I was on neutral grounds till you said this.
Dude sold you a guest post on a site that got a penalty, that’s bound to affect your rankings
This is so weird! How did you find Passive Journal's blog post? I am laughing so hard right now that someone tried to scam, and got caught by an unassuming bystander.
Damn, I didn't even think of that.
Can
@hoangvinhcbvn confirm whether the site was issued a penalty via Search Console before the sale was completed? Because it's possible that the site didn't get an official penalty, it just suffered a drop in rankings after the June 3rd core update.
It's still unclear to me whether
@Passive Journal intended to defraud the seller, or whether he bought a site, realized it was a bad investment and is now trying to recoup the cost through selling the Instagram account and guest posts. It's also possible that the site stats were not accurately represented during the sale.
Let's not jump to conclusions until
@Passive Journal has had a chance to reply.
Great news on the PayPal result!
I think he intended to scam because:
- He said on another BHW thread that he is not into Instagram and wanted to sell OP's "healthy" instagram, but has an active personal Instagram with 1k followers.
- He said on his blog that he didn't want the hunting site because it was about killing, but sold a guest post on it.
- He said on his blog that he didn't want the site because it was penalized, but sold a guest post on it.
- He said on his blog that he was going to transform the site into a review site, but sold guest post on it.
He lied to OP, PayPal, the guy above who he sold a guest post to, his own readers, and it looks like he may not be telling the truth in this thread. I agree with you that it sounds like this "penalized" site is working just fine as he is actively using it. It might not be penalized at all.
When we looked into this, after we bought the site
This is all I need to know. You made a mistake and tried to scam your way out of it. You can't half-azz things then make other people make up for your lack of effort. You have a whole entire blog teaching people about Internet Marketing, yet you aren't doing your own due diligence? That undermines everything you have written on your blog. You failed at a major fundamental of IM. So how can you teach someone else?
Yes, OP should have told you about the penalty, if there really was one, but it's up to you to verify if what the seller said was true BEFORE you buy. Not AFTER!
May I also ask why you are using a "penalized" website to sell guest posts on?
It's not asking a partial refund from PayPal, you filed a dispute and escalated to a claim (or did seller escalate to claim?)
Of course he will ask you to push the domain first. He isn't going to send your money back so that you can have the domain AND the money.
There is no way for him to claim the domain and money back if he refunds you while you control the domain and instagram.
However, if you send the domain first, you will have your claim with PayPal for the money, so you have more liklihood that PayPal will decide in your favor when you show them you returned the domain.
You made a blog post about how you recommend newbies stay away from Flippa because they are likely to get scammed, so clearly you knew that there were risks and you should have known how to check them BEFORE you bought it.
It's really hard for us to side with you when your blog post says "The only reason why I paid $4001 for the site is because of the healthy Instagram account with a decent follower number & the traffic of the site."
Everything you said is correct. A seasoned Internet Marketer with his own "healthy" blog, full of active readers and comments, is trying to get us to believe he did not know what he was doing when he bought the website, but then bragged about the sale on his blog. I am so glad OP got all his money back. I don't feel that OP was the dishonest one here. The Google update and the Flippa sale look like they both happened in the same week, so some things probably didn't show up until after the sale. Those things are kind of out of OP's hands. PJ tried to scam and it blew up in his face. There is an old Proverb that says something like:
"
If you set a trap for someone else, you will be the one to fall into it."
and that is what happened here. Even Paypal saw through the scheme. Lol.
ETA:
I found the Proverb:
"If you set a trap for others, you will get caught in it yourself. If you roll a boulder down on others, it will crush you instead."
Keep this in mind before you scam anyone.
