra” on LeapFish.com, there is indeed a sponsored ad is triggered by the search. However the ad is irrelevant to the keyword and links to the official blog of LeapFish.com:
Click on the image to see it in full size
This also is true about keyword “Refinance”:
Click on the image to see it in full size
And the keywords “Billings Real Estate” and “Billings Homes” trigger no ads at all:
Click on the image to see it in full size
Click on the image to see it in full size
While astroturfing and click fraud was blamed on sales representatives, it is unclear who might be responsible for this, in my opinion, deceptive strategy. I am afraid a web designer’s job might be on the line this time around, as the management of LeapFish, in my sole opinion, has proven incapable of taking responsibility for the company’s mistakes.

RealDiggity.com – “Digg-like” Website For Realtors

RealDiggity.com Beta - Digg-like Website For Real Estate NewsRealDiggity.com has a hard act to follow. Made to look and feel like Digg.com, RealDiggity is aimed at helping to promote stories related to real estate.

The website is being developed using an open source content management system called Drupal, with the help of Drigg– a Digg clone module for Drupal. I personally would prefer Pligg if I was developing the website.

The success of the website however will not be in the software used to create it. It will largely depend on whether or not internet users will find it useful.

I personally would love to see more “social” components on the website such as ability to connect friends (adding friends)- my main reason why I would have opted for Pligg instead of Drupal.

Is Your WordPress “Viagra Spammers and Hackers” Proof?

I often wonder what is worse? Having a server down time or having your blog hacked by a spammer? I would prefer a server down time over having my blog(s) hacked by spammers any time of night or day.

Recently I have been helping a friend of mine after her blog was hacked by a viagra spammer. I am sure some of my readers can benefit from the things I have learned.

How Do You Know If Your Blog Is Hacked?

It can take days or weeks before you can discover that your blog was compromised. But following are red flags you should pay attention to:

  1. Your blog’s performance suddenly decreases. It takes forever for pages to load in your browser. It can be due to the fact that a PHP scripted inserted in your blog’s theme files is trying to “pull in” hundreds and even thousands of slinks. Your blogg may appear to you and your visitors the same, but if you take a closer look at the source of your pages you might see the link spam.
  2. The number of regular daily visitors suddenly drops. This can be due to two factors:
    • Visitors become impatient that your pages take so long to load and move on.
    • Your search engines raking and position may be affected resulting in less

    traffic.

  3. If you are regularly using an FTP client, pay attention if there are any suspicious files on your server.

Things you can do to help you out to make you blog less attractive to “viagra spamers and hackers”.

  1. Always have the latest version of WordPress. Yes updating WordPress in the past was rather painful task. But there is no longer excuse not to update it your software since you can do it straight from your Dashboard.
  2. If you still are afraid to upgrade your WordPress on thing you can do is to stop publicizing to the entire world which version you are actually using. Many theme developers please a code in the header of your blog that produces following result:
    wpgenerator
    You can fix this rather easy by removing following code from the header.php file of your current theme:

    In my opinion, it would be better to show your love and appreciation for WordPress by linking to them.

  3. One of the ways you can find out your blog has been hacked is to set up a Google Alert for the following query “viagra site:www.yoursite.com”. Of course you can substitute keyword “viagra” with any other keyword you think your site might be targeted with.

It is probably impossible to prevent your blog from being hack at certain point, but there are few things you can do to make your blog less attractive to spammers and hackers.

If you need more advanced approach to dealing with spam hackers, I highly recommend to read “New WordPress Hacking Strategy Using Cloaking to Target Google IP Addresses” by Aaron Wall

LeapFish CEO Uses Twitter To Assail Bloggers

UPDATE May13, 2010: Things pertaining to LeapFish.com, their founders and management, along with related startups are no longer of interest to me, therefore no further comments are allowed on this post. There are also more reliable sources out there (such as Better Business Bureau) to help you make an informed decision about LeapFish.

***You may also want to know that the Law Firm of Daniel Bakondi, in San Francisco, CA, is investigating a possible Class Action Law Suit Against LeapFish.

I was trying hard not to add more embarrassment to the situation surrounding company called LeapFsih.com.

