Just saw the most hilarious scam

[pompousjohn]

I heard about different websites being for sale on a popular online auction website, and the usual story is that people sell these sites after getting banned from adsense.

So out of curiosity I went and ran a search to see what was up over there and saw a site the owner is trying to sell for 20k, claiming it has high PR, good SE positioning, etc.

So first of all I checked backliknks, only 5 backlinks for a site that supposedly has been up for 6 years with over 4,000 active forum members.

Also the owner mentions that he has decided to "temporarily turn off" his adsense account "as evidenced by the white squares on the site."

and goes on to say that adsense income from the site varies from x amount to x amount.

Well it seems strange to me that anyone would disable adsense for a site that's still live and could be making money, so I clicked around and found one of the white squares that he supposedly "decided to temporarily turn off" and has text above it that says:

"please click on google link"

this appears on a page with no other content.

Yeah, I am real sure it was all his decision to disable adsense...

Are there really people out there with 20k to spare and no common sense whatsoever? Scary...

[MediaSpree]

Are there really people out there with 20k to spare and no common sense whatsoever?

Prehaps in the hey day of domains before the dot com bust, but nowadays no way his site will sell for that much if at all.

[jenkers]

it is a little worrying... I saw on ***deleted***bay
a few months ago. Someone selling a site for approx £300 on the basis that its traffic rank was 1,500,000 in Alexa and initimating that the rating meant this was how many hits the site was getting. There were bids - when I asked the auctioneer exactly how many uniques (publicly) the site received, there was no response.

[pompousjohn]

Well the other thing I was wondering is if maybe offering a site for sale on "that website" is a sneaky way to get backlinks and other traffic from high traffic websites, it's unlikely anybody's gonna shell out cash for these sites.

[jenkers]

the sad thing is that sometimes people do. They've heard of the interthingy and think its a good opportunity - and where better to go than a leading reputable brand to buy a good interthingy wotsit. I jest not, there are still many many people out there who are not yet web-savvy.

As for backlinks - *bay pages don't seem to show up so much in SERPS these days (I think...could very well be wrong) - wouldn't think it'd be a very good backlink.