Recently I was researching on different landing pages for my web hosting reviews site which I’ve neglected for a long time and came across this ripper of a dodge. The site is hostdir .org and they definitely do not deserve a link in from me.

What’s wrong with this site? It looks like a normal, cleanly presented, review site, but have a look more closely…

Every host is suitable for your country (they must be using a geoip tracker)

Every host is the host of the month

Every host has 271 members who signed up, 21 reviews, and rated 4.91 out of 5!

and lets throw in some random awards and guarantees

Finally… the dodgiest of them all is that they claim to have 2154 subsribed rss readers!

But hold on… it links to the netbusinessblog!!

another unethical affiliate exposed!

These dodgy strategies used on the site, if applied in the offline world, would certainly land the guy with a huge fine from the office of fair trading (or equivalent body in the US). In the big bad world of online affiliate marketing though, we’re still in the wild wild west days where anything goes!

Popularity: 13%

I found this neat feature on eBay today. With just a few clicks you can set up your own ’shopping’ portal to eBay via what they call an ‘Editor Kit’.

Check out the live sample at my new Maltese Dog Shop :) The eBay listing are actual live auctions with the keyphrase “Maltese Dog”. I’ve previously had real shops like Pet Care RX and Dog.com on there but they didn’t convert very well. I’m hoping eBay does much better because everyone uses eBay - right? Being on the front page of the google serps should help my cause too :)

Anyway, to set this widget up, you can sign up via this link:

Editor Kit Link - Visit: http://pages.ebay.com/api/editorkit.html - to use this link

The Editor Kit is like a sort of ‘wizard’ that takes you step by step to creating whatever live listing you want to show. At the end of the process you get a script that you simply cut and paste into any Wordpress page and walaa, you have a fully functional, live eBay listing that is updated in realtime! How sweet is that?

Popularity: 16%