Today, I noticed an article on Google News about stamp collecting that pointed to an article over at PR-GB.com. I’m not going to put a link to it, as I followed through and decided to warn people against it instead. As it turns out, the article was a horribly written spam piece about the basics of stamp collecting. The article was full of misspelled words, bad grammar, and incomplete sentences. In fact, the only purpose for the article was to push collectors to click on a link at the bottom of the article to go to a site which on the surface seems to be about stamp collecting. Nothing could be further from the truth. The site is full of pages that have no real information about collecting, but instead is loaded with nothing but advertisements and affiliate links trying to get people to buy stamp collecting related items. This is the worst kind of Internet pollution out there, because it is simple deception designed to get high search engine rankings and draw people in for the sole purpose of making money without providing anything real in return. I will give you the URL (stampcollectinghq.com), but I will not make it a hot link for you to click on. If you want to see the site, then manually put it into your browser address bar.

Putting hot links to other sites on a page draws attention to that site by the search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN all view links like that as a “vote” for the importance of the site linked to. This is why I will not link to that site (stampcollectinghq.com) or PR-GB. PR-GB is a paid for inclusion press release website which exists only for the purposes of letting people buy links back to their websites. In essence, the website owners are buying votes to try and convince the search engines that they have a popular and important site.

So, you might be wondering about the purpose of this post. What I wish to get across here is that, while I run advertising on this site and I do receive money for it (at least someday I might…I haven’t reached the minimum payout threshold yet), I try to provide something of value on this site. Clowns like the owner of the above mentioned site do not provide anything of value and should be banished from the Internet. If you see something like that site, please don’t give them your business by clicking on their ads, as you will only be contributing to the pollution of the Internet. Instead, try to reward those site owners that actually DO something to try to keep your interest.