Questionable Promo Tactic

Groupie Joined: Nov 15, 2007 Posts: 63

I was looking over my website statistics one day, and discovered a site that put up a link to my own website. Curious, I went there, and discovered it was a DJ out of the Detroit area.

It looks as if he is pretty web savvy and has built a "spider" to try and find all the Michigan musician acts he can. He then takes the results of this and places these website links on his own page. At first, I thought it was a resell ploy (sort of like being agency-represented without my knowing or permission, and him keeping a gig connection fee of his choosing), but, it doesn't seem to be making such a claim. He frames this up as just being supportive of local music, but, it does seem to make the implication that he is some sort of central "connected" guy knowing of all music deals going down in the state, or something.

I have links to fellow musician friends on my page, but I always ask them first and they all KNOW that I'm doing this. And, it really IS for support, and it being for profit purposes is not the intent of this at all.

I won't list the very link LITERALLY here, since I don't want him tracing to this site or being findable to here with search engines, so I will try to describe how to get there without out-and-out saying so (and I ask that you don't spell this out with any answers to this post, either, for the same reasons!) : It's "madd mann mike" dot com, except with the first two words spelled right and the URL all put together (you can figure it out!...). If you're curious about what I'm talking about, just type this into the URL spot on your browser, then click on the link "Michigan Bands Musicians" at the top. This is the page I found my own link on, as I say, unbenounced to me.

What do you think of this practice? I suppose any promo is good promo, and it doesn't out-and-out say that I'm getting resold, here, but there's just some kind of sleaze factor going on with this, somehow, to me. Is it me or is this a bit on the unethical side?...

Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 3:52 pm

Hi Gene,

I've been to that site before and didn't make that connection. As a mater of fact he comes up quite high in the search engines. From this perspective he may actually be helping you in the search engine listings at least.

Frankly I do not know what his motive is, but I can see your point. What ever he is doing is bringing more people to his site to view what he is selling.

You will notice that bands have to add their link here. We do not seek them out and add them to this site manually.

This does bring up a very good point though. Search engines, especially Google, will punish you if they find a link on a website pointing to you from what they call "a bad neighborhood". Websites that have little or no content and a bunch of links fall into this category. Many businesses have staff that will search the internet for bad links pointing back to their site and request that they be removed from the offending site. The point is, keep the number of links going out on your site to a minimum and keep an eye on who is linking to you. This is just good practice.

Posted: Fri Jan 04, 2008 9:35 pm

Is he selling something there Gene?