Thanks to Publicity Hound Gaye Carleton of Mantra Public Relations in New York City for tipping me off to this super-sleazy (as in dishonest) website owned by a company calling itself Public Relations, Inc.
The hyperlink provided above sometimes leads to an error page, which is just as well.
When I clicked on it a few days ago, I discovered that the site disguises itself as a website filled with PR resources. The site’s owner apparently scraped content from Mantra PR and other PR websites, including some from big agencies like Ketchum, and posted the content at their site so they could draw traffic when people search on PR-related keywords. They also make money from Google AdSense ads that show up on the site.
Gaye contacted me because she noticed that one of my Google pay-per-click ads was displayed there. She advised me to tell Google to block that site when showing my ad, which I’ve done.
Why am I telling you this? Because you should be checking your website statistics to see where your traffic is coming from. That’s how Gaye stumbled upon the sleazy site–when she was routinely checking her web traffic statistics provided by Hitslink, a subscription service.
“As I was reviewing the report from Hitslink, I saw that someone came to the Mantra Public Relations site through http://www.in-elkhartindiana.com. Since I thought that was such an odd site through which to be found, I went to the site myself and was shocked to see what was there. And that’s when I began notifying the other PR firms listed on the site.”
I use Hitslink, too. It’s a better tracking program than what my hosting company offers, and it gives super-detailed real-time statistics like what keywords people use to get to my site, where all the traffic is coming from, what pages they leave from, and how many people are at my website at the precise moment I am reading the stats.