With web development becoming more and more available to almost every internet user and with the increasing number of platforms allowing virtually anyone to create his or her own website, it is expected that the competition for online traffic become tougher and tighter by the hour. And with many businesses today basing their operations entirely on the internet, it should also come as no surprise if they do everything to make their page ranks higher to drive more visitors to their sites. This whole business of traffic-driving is called search engine optimization or SEO. The best thing about SEO is it creates so many online jobs that can be done from the comfort of one’s home.
One of these SEO jobs is link building. Basically, it is the creation of links in other websites that lead to the website being optimized. That may be quite a too simplistic definition but it explains in the simplest terms how link building is done.
Searching for link building freelance opportunities, I stumbled upon the following job post, which I found quite funny.
“I want as many as possible links to my site. I only need to be 'famous' for 10 days. After that, it doesn't matter if I'm blacklisted or whatever. I need to be No 1 on Google on the 15th of May. Absolutely, positively. If I am toast by the end of May, doesn't matter. So I want porn links, link farms, blog spam. Everything! I MUST be No. 1 on the 15th of May for at least 24 hours. Bid a low to win. If I am no. 1 on 15/05/10, I WILL pay $600 U.S. dollars as a bonus. Guaranteed. My regular employee rating is 9.985. I'm sorry, but I am undercover for this one as it is flying under the radar.”
This job ad was created on April 20 the same year. I found it funny because the buyer seems to be really desperate to rank number on Google’s search results in such a short time. And the poster even had a specific target date for it! Whose curiosity wouldn’t be piqued by that? What kind of site could it be?
Well, I never found out because I didn’t even think of applying for it. Obviously, the buyer was looking for a link building team. An individual couldn’t possibly deliver the results the buyer wants in a very short period of time. But even with a team of link builders, they would have to have a really, really good strategy to give the buyer’s website the highest possible page rank even for just a day.
Doing link building per se is quite easy. You just need to post links in forums, comment threads, online site directories, blogs, etc. But getting good results, i.e. a boost in page ranking, isn’t as easy. Therefore, the practice of link building should be done with quality in mind. When we say link quality, we are talking of how creative links are.
Link building freelancers should be able to make their forum and blog posts more engaging and more credible-sounding so other people won’t think of them as mere spammers promoting their websites.
Websites have been using Captchas since around 2000. Still, many people have never heard of it or don’t exactly know what it is. So you can just imagine how clueless they would get even more if they’re asked about a captcha entry job.
If you belong to the “triple W” generation and you don’t know what Captcha is, it’s all right. It’s a bit on the usually ignored technical aspect of websites that’s why many internet surfers still don’t know about it even if they’ve already encountered it countless times.
Captcha stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” (Good thing they coined the acronym, right?) It is what we almost always see whenever we fill out sign up or registration forms online. Usually placed near or at the end of online sign up forms, Captcha comes in the form of an image in which there are slightly distorted letters and numbers. The user should read the image and type the alphanumeric combination in the text box provided to proceed with whatever he/she wants to do on the website (e.g., sign up, post a comment, do a search, etc.).
As its full name implies, Captcha is a way to counter spamming bots, or online programs that “crawl” websites to read information, fill out forms, and post comments. Captchas had been effective until programs were developed to “read” the images. So, companies designed more complicated Captchas that couldn’t be decoded by programs. Hence, Captcha entry jobs started.
With Captcha’s background already explained, you should more or less have an idea on what people do as Captcha encoders. Some companies wanting to send promotional materials and invitations to millions of internet users bypass anti-spam measures by using bots to fill out forms and comment boxes and employing humans to decode the Captcha images.
The number of spam entries bots make is more or less equal to the number of images that should be decoded—and there could be hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of Captchas. This is why there are countless online job posts for Captcha entry projects. However, when it comes to earning through this job, it wouldn’t be biased to say that it indeed is one of the most low-paying home-based jobs you can get.
You’d be lucky to get a rate of 25 cents per image. However, most companies post their ads in freelancing sites where freelancers have to bid for prices to get the project. So the tendency is, the buying price gets lower as more sellers (freelancers) try to outbid each other. And when we say gets lower, we mean really, really low. Captcha entry projects could pay as low as $1.00 for 2,000 Captcha images. Some even had teams of encoders to produce as much as 100,000 entries per day.
It is said that bypassing such anti-spam automated test is against the law and constitute a cyber crime, but many still continue doing it to earn money however low the pay is.
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