In fact I made several attempts to avoid writing this this post my. I have e-mailed LeapFish’s legal council as well as their marketing director in hopes that they can convince Mr. Behrouzi to remove two posts he made about me. The first tweet Mr. Behrouzi made shortly after TechCrunch exposed LeapFish eployee for committing click fraud:
Twitter

The above tweet alleges that I am the author of a comment on TechCrunch. The second tweet (see below) was published on Twitter on the day I e-mail to Mr. Cook, the attorney of DontNexInc, the parent company of LeapFish.

Twitter

I am not sure what CEO of LeapFish is trying to accomplish besides adding more embarrassment to already an embarrassing situation.

UPDATE, March 5, 2009 10:50 AM: I have received following e-mail from Mark Kithcart, the Marketing Direcotr of LeapFish:

Saw your post Vlad you failed to mention the part about you refusing to speak to me. I’ve been here for about 3 months and all of the history is what it is – history.

I don’t typically go back and dwell on things – that’s what will keep us in the economic state we are experienceing in the U.S.

So saying that and stepping into something that has been created by you and Ben I do find it interesting that you would ask me to tell Ben to remove something but then not want to speak with me as if I’m trying to negotiate with you (your words – not mine).

I try to maintain an objective view as I approach each situation as people are not perfect and mistakes can be made by all sides. But I’m starting to wonder about the validity of what is happening here. Especially you going about it the way you did and talking about tweets that are a month old, making an ultimatum and then saying “I won’t negotiate” when that wasn’t even on the table.

No, Ben is not aware of this email to you from me. And I am NOT going to copy him on it. You involved me now and I have questions as I stated before in my last email to you.

If you want to move forward, not waste your time and move on to more productive activities that can help youself and others as we, as a country, naviagte the terrain – then great. I would like to ask you some questions to see if that is indeed what you desire to do. If it is not and you have an agenda (which I don’t think you do) then we will remain in activities that aren’t going to benefit anyone.

Hope you’re having a great day & I look forward to speaking with you at some level.

Mark Kithcart

Director of Marketing

Mark is absolutely correct. I did refuse to answer any of his questions, and frankly do not think I owe him any answers. I involved you because you are Director of Marketing at DotnextInc, whatever your employees do reflects on your company and it also true about your boss.

UPDATE: March 5, 2009 1:23 PM The CEO of LeapFish continues accuse me of stalking him, in-spite the fact he purchased domain names aimed at “exposing me” although in my opinion the purchase of the domains was truly aimed at damaging my Interpreting and Translating Business.

CEO of LeapFish Continues his attacks

Outsource Your Press Release To A Pro

Janet MeinersMany of my readers have probably ran into Janet Meiners Thaeler aka NewspaperGirl. If you did not meet Janet on Twitter, you probably have read her articles on Marketing Pilgrim. If you know Janet, you know she is an expert as far as press releases go. If you did not know that, you know it now.

So why I am bringing up press releases and (re)introducing Janet to you? Simple. I believe that press releases will be on the rise this year, considering economic factors. Long time ago (about 2 or 3 years), Janet, while still blogging on WordPress.com blog, wrote about her experiment with press releases. Comparing to PPC advertising, press releases delivered visitors to her websites at a consistent rate of 5 cents per click or less. Even back then you really needed to “babysit” and “sweat” over your PPC campaigns to keep the cost per click under 20 cents.

Janet got me hooked on PRWeb. My first $40 press release brought a 300% return on my investment during the first day of the press release going live. To make the long story short, I have never felt like I wasted money on a press release. PPC??? Well that’s another story….

There are however a few challenges with press releases. Not being a good writer with added difficulty of English as my second or third language, I never felt comfortable writing press releases. I certainly never scored highly as far as editorial review goes, probably just barely passed the scrutiny of PRWeb to get my releases published. Writing for my blogs is different. Most of you are very forgiving as far as my grammar goes. But press releases are different…

Slowly I came to realize that press release is something I will have to outsource. So to my surprise, when visiting Janet’s blog, I discovered that she is now offering Press Release Writing Services. Knowing Janet’s background in blogging, marketing and social media – there can be no better person to write my press releases. I am planing to use Janet’s services for my Interpreting and Translating Business. If you need a solid press release, you should consider her services as well. Don’t take my word for it. Read what Jeremy Shoemaker (aka Shoemoney) wrote about Janet’s press releases– a very powerful testimony testimony if you asked. Not trying to be mean to Jeremy, but it is good to know we can compete on the level of grammar. 😉