It seems I've stirred some disagreement with my previous post on BackLinked. After Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim picked up my link with a post (since revised), WhoLinked's Todd Dunning emailed to both of us with his opinon on my comments. I'll post his whole comment below:Let me correct Melanie's characterizations which are not factual.
"A spam sucker" - To keep WhoLinked free, we run an eBay ad in the bottom which is paying for about half of our hosting cost of $4670 this month. Otherwise it's out-of-pocket. The ad is purposefully small as explained below.
"monetizing with sneaky tactics" - I didn't want spammy self-promotion visible on people's sites. So I made the dropdown purely to obscure the links. We would get more money if it was not obscured, which we may have to do in the future.
"The affiliate link is cloaked...a random link " - The eBay link is the standard one they provide: http://affiliates.ebay.com/best-practices/landing-pages/ "advertisements or farmed links are part of the deal" We do a link: site.com query on each of the 3 search engines.
I don't know where "farmed links" comes from. Kind of lame for Melanie to get the benefits of using WhoLinked now on her own blog, while bashing it at the same time. Right now about 400 sites/blogs a day are adding WhoLinked, so we're wracking our brains trying to figure out how to keep it free and non-spammy on people's sites. The Rackspace bill is killing us in the meantime... so I'm really up for suggestions!
First, I did point out first that I like WhoLinked well enough and that many, including myself, would be willing to run it as a good service regardless of whether the ad link was hidden there. (I am the "spam sucker" I spoke of.)
Second, I'll admit I did see the FAQ mention of sponsored links, but didn't read that as a full disclosure of the redirects. I don't remember if the words "under the box's explanation window" was originally there last I viewed the site (Friday), but I will note that WebLinked has since changed at least some content on their site which I commented on.
Namely, third, I mentioned some famous awards WhoLinked posted on their site. I pinged Todd for clarification. Todd said he was unaware that those award pics were on the site, that it was a mistake over which they'd recently fired their webmaster, and that he'd appreciate if I could send over the page link so corrections could be made.
Two technical points. By "sneaky redirects" I meant the hidden url for a spam-like directory/doorway page that is served between the "What is this?" link and the eBay destination. Those cloaked links, by the way, are what I meant by 'farmed links,' placing hundreds of linkbacks and inevitably boosting pagerank for those urls.
Finally, to one of the commentors on my site: yes, I do love capitalism! Viva free products with small ad bits thrown-on to help keep the venturesome programmers alive. I just prefer all the information up-front, and correct.
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