Is Tramadol the new Mesothelioma? I have been seeing lots of Tramadol spam on my sites the last few monthes. I think its more popular than dick pills for spammers at this point. I had no clue what it was so I decided to take a look.

What is Tramadol?

Tramadol is a pain medication. It is an opiate. It apparently isn’t as addictive as other opiates so its not a controlled substance in the USA. Its used to treat moderate to severe pain. There are lots of off label uses for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramadol

NIH says that Tramadol comes in tablet form and should not be crushed or snorted. I am wondering if thats a way to abuse it. Would they mention it if people werenlt doing it? Its supposed to be weaned off of so you don’t experience withdrawals. Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/medmaster/a695011.html

The brand names of Tramadol are:

• Ultratram
• Ultratram ER
• Ultracet ( has acetaminophen in it )

How do spammers make money with Tramadol?

Types of Sites
Affiliates and direct advertisement sales seem to be the only way they are making money. I haven’t seen any adsense setups. I have seen two types of setups. The first they collect all the lead information, I assume they then pass it on to the pharmacy. These types of setups are generally appear to look like online pharmacies.

The next types are basically link farms that refer the user to a site that can fill their need. These are generally information type sites with links to the online pharmacy. Some though also appear to be online pharmacy as well but when you click a link on a particular drug they take you to the pharmacy site.

Adsense:

I didn’t see any made for Adsense type sites for pharmacy. Checking Adwords budget creator the terms cost around 70 to 90 cents. That could convert to clicks worth as much as 45 cents, though its likely less with smart pricing and splitting of budgets between content and search networks.

Affiliate Programs

Payouts for affiliate programs tend to be around 40% for something like 6 to 27 dollars a sale. I have no idea what the average sale volume is no do I know if the programs share future revenue per signup. Seems like a pretty crappy deal to me if they don’t share revenue for the life of the customer. All and all payouts are pretty good though.

Some programs that I read good things about:

• http://www.glavmed.com/ 30% to 40% (revshare recommended on syndk8)
• http://www.rxpayouts.com/ (recommended on syndk8 and digitalpoint )\

Pitfalls:

There are lots of warnings though about promoting pharmacy related affiliate programs and being in the US. News on the street has it you can be held liable if the pharmacy ships drugs with out valid prescriptions. There are several related news stories reporting just that.

Once recent story thats getting a lot of attention is the saga of AffPower.

… Covino and Prasad are just two of 18 defendants charged by indictment on July 27, 2007, for their involvement in the Affpower online pharmaceutical business. Defendants include: three physicians (including Prasad), two pharmacists, a pharmacy owner (Covino), an administrator and manager, two recruiters of physicians and pharmacies, a credit card processor, and eight affiliate website operators. … via networkworld.com

Relevent information on promoting pharmacy affiliates

• Info on a legit affiliate program that won’t get you put in jail
• Info on the ins and outs of pharmacy affiliates

Overall it seems risky but extremely profitable. The monetary figures quoted on the news stories were as much as $5,000 to $10,000 a day for the top of the line. With the threat of jail time I wouldn’t do it with out talking to a lawyer first.

What are they doing to promote their Tramadol sites?

Some examples: ( from “online tramadol” )

On Google:

Lots of parasitic pages are being posted on “trusted sites” to promote their particular sites.

http://www1.epinions.com/user-matthewseiler/show_~View_Profile - currently #1

• Not seeing any backlinks for this page anywhere.

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=profile;u=145742 - currently #3

• 2 links via the google link command
• 125 inbounds via Site Explorer

www.youtube.com/PaulTaylort - currently # 4

• Slightly more than 100,000 backlinks via Site Explorer
• 448 backlinks via Google link command

Once result that I thought was particularly interesting was this page on harvard.edu. The cached version of the page and the current version show no “tramadol” terms on the page. To make it rank for tramadol the page had to be referred to with anchor text or on page text from other locations. Checking the backlinks to that page via Yahoo site explorer we see Doc Searls old blog is overrun with spam and a majority of the links come from there. His old blog is also still indexed demonstrating again the power of parasitic links on a trusted domain. Also this points out the power of anchor text thats still in effect with Google.

On Yahoo:

Top result is a “legit” wikipedia entry everything else is I am seeing is just crud. Yahoo is susceptible to the same parasitic pages that Google is with one difference. Yahoo doesn’t detect redirects as well as Google so many of the results automatically take you to the target pharmacy site. I guess thats a good enduser experience (lol). Considering that only one site is good and the rest junk I suspect the Wikipedia entry is a hand job.

One interesting site was the CBS search page… looks like someone is linking in to a search page on CBS in such a way to produce Tramadol results that highlights their site. The search page is a Google site search page and the spammer used the “intitle:” and “site:” commands. It looks like it worked for sometime but the “intitle” command no longer works for Google site search on CBS. The search page isn’t blocked via robots.txt or meta robots. Its notable that Yahoo can’t detect and remove Google site search pages.

[note] Advanced search operators for Google

On Live:

Live is pretty much over run with spam too. The only difference in the spam with Live is that they seem to trust “groups” sites. Yahoo groups and MSN groups dedicated to Tramadol are at the top.

An interesting site that I guess is a legit result is http://www.onlinetramadol.org/. I have always noticed how domain names affect MSN rankings. If your domain is exactly what the term is it seems that you will always rank for that in MSN. (Please note thats anecdotal only ) .

Overall:

I am not seeing much in thats legitimate in the search engines that isn’t paid for. Google seemed to do the best ot of all of them but thats relative. Its almost as if they all have just decided to fly the white flag and surrender the serps for these terms. