www.Pingl.net is a fascinating but ultimately quite dangerous website offering quick and easy traffic to a website, something most webmasters are desperate for.
This is how I found it, and also why it is so clever.
On one of my company sites, www.universitytranscriptions.co.uk, we have Google Analytics set up, and it came up with the following list of top 5 referrers to our site.
- e-learn.sdu.dk – 32 Visits
- linkedin.com – 27 Visits
- saasoh.com – 21 Visits
- permanent-makeuped-london.info – 18 Visits
- perform-like-alibabaty.info – 9 Visits
Bearing in mind this is a transcription service for academics based at universities and other educational establishments, we were surprised to see that two of the top 5 referrers were from fashion and beauty websites. Two of the others were relevant, we think (a Danish academic site and LinkedIn) and the third is not some reference to Ali Baba and the Thirty Thieves, but the Chinese product website. We looked both of the makeup sites up to discover they were unlikely to have anything to do with our business.
1-0 to Pingl.
The fifth one, perform-like-alibabaty.info, is the actual Pingl website. If you type the address above you automatically get pingl.net popping up.
2-0 to Pingl!
So not only have we clicked on two random websites we have no interest at all in, we have also clicked through to the Pingl site and potentially turned into a customer, if we were that way inclined.
How clever, yet devious is this!
How many other webmasters will have been curious to see who the mysterious visitors are to their websites and clicked the links?
Well done to the inventors of Pingl.net – or at least well done until Google catch up with you, penalise all your customers, and blacklist everything you have ever done..
Which is a little inevitable..
Jonathan Fagan is MD of Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited and TP Recruitment Limited, a set of websites involved in a range of recruitment work. Jonathan has been running small businesses for over 20 years and has a number of interests and investments in companies as diverse as transcription, legal recruitment and a bit of marketing. He is an author of a number of guides and books, together with a children’s novel. In his spare time he enjoys playing golf, cricket, coaching girls’ football, operating a parent taxi, lots of running and paddleboarding on Bala Lake and the River Dee. He is a strong believer in a good work-life balance and regular blogs on making money vs enjoying life. Jonathan’s website is https://www.jonathanfagan.co.uk
Nice article – I’m seeing similar ‘spam’ results in my Google analytics data for our website https://www.surreylofts.co.uk/ – it seems like as quickly as Google stop them (or I fliter them out of my results) another half dozen pop up to take their place, which can be pretty frustrating.