MrClowder
Registered Member
- Oct 7, 2017
- 95
- 32
Okay so this is getting really weird.
I ordered a Press Release distribution service from a vendor on here, and I got back a report of the websites that picked it up. The report said that 325 websites picked it up. I was a little bit confused at the results because half them were on the same domain. 160 of them to be exact were on the same domain. For example, it would say "San Diego Tribune" as a network that picked it up, it would show the logo the logo of San Diego Tribune, but the URL would link to http://markets.financialcontent.com/sandiego/news/read/id-of-my-press-release/. This is on the financialcontent.com domain, but uses the San Diego Tribune logo.
Then I realized, half of the ones that were on the same domain (86 to be exact) weren't even real URLs at all. They just redirected to http://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/news/read/id-of-my-press-release/. For example, it would say "The News & Observer", it would have the logo for the news and observer, the URL would link to http://markets.financialcontent.com/mi.newsob/news/read/id-of-my-press-release/, and when I click on that URL it would do a 301 redirect to http://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/news/read/id-of-my-press-release/.
I made a post about it on here asking if that was normal, but I left it thinking "Oh well, at least there were a lot of legitimate news networks that picked it up. For example, azcentral.com (91 DA), or buffalonews.com (78 DA), jsonline.com (88 DA), and post-gazette.com (91 DA). That's pretty significant" That is, until I dug deeper...
Now this is where things get really weird.
I noticed that a most of the high DA networks all had my press release on a subdomain (for example http://markets.ask.com, http://markets.post-gazette.com, http://finance.jsonline.com, and http://finance.az-central.com). Of course at first it just looked like they it would be the finance or the markets section, but then I did a bulk query to find tag information about all of the websites. I noticed that all of the websites that were on a finance, business, or markets subdomain all had their canonical URL set to.... you guessed it. financialcontent.com. There were 49 in total. The websites are all identical copies of the same website, other than the fact that they use the logo of the domain they were on.
Below is a full list of the websites for anyone who is interested.
https://pastebin.com/gRVeTG00
So we have extremely high authority news networks from all different areas all with a subdomain that is a clone of the same website. What is going on here? Why would they do that, what would they have to gain by doing this?
I ordered a Press Release distribution service from a vendor on here, and I got back a report of the websites that picked it up. The report said that 325 websites picked it up. I was a little bit confused at the results because half them were on the same domain. 160 of them to be exact were on the same domain. For example, it would say "San Diego Tribune" as a network that picked it up, it would show the logo the logo of San Diego Tribune, but the URL would link to http://markets.financialcontent.com/sandiego/news/read/id-of-my-press-release/. This is on the financialcontent.com domain, but uses the San Diego Tribune logo.
Then I realized, half of the ones that were on the same domain (86 to be exact) weren't even real URLs at all. They just redirected to http://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/news/read/id-of-my-press-release/. For example, it would say "The News & Observer", it would have the logo for the news and observer, the URL would link to http://markets.financialcontent.com/mi.newsob/news/read/id-of-my-press-release/, and when I click on that URL it would do a 301 redirect to http://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/news/read/id-of-my-press-release/.
I made a post about it on here asking if that was normal, but I left it thinking "Oh well, at least there were a lot of legitimate news networks that picked it up. For example, azcentral.com (91 DA), or buffalonews.com (78 DA), jsonline.com (88 DA), and post-gazette.com (91 DA). That's pretty significant" That is, until I dug deeper...
Now this is where things get really weird.
I noticed that a most of the high DA networks all had my press release on a subdomain (for example http://markets.ask.com, http://markets.post-gazette.com, http://finance.jsonline.com, and http://finance.az-central.com). Of course at first it just looked like they it would be the finance or the markets section, but then I did a bulk query to find tag information about all of the websites. I noticed that all of the websites that were on a finance, business, or markets subdomain all had their canonical URL set to.... you guessed it. financialcontent.com. There were 49 in total. The websites are all identical copies of the same website, other than the fact that they use the logo of the domain they were on.
Below is a full list of the websites for anyone who is interested.
https://pastebin.com/gRVeTG00
So we have extremely high authority news networks from all different areas all with a subdomain that is a clone of the same website. What is going on here? Why would they do that, what would they have to gain by doing this?
