In an article posted on Oilman's blog there is a story about a guy looking for a girl he met in an airport, I posted a note about it yesterday. I also came across a comment by IrishWonder on the same post :
Am I being too cynical or is it a cool case of linkbait?
This was the first time I had heard about linkbait and so looked it up and found out that it is basically a technique for creating a story/content to wheel in links from interesting sites. Getting interesting sites to willingly do so would depend upon the content being special/interesting. Some people seem to think the term linkbait is not a good term since it isn't always about tricking people into linking to your site.
Anyway, curious as I am, I did a few searches on the name "Kevin Amoros", initially I thought that it wasn't a very French first or last name. Also having done some English teaching, I was surprised at how the structure of the sentences were pretty complex with some simple English mistakes as if they were added afterwards. First of all some school photos come up on a French site called trombi.com. Then I came across an interesting thread on a forum and this part of the thread is why it came up in Google :
domain: pleinphare.com
created: 04-Oct-2002
last-changed: 17-Dec-2003
registration-expiration: 04-Oct-2004
nserver: ns19.schlund.de
nserver: ns20.schlund.de
registrant-firstname: Kevin
registrant-lastname: Amoros
registrant-street1: (Deleted upon persons request)
registrant-pcode: 92700
registrant-city: Colombes
registrant-ccode: FR
registrant-phone: +33.662703455
registrant-email: kevinamoros@wanadoo.fr
admin-c-firstname: Kevin
admin-c-lastname: Amoros
admin-c-street1: (Deleted upon persons request)
admin-c-pcode: 92700
admin-c-city: Colombes
admin-c-ccode: FR
admin-c-phone: +33.662703455
admin-c-email: kevinamoros@wanadoo.fr
It refers to a domain name used in a scam with a special phone number you would call and get charged extra. The idea from this thread and another of the site labelled as "400 Euros in three clicks" in this post was that each time you brought a friend to sign up you would get 1 Euro. They would guarantee you for 20 friends who in turn would bring 20 friends so 20 x 20 = 400 Euros. The small type : you have to ring 3 telephone 'AlloPass' numbers that have a high charge rate... The second thread above explains how the site stopped responding after a few weeks with no way to follow up after having being billed on the numbers...
So far no way of knowing whether this guy is the same one !? Well yes, because the email is the same one used on the guys ad page, which I'm not going to link to (kevinamoros@wanadoo.fr) and a 'whois' query on the domain name that was used for the scam (404 error on pleinphare.com) reveals that the registrar company (schlund) is the same as the one for the current web site. Kevin seems to have his habits. This doesn't actually indicate whether he actively participated in this scam though.
So could it be he heard the song by James Blunt called 'You're Beautiful' and thought that's a nice story I know how I could use that, replace subway with airport, same sad ending...
IrishWonder may well be correct in his first idea that this is a linkbait scam (not as bad a scam as the one described above). Has Kevin just been pretty unlucky and got mixed up with the wrong people ! On face value you wouldn't think the sub domain which is pretty long is interesting from a search engine perspective and I doubt the aim was to have an impact on the main domain !?
PS : I've just been going through my email and today's Robert Clough searchengine.com newsletter is talking about this, obviously Clough talks about it from a Search Engine Advertising perspective !