Internet Black Markets : Part TWO

Wed Aug 12 00:00:00 IST 2009, by Abhishek Mehta

Unfortunately! majority of the Web surfers are fragile. Their fragility comes from a trait of human society named "Trust". Trust is a basic building block of human society but it is a totally different ballgame when it comes to the virtual world. The next door trustable Joe is part of your society but the website hosted in next building/url might be a black market shop booked under a ".com" domain.

This part 2 of the series on "Internet Black Market" continues from Part 1 (Domain hoarding, counterfeit products, antisocial networking and propaganda marketplaces). As in part 1, I wrote more about the black markets where people go but in my latest blog I am detailing the markets where web surfers are taken.

Traffic Generators:

Success of website is based on the traffic it generates, in simpler words more the visitors more successful your website is. But what does a website bring? Appreciation, recognition, business, advertising revenue, clients, customers, collaborators and buyers. This is where traffic generators play an important role, they certainly do not serve any genuine business goal but provide enough traffic to your website. In Search engine many times we come across WebPages, which actually redirects us to something totally different/offensive. These are one form of traffic generators employed by a shady website. Sole goal of such traffic redirectors is to pull web traffic from the net and push it to its client.

Traffic generator can be a software, which constantly hits a website by morphing the IP address to make it look like a real hit. Other form of Traffic generators use spamming, they will post link of the website as various known/unknown forums, chat rooms, groups so that little more legal (spammed) traffic get generated. Third kind of traffic generators comes from companies who hire people in third world under read and earn policies. These people have to go online and go through the urls provided to them by companies. Read it (spend some time), click around, create user accounts and get paid in pennies.

Once the traffic ranking of these shady websites goes up they can charge higher advertising fee, increase market value for the website reselling or just hope that this redirected traffic will turn into business.

Click Frauds/ "Paid to read"

This is darkest of Internet black markets; this threatens the very existence of online advertising. Let there be no doubt that any business, which does not generate revenue will cease to exist. And revenue generation for millions of website on the Internet is not product sales but advertising. Advertising model only works for people who generate at least tens of thousands of hits everyday but even for a smaller website this can pay just enough to get the domain name renewed after a year. How the model works is out of scope of this blog but what happens in the black market is straightforward. Software which generate impressions of URL on website can also simulate the advertisement click. This makes the advertisers feel that someone has genuinely clicked on the advertisement and coming in to do business with them. Money is pocketed from advertisers or advertising services and business is cheated. In day-to-day Internet this is called click fraud.

Just like traffic generators Click frauds happen in many ways. Sometimes software is used and other times low cost labor. Often you will come across websites who have literally no content but lots of advertisements and you cannot leave that webpage without clicking on something. Millions of websites have adopted this way of revenue generation and dark forces of SEO, Traffic generation, domain squatting are helping these black markets to thrive. Life span of such website is very small but in the mean time they pocket the money and vanish. Resurrection under different name is equally quick for them.

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and at crust of it SEO is a good thing. It empowers web sites to inform the search engines (like Google etc.) about the important content for indexing. Then people like you and me use search engines for getting these high value results. Major force behind SEO is a rat race of showing a webpage on top of others in a search engine. Using right kind of keywords many times in content, with right kind of URL/domain name and HTML TAG modifications people can push up their rankings in Search Engines even though they should not be there.

Search engines are the staring place where quest for information begins. SEO in wrong hands is harmful for Internet world. Not many times the web surfers verify the source while looking for the information on the web. Higher search engine rankings, Attractive pricing, false promises and need of immediate solution to the problems can trick user to provide his personal information on a website which looks not only authentic but also look alike your favorite website. SEO techniques are frequently used when it comes to stealing of personal information like home address, social security numbers, phone numbers, bank account details and the list continue.

Plagiarism

Heard of copycats! Yes that is what plagiarists do. This is a poisonous cocktail of lifting the work of someone and using it for your self in different language, packaging or process. This can deeply impact the search engine rankings of original content creator alongside of his derecognition in your eyes. Due to the very nature of the Internet, Plagiarism is not only hard to detect but also hard to prove. God forbids if someone translates your work to Urdu language you will never even know that.

This problem of Plagiarism is rampant on Internet and allowed by companies and people up to controlled level. Say if someone wants to quote my work; few paragraphs of my content, it is permitted as long as he/she refers to original source or me (So that is not Plagiarism). But plagiarists do not care to seek permission while translating or jumbling up the words to make it look different.

Plagiarism is one of rapidly rising trouble of Internet because of the advent of freelance writing and crowdsourcing (Know More). To get writing material for personal blogs and websites, many website administrators prefer to outsource this task to open communities for very cheap price. This content is either copied or low quality but it serves their purpose of piling of unique pages to earn advertising revenue.

At end of this article I would request you to notify the advertisers or web administrators or the search engines if you see these practices taking place in your sight.

Part 1/4 of this series "Internet black markets" contains the detailed information about domain hording, social networking, propaganda market and counterfeit products

Part 3/4 of this series "Internet black markets" contains the detailed information about Spamming, Phishing, Personal information market places and pirated software

Part 4/4 of this series "Internet black markets" the biggest market places of EBay, Twitter, race crimes and online dating will be explored

Courtesy:

Free Stock Photos for websites - FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Posted at 12:00AM Aug 12, 2009 by ABhi in Trends  |  Comments[0]