So the next time you get an email soliciting paid links on your blog — and who hasn’t these days (I retract that: if you’re doing well enough that someone wants to pay for links on your site, good for you) — and you’re *really* tempted, because you know that a lower pagerank means squat to traffic, and you could really use the funds to reinvest in your blog / buy a new pair of speakers / pay your rent, you may want to reconsider.

Turns out that there is a new scam that is going around which is actually an elaborate form of the Nigerian Email Scam, or 419 Fraud. I’m sure you know the one — its where you get an email out of nowhere (perhaps Nigeria, as that’s where its thought the scam originated there is no data as of yet suggesting where the fraud is actually coming from) telling you that you’ve won / been bequeathed / need to hide millions of dollars, and that all the other folks need is your bank account number, and — inevitably, extra funds (this is where you get scammed).

Anyway, the *new* version of the Nigerian Email Scam is one where sites, or blogs, are solicited for display, or text link (paid) ads. I found this nugget of information on a security site called F-secure, no less, where the scammers in question used the subject line “partnership enquiry“, or “Website Partnership Enquiry”, that enquiry being, of course, their solicitation to purchase advertising on your site, in the form of display ads and text link ads.

If you *do* answer them, they will negotiate a fairly heft sum of cash (F-Secure has the details) in the low four figure range, which is no small sum to some bloggers. So, here’s the scam part:

They will send you a check for the agreed upon sum PLUS some additional cash, by “mistake”. For example, if you agreed upon $2000, they’ll send you $3000. Then they’ll send an email back saying that they sent the extra by mistake, please send *back* the balance, please.

Problem? That check that was mailed to you for the advertising deal, if you wait long enough, never clears. You end up with squat and the scammer gets your money.

So the next time you get an email solicitation for display ads or text link ads (paid links) on your website, be cautious and do a little bit of due diligence:

1. Investigate your buyer thoroughly: do they leave an appropriate name, place of business, and phone number? Do they have an actual website that they want to advertise? Do the owners of the website *know* the alleged buyer of the advertising?

2. Wait for that check to clear: the scam only works if you don’t realize that the check doesn’t clear / it does bounce. This is a non-issue if you’re being paid via Paypal, but if you’re being mailed anything it always helps to be cautious

Update: Snoskred suggests that it can take an awful long time for checks to clear, and that they can take up to a year to bounce. As always a low threshold for calling any offer that is too good to be true “BS” should be a low one.

Other resources:

• The History of the Nigerian 419 Fraud or Advance Fee Scam
• Examples of Nigerian Email Scams
• Interviews with Nigerian Scam Operators
• 419Eaters — A Scam Baiting site for Nigerian Scam Artists

Well, looks like there’s another PageRank update underway, and it looks like this blog has been penalized / slapped down, for what I can only imagine is the fact that I have paid links on this site (or, used to be: read on). It used to have a PageRank of 6, and now its been kicked down to a humble 3, and yet others being zero.

Is it a surprise to me? Well, no. I mean, as you may have noticed (or not, if you only read this through your feed reader of choice), that Text Link Ads, the company which puts puts the Pay in Paid Links, has generously sponsored this site for many months (I used to have a giant banner on the top of this blog).

Now, at this point, many bloggers would beat their chest and throw up the proverbial finger to Google. Furthermore, they would include other culturally appropriate / rude gestures as well in the mix, ending with the “PageRank don’t mean squat to me, it shouldn’t mean squat to you, and I’m just going to carry on selling links”.

Well, here’s a sad, shallow, fact about me.

I *do* care about this site’s PageRank.

And it doesn’t have anything to do with this site’s perceived traffic, which is minimal to begin with, and which I don’t believe will materially change with the downgrading of my pagerank; nor does it have anything to do with PageRank as a metric that is used by other sites to rank DJI — for example, ironically, text link ads.

No, the reason why I do care is because, to *me*, its a yardstick of how well I’ve done with this blog over the past year (almost two) that I’ve been blogging for, independently of traffic, as its all about the quality of their inbound links.

And you know what?

I like that metric.

This blog has humble amounts of traffic and a humbler amount of people subscribing to my feed, but the quality of those in bound links don’t have anything to do with that. And for a guy who

• blogs part time,
• only writes opinion columns,
• is rarely in a position to break news,
• doesn’t write link-bait material

… I’m rather proud of how far this blog has come — and for those reasons, I don’t mind people checking out my PageRank, as it stacks up to other blogs which have a lot more traffic / much more popular than mine.

