Grant Shapps is invited to explain recently-deleted text by ‘Sebastian Fox’ of HowToCorp

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Monday, October 15th, 2012 at

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under Consume!, Tories! Tories! Tories!.

We begin today with a hat-tip to data spotter @jolyonjenkins. I urge you to listen to his highly relevant report for BBC Radio 4; Jolyon has been looking into exactly the kind of ‘get rich quick’ spivvery that HowToCorp has been engaging in, and he recently brought to my attention the presence/activities of ‘Sebastian Fox’ in an internet marketing forum hosted at warriorforum.com

Putting aside for a moment those serious unanswered questions about how this product is/was sold (as ‘Michael Green’, Shapps describes something called ‘Joint Level Partners’ in a manner suggesting that his is some form of ‘multi level marketing’ scheme, more commonly known as a ‘pyramid scheme’), here/today I want to focus on the legitimacy of the lead product itself.

The following are two different captures of the same discussion thread at warriorforum.com;

BEFORE: HowToCorp discuss ‘TrafficPaymaster’ at WarriorForum – Thread #1 (Sep 2012 version)

AFTER: HowToCorp discuss ‘TrafficPaymaster’ at WarriorForum – Thread #1 (Oct 2012 version)

What you will notice first is that all mention of detail of the product has been removed on the pretence that the product is now “only available to existing clients”.

There has been a pattern of this kind of behaviour from HowToCorp in response to scrutiny. As Grant Shapps has been assuring the public that everything is above board at HowToCorp, someone has been cleansing the web of visible traces of what he/HowToCorp have been up to; this has included changing the settings/preferences of several domains in order to remove any trace of them from the Web Archive.

There is a lot more detail in the 28 September version to be noted and discussed (as with my earlier/initial post about Wikipedia edits, it is a treasure trove of delights for other bloggers/journalists) but a key point I wish to highlight is ‘Sebastian Fox’ (Grant’s wife) openly bragging about how the product is designed to outwit Google rather than actually meet its content requirements, even after a now-famous update specifically designed to address the problem of junk and/or misappropriated content:

06-28-2012, 07:33 AM howtocorp

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Social Networking Re: How To Build An AdSense Empire – here’s the PROOF you can do the same! Quote:

Originally Posted by seoslug also in terms of spinning…Google is catching up with spin articles…anyway of making it more unique? People who say that “Google is catching up with spun articles” simply don’t understand how search engines operate. Take these two sentences for example: 1. She walked along the road and before long she reached the corner.

2. Strolling along the street she quickly reached the street corner. Question… Which of the two sentences above is the original unspun version? Answer… Neither. They’re both spun! The point is that a search engine has absolutely no way of knowing whether a piece of content is “original” or not. We use TheBestSpinner as our API in TrafficPaymaster. It’s as good as article spinning gets. And it’s way better than is required for a search engine ranking. Seb. TrafficPaymaster | Where Will You Send Your Web Traffic Roadblock?

The patronising lecture about search engines is 100% horse hockey, by the way, but what really matters here is that something that is normally very difficult to prove – intent – is very clear.

For all their talk about this product being an alternative to cheating, it is clearly designed to cheat Google and by extension their users, and hard working creators of original content (the system appropriates content written by other people and falsely presents it as original copy).

I would very much like to hear the Tory party chairman Grant Shapps and/or his wife resolve their demonstrable intent with issues such as copyright infringement especially, but – happily – HowToCorp’s position on cheating Google is already crystal clear; it doesn’t count if you don’t get caught!

Here’s another cleansed thread including incriminating data that HowToCorp have tried to erase, and an extract from same. Check out the text I have highlighted in bold:

BEFORE: HowToCorp discuss ‘TrafficPaymaster’ at WarriorForum – Thread #2 (Sep 2012 version)

AFTER: HowToCorp discuss ‘TrafficPaymaster’ at WarriorForum – Thread #2 (Oct 2012 version)

04-18-2012, 04:24 AM howtocorp

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Social Networking Re: TrafficPaymaster can send you NEW traffic in 2 hours! Hi Sandy, Google may or may not like a particular approach, but the real question is whether there are any signs about how a page has been created. If the answer is no, well then it doesn’t much matter what Google officially thinks. And that’s where pages produced by TrafficPaymaster are completely different from other WordPress auto-blogging packages. TPM doesn’t produce blog pages at all. In fact these are regular HTML pages which aren’t based on other blog software. So there’s nothing that distinguishes pages produced by TrafficPaymaster from pages produced by you. And that’s really the key to the success of TrafficPaymaster | Where Will You Send Your Web Traffic Roadblock? Check out the TrafficPaymaster blog for loads more detail, feedback and success stories… TrafficPaymaster | Where Will You Send Your Web Traffic Roadblock? Seb.

Summary: It doesn’t matter what Google thinks; if we can fool it into thinking the content is legitimate, we will have met their requirements for legitimate content. Genius!

What is most incredible about this attitude is how liberating it is. It doesn’t matter how fast you drive; so long as traffic cops/cameras don’t clock you doing it, you’re OK. Further, while police and people generally often frown on burglary officially, so long as no-one catches you coming, going or taking, no offence has been committed. Brilliant, eh? One wonders how much Mr & Mrs Shapps use this thinking outside of their business interests.















