I am not sure if this is Shoes doing or if one of his advertisers is taking advantage of his site. But he has a serious problem. If you go to ShoeMoney.com as of 10:18AM EST once the page fully loads wait a few seconds and you will be automatically redirected to http://www.affiliate.com/?affilate=shoemoney . You can't even read a whole post before this thing sends your current browser window to this parked page. If you hit the back button it just takes you to your last page and not even shoes site. Someone just got very very rich by owning shoes site and his traffic. Edit 10:22AM EST:
It's possible that the conspiracy theory of him doing this to himself is true because it's his style to create controversy, but I have a feeling this is not his own doing. Of course, when he does a story about it, it will be massive linkbait, so either way, he wins.
I see it as well, that is very surprising. Why would he add a tag like that into his page if he did this himself?
The ultimate conspiracy. Someone hijacked my page and picked "Shoemoney" as their affiliate id. Now, I will do a blog post about it and get 9,000 sphinns and a crazy amount of links, chatter. He will make back all the money he is losing right now after the linkbait storm.
Its not some sort of linkbait, At first I was shocked and then skeptical. But then I saw where the redirect was. In his post he was giving an example of how to do a meta redirect. The problem is that forgot to close the tag in wordpress. This is causing his blog to read the meta refresh as html and not as sample code. Its a simple mistake and I am 100% sure it was a accident. Its just funny to see that major blogs and players in our field can still make major mistakes. If that was on a PPC campaign he would be hemorrhaging money. I hope he sees it soon. HTML:
Lol, I just checked his site and it looks like he has an article on redirection and link cloaking, maybe he forgot the code box?
I can't remember the last time I actually visited his, or any of the other RSS feeds' sites in my reader.
Just think about it, it could be a general mistake or it could be a way to get people talking about his site all over the web. Look at this thread for instance, that's one discussion about this already and I wonder how many more other discussions there are of this all over the web.