Honesty is the Best Policy - Not for Ashwin Khanna
Ashwin Khanna, at his blog at “his name plus dot com” (I am not going to link to him), recently announced a contest with first and only prize worth $2500 that required copy/pasting a certain piece of text to a post for participation. Naturally the contest was intended to get backlinks and worked as anticipated getting him over 450 links. That was all OK except that on recent announcement of contest result, everyone was awestricken as the prize went to a blog that was open just two days ago on wordpress.com with only two posts including one that was meant for the contest.
Obviously the Winning blog is owned by none other than Ashwin Khanna himself, which prevents him from loosing the $2500 as promised.
Unfortunately Bloggers were unaware of the fact that the person in question, who was offering $2500, himself was trying to raise money through donations so that he could afford Web hosting (screenshot below, from a blog owned by Ashwin Khanna).
Of course Ashwin Khanna is not going to get away that easily and The Blogosphere is letting Ashwin Khanna know he sucks
Update 27.08.2007 :
Guilty for sure, Ashwin Khanna has removed all contest related pages from his blog and now the contest page shows up something as below.
But hey Ashwin you forgot to remove one page naa… see the screenshot below… time to remove it too… am I right?
Oh! forgot to mention all those posts that you have posted as yours but are actually written by someone else! Naughty Naughty!!
I never expect to win these things anyway, thinking in reality, all we’ll get is a few links.
So, if the upsetting thing is that he gets all these links and then wasn’t honest, why don’t we all just go back to our posts and remove his link?
If everyone did that, his backlinks are gone. For example, technorati isn’t forever, you have to keep up your links in order to maintain your ranking. If he loses all those links, eventually his rating goes back down.
But you know… thanks for bringing this to the attention of many people on that list. I’m going to go check it out more.
fracas
24 Aug 07 at 10:13 am
[...] trackback appeared and I went to check it out. It seems that the “winner” was a blog that was created right before the contest [...]
I heard it through the grapevine… « fracas
24 Aug 07 at 10:31 am
[...] 6, 2007 August 24th - UPDATE: I’ve removed the links to this because apparently the thing was a scam to get the blog owner backlinks. Visit the above link, or this one to see for [...]
How to make an easy $2500.00 « fracas
24 Aug 07 at 10:35 am
I came to know about this scam when Lorelle’s blog today featured a post Never Break The Blogosphere’s Trust: It’s universal by Guest blogger J.T Dabbagian. Ashwin is going to regret doing it. Backlinks will disappear and his name will shine on search engines for the scam for a long long time.
As of 27.08.2007 the contest page and related pages have been removed from Ashwin’s blog (update on post) except for one… how forgetfull Ashwin is!
@Elizabeth (#11)
No it will not stay in RSS. Only Google Reader and other aggregators keep it in cache for a while but update it with latest within hours.
Jalaj
24 Aug 07 at 11:08 am
ahhh.. thanks for the heads up about this! I will remove his link and curse him with a thousand boils.
Jon
24 Aug 07 at 11:13 am
[...] [UPDATE] - I removed this link. Apparently the owner of this blog decided to run a backlink scheme. You can read all about it at jalaj.net [...]
Win $2,500 — Chimeric Day Dreams
24 Aug 07 at 11:22 am
Lovely. What a loser.
Thanks for spreading the word about the scam!
Indigo
24 Aug 07 at 1:43 pm
nice work .. i will use tht idea ..
nishugoyal
24 Aug 07 at 2:36 pm
[...] guy shed some light on the [...]
Let the dog in! » Blog Archive » fake internet contests suckHumorous reflections and stories from a Bainbridge Island, Washington family of 3, plus dog
24 Aug 07 at 3:10 pm
Hey dude, great post! Thanks for the shout-out!
Contest Blogger
24 Aug 07 at 5:13 pm
Even if I go in and delete the post I wrote about the contest, doesn’t it stay in RSS?
Elizabeth
24 Aug 07 at 5:24 pm
My entry was deleted. Thanks…for the headup.
Jennifer
25 Aug 07 at 11:11 am
Thanks for the link. I was one of those scammed.
Adam
26 Aug 07 at 11:02 am
[...] Skip navigation bookmarky_key_088a85223f181ac8.htmlgoogle51603ad9d1bcb791.htmlStatsIdeas ? « Honesty is the Best Policy - Not for Ashwin Khanna [...]
Some Copycats Don’t Use Their Brains : How to trace Copycats « Jalaj
28 Aug 07 at 9:25 am
[...] who fear it to be another fake contest after Ashwin Khanna’s, can stand relieved as the contest is backed by a dozen of Sponsors including Lorelle VanFossen, [...]
Drive Slowly : Google Ahead « Jalaj
26 Sep 07 at 12:27 pm
i cannot pay that much 2500 $
mine total 6 month earning are that much from blogs
lalit nagrath
12 Nov 07 at 5:23 am
[...] Honesty is the Best Policy - Not for Ashwin Khanna [...]
The Blog Revisited - 9 « Jalaj
6 Dec 07 at 9:56 am
who is this danta wise???????????????
fred sanford
13 May 08 at 4:48 pm
who is this danta wise
fred sanford
13 May 08 at 4:49 pm