Bloggers Gaming The System

Ever since Salisbury News announced we were going to start selling advertising, other local Bloggers have come out of the woodwork. One in particular erased all of their extremely nasty history and even changed their domain address so you couldn't see all the nasty things they had said about innocent women and children. Clearly they knew businesses would have nothing to do with their past.

However, once you change your domain name and start fresh, companies like Alexa, (who rate Websites) have no previous history so the new website address would start off with a very low rating. Remember, lower is better on Alexa. However, we knew it would be a very short period of time before Alexa would recognize that this website wouldn't have the traffic to keep their ratings low, so how do you fix that problem?

Well, it turns out, several local Bloggers have placed some code to their websites to make it look as if they're receiving a LOT more hits than ever before. What they have done is, if you go to one of their Sites and just sit there for a few minutes, then go to the top of your screen where it has the http:// address and click on the down arrow, all of a sudden you'll see their address up there multiple times, yet you only went there once!

This new code keeps refreshing their page over and over again, making it look like you keep going back over and over again. Cleaver, but a complete lie. You're welcome to look at Salisbury News any time you like and see that will NOT happen. Our numbers are real and we do NOT game the system/Internet. When we tell people what we're doing every day/month/year, these are real and factual numbers.

Another local Blogger recently delivered an article asking for people to advertise on his Site, yet he also gave some heavy duty misleading numbers. The numbers he gave was for one week. Heck, we do those kind of numbers in one hour, let alone an entire week.

However, the big question is, why would someone waste their money advertising on a Website that gets 95% less hits than Salisbury News and then realize that 95% of those people going to that other Site already go to Salisbury News anyway. Maybe it would be worth your money if they only charged $1.00 a month for their ads, right?

Nevertheless, these people are constantly lying and tricking people. Some make claims that they are selling ads, yet it's absolutely not true. They place ads up there to copy what we're doing here because, (as usual) they're trying to make it look like they're somebody. We have spoken to those people who have ads placed on this other Site and they swear they never asked for the ad, they have never paid for any of their ads, yet they're afraid to ask this particular person to take their ad down because they're afraid they will pull another John Phoebus on them. In other words, they'll go on a personal attack against them.

One candidate said, "It’s a vicious rumor!  I’ve authorized no ad for Taylor’s site.  No one’s even asked me to buy one."

One other example of such was a recent group of messages this same Blogger sent to candidate Bob Culver. He had asked Bob, I know you want to place an ad on my site. Bob responded very politely that he was not interested in placing an ad, yet stated he'd be happy to sit down to a cup of coffee and discuss it more. This Blogger responded, "this is going to come back and bite you in the ass".

Its sad that some Bloggers get their feelings hurt because certain individuals choose not to have any part of their personal attacks on innocent women, children and even candidates. Because so many people will never forget what some Bloggers are capable of, just because they wipe out their history and start over again doesn't mean they're not capable of attacking again, hence Bob Culver, John Phoebus and several others.

Always remember Folks that you can go up to the top of the page and hit that down arrow to see who's gaming the system. If you want to deal with cheaters and get nothing for your money, that's your choice. Salisbury News delivers, period. Oh sure, we knew years ago how the system could be gamed. We had several companies offer to do this for Salisbury News but we refused to participate. I had stated then, when we start advertising I want to deliver results. I did not want to become a global Blog getting hits in from around the U.S. because this wouldn't be fair on our advertisers.

Now that this is getting exposed, I would expect they will make immediate changes to that code to have it removed. Then again, their attention span may not be strong enough to read this entire Post and they may be dumb enough to leave it up. In the mean time, you'll know what's going on. Salisbury News has been ranked the #1 Most Influential Political Blog in the state of Maryland for 4 years straight. We didn't get that honor by gaming the system. We got it because we earned it.