phplist Site Paid Links

phplist web site appears to have paid links for Spa days, Cosmetic Surgery, and other sites.

I’m helping a friend with her web site, and she is already using phplist for her newsletter emailing. I haven’t really used similar software other than the general mailing list software like mailman and before that Majordomo.

I went to the phplist’s web site to learn more about it, and from there to the sponsors of it Tincan “a web solutions company”. Oh noes, look at all of the “sponsored links” at the bottom and none of them are nofollow. I have no idea, what Yellow Pages for each of those countries have to do with Tincan: “Web Hosting UK, Yellow Pages Italy, Yellow Pages Norway, Yellow Pages Finland, Yellow Pages Germany, Yellow Pages Sweden, Yellow Pages Denmark, Yellow Pages France, Yellow pages Spain, Yellow pages Netherlands, Yellow pages Belgium, Yellow pages Switzerland, Yellow pages Portugal, Yellow pages Austria, UK Dedicated Servers, Web Hosting, Dedicated Server Hosting, Yellow Pages UK”.

It is a safe bet those are paid links, and their sole purpose is to influence search engines. Now, I would love smarter search engines, but as long as we have the fairly dumb ones we have today, then those links create a bad experience for everyone.

Oh, but it gets worse, I now notice phplist.com has a similar list of links, but these ones aren’t even labeled as sponsored links: “web hosting and reseller hosting, Managed Dedicated Servers, Yellow Pages Finland, Yellow Pages Germany, Yellow Pages Sweden, Yellow Pages Denmark, Web Hosting UK, Spa Days, Dedicated, Hosting Reseller Hosting, UK Web Hosting, cheap web hosting, Yellow Pages France, Yellow pages Austria, Web Design Company, Cosmetic Surgery, Yellow Pages UK, Yellow Pages Italy, Yellow Pages Norway, Yellow pages Spain, Yellow pages Netherlands, Yellow pages Switzerland, Yellow pages Portugal, Schüssler Salze”.

Spa days and Cosmetic Surgery are cute additions to the list. Now, these are so blatant there is no way that Google and others haven’t already busted them on this.

Way! phplist.com is the top “organic” result for ‘mailing list software‘ and also for ‘php mailing list‘.

Ironically, the other links on the page go through a redirect function http://www.phplist.com/t/~[target url]

Using the way back machine, you can see when the sponsored links where added:

• Sept 1, 2006 No similar links http://web.archive.org/web/20060901081213/http://www.phplist.com/
• Nov 9, 2006 Now 3 links all hosting related. This seems reasonable. They could have a
  genuine partnership and have found those hosts to provide a good
  phplist experience. http://web.archive.org/web/20061109075825/www.phplist.com/
• Aug 17, 2006 Now 6 links including Spa Days and Cosmetic Surgery http://web.archive.org/web/20070817054431/http://www.phplist.com/

Wed, Feb 13th I emailed tincan.co.uk asking about these sponsored links but haven’t heard back.

I’m hoping by posting this publicly it will help shame them into correcting. It is a really shame that it dirties what otherwise looks like an awesome product and contribution to open source.

Hopefully, they correct it before someone reports them to Google and the other search engines for paid links. See Matt Cutt’s How to report paid links for more information, but the following from the article is particularly relevant:

There are a few interesting things about these links. If you take off your webmaster hat and put on a user hat for a minute, you quickly start asking yourself questions like “Why is a Linux site linking to a bunch of poker, pills, and gambling sites?” Users often consider links like this spammy or low-quality. I’m sure some people will happily defend links like these, but in my experience people who search on Google don’t want links like these to affect Google’s search results.