And in many respects, that public metric, to me, is a measure of the great links I’ve accumulated over the past year or so, such as TechCrunch, Mashable, Valleywag, ReadWriteWeb, 37Signals, CNet, Direct2Dell, and the UK’s Guardian Unlimited are included as well.

To me, those inbound links are a small recognition that someone somewhere (‘professional’) thinks my writing is worth something. And if PageRank is one of the only well recognized, albeit troubled, public validation of that metric, then its one whose rules I will have to respect and abide by.

The bottom line is that I’ve realized what those links mean to me, and as a surrogate, what PageRank means to me, and they are worth much more than what any specific sponsorships or paid links bring in.

So, I would like to publicly thank Patrick Gavin who has been nothing but gracious and supportive of this blog, but as of today, I will no longer be accepting paid text links, nor allowing public sponsorship of this blog *by* Text-Link-Ads.com, in hopes that one day my PageRank might be restored.

(And yea, I do recognize that Google is a fickle creature, and lo, I may not have my PageRank restored even though I do banish these looked-down-upon practices … by Google).

Am I making a lot of sense?  Am I merely being weak and vain in the face of The All-Mighty (Google)? Shouldn’t I take a stand on all of this on principle?

I don’t know the answers to much yet, except that for the time being my answers are “maybe”, “yes”, and “not right now”.

• being on-call a lot at the hospital, and being called in. “Home call” — faugh!
• contending with a summer cold that my son gave me (and my wife, and my wife’s mother, and my wife’s mother’s mother. Thanks Ian!
• … and a presentation that I had to give yesterday that took much, *MUCH* longer to prepare than I had anticipated [it had to do with the association between proton-pump inhibitors -- like nexium, for example -- and hip fractures if you must know]

At any rate, thanks to everyone for sticking around, and a few other miscellaneous thank-you’s that are outstanding, namely:

• Patrick Gavin at Text-Link-Ads who continues to sponsor this blog
• Curtis Sund over at FindInternetTV — who incidentally figured out the CSS hiccup that was causing DJI’s theme to not display correctly in MSIE7 (but not 6, or 5, or Safari, or FF or anything else)
• Chris over at GeekFitters.com. Who is Chris, you might ask? Well, he’s the guy behind GeekFitters, which is an online concern which outfits geeks in t-shirts [translation: its a t-shirt company].

Anyway, being a bit of a geek requiring outfitting, Chris sent me a few shirts to try out earlier this month. One day soon I’ll post a picture of me in one of them. Nevertheless, the service was fast, friendly, and the t-shirts themselves are actually quite nice. Specifically, the “Vintage cut” is actually a nice fitted t-shirt. Its not loose and billowy, and the cotton has a nice feel. Its a bit of a lighter weight, so its ideal for summer. Of course, the graphic on the front is a bit cheeky — and I chose the one that said “I put the STUD in STUDY”. Which would be apropos given that my royal college exams will be coming up in the new year, and I will in fact be studying like a banshee (if banshees were to study real hard). If I had any complaints it would be to give the actual site and shopping cart a bit of a make over — it looks a bit long in the tooth, shall we say.

In other news around people in blogging that I may have missed there are two things of note:

1. Jason Kaneshiro has joined the BlogHerald, joining a stellar cast of bloggers already. Who’s Jason? You might know him already from his own blog Webomatica. Jason will be dishing thoughts and things he’s learned from blogging a la “Blogging 101″ every Wednesday. Jason’s been on my radar for a long time, so check it out! (and his blog, if you’re not already doing so!)

2. Aiden Aidan Henry of Mapping the Web got a regular gig over at Read/Write Web. Aiden Aidan is another blogger — and Canadian, naturally — that I’ve been keeping my eye on, at his own blog Mapping The Web, which has a nice web2.0 focus. Congratulations to Aiden Aidan, as I understand he fought tooth and nail through 4 rounds of interviews, applications, and actual, real, physical combat to secure his position. That Richard MacManus throws one helluva round-house, I hear. :)

Anyway, I should be back to blogging over the next week — thanks everyone for their patience.