I volunteer with Friend of Greyhounds in Hialeah, Florida. Along with helping with the ex-racer greyhounds that they have up for adoption I also assist with computer, web and other information technology items for them.

We just received an email that seemed mostly harmless. It said that we just won a blogger award and gave a link their site.

When I visited their site, the first thing I noticed was the link was to a generic award. There were several choices for the size and color of the award. As you can see the “award” is very plain and generic. The site even generated the HTML code to include the award on our site.

At first glance it seemed innocent enough, but there were several things about this “award” that bothered me.

The award page was for everybody. Nothing was passed with the link to their site to indicate who we were.

The real problem was with the HTML code they generated to include this award in our website. The HTML code they wanted me to add to our site had 5 links to their website.

At this point I understood what their motive was in choosing us for an award. By having us add 5 links in our website to their website we were providing information to trick the search engines into giving them a higher score in search results. Search engines would determine that their website was more popular that it really was and would rank them closer to the top in search results.

We did not accept this award based on one simple criteria, “If it doesn’t help get out dogs, don’t bother.”