Spotting Scam Sites (some basic website background checks)

January 12, 2008 – 11:38 am

Ok the title of this article is ’spotting a scam site’ and by scam sites I am referring to iffy paid to click sites (PTC) and referral sites. There are litteraly thousand of these type of sites and there are bound to be some bad eggs in there. Unfortunately there is no real way to know which of these sites are legitimate and which are scams until you put in the work and try and cashout and don’t get paid.

But there are a few “background checks” I personally would do on any site if I want to find out more about it.

The first thing I would do is check the Google PageRank of the site. For anyone that doesn’t know Google award sites what they call a PageRank which is anything from 0 - 10 (0 being the lowest). You can either check the PageRank of a site by using a site like this one http://www.googlepagerankchecker.com/ or the easier way is to download the Google toolbar which installs on your browser and you can see the PageRank of any website (which you can see in the image below). If the PageRank of a website is zero it can mean a few things things, either that the site is so new Google has not had a chance to visit it yet or that Google does not consider this site to be of value at this moment in time, which can meant quite a lot.

The next thing I would do is check the number of links that point to the website. You can do this by going to www.yahoo.com and typing in link:http://www.theURLyouwantocheck.com. This will bring all the links up that Yahoo has found pointing to that domain. If you have a check through and see what sites the links are coming from. If the site you are researching is any good chances are someone may have written something poisitive on a blog somewhere and linked to it. This way you will be able to check who is linking to the site and what they have to say about it.

The next thing I would do is check who the site is registered too. You can do this at http://www.allwhois.com/ legally any commercial site should have contact details and a postal address.

The final thing I would check is the age of the domain, which is information you can also get from the website in point 3, if a website has just very recently been created and they say on the site they have been running for ages then I would be suspicious.

This is a very basic guide to checking out a website and is certainly not exhaustive. If you would like more information on checking websites then leave a comment on the post and if enough people are interested I will add another article to this topic.

On the forum we have started a topic on any scam sites you know about, I you have found any to avoid then leave a post on the forum. Prevention is better than cure.

Problem PTC sites
Referral links section