Google Cash – Local Media’s Savior?

With so much being written these days about how hard it is for local media companies such as newspapers to survive, I thought it would be helpful to share with all of my readers working in these companies a fantastic new revenue opportunity I recently discovered called Google Cash!

According to David Rodnitsky of PPC Associates in his Google Cash Review post, some scam artists have been creating sites that look like local news services – such as “Los Angeles Tribunes” or the above screenshot from the “Elk Grove Career Digest” – to promote a fake money-making scheme that seems designed to part the reader and his/her money as soon as possible.

Jonathan Hochman offers his take on the whole thing here with his Google Scams post.

And Jonah Stein, founder of WhiteKnightSEO.org, weighs in with Google’s Cash Cow.

According to Jonah:

Readers should be highly skeptical of any company advertising for “Google Cash” or “Google Money Tree”, but this is not a specific characterization of individual companies as fraudulent . Read their fine print and decide for yourself.

Read it carefully and you may see that by paying a very modest fee, say $1.99 or so, you are actually agreeing to a repeated monthly charge of $70 or more unless you cancel your “membership”. Again, the exact details vary, but each of these offers depends what is called reverse billing fraud to make money…by victimizing the same people again and again.

Since the publication of these article these faux-local news sites have disappeared, but they are sure to reappear in some other form soon.  If you are interested in using your pagerank to put these scam artists out of business and clean up the SERPs and I recommend you get in touch with Jonah at WhiteKnightSEO.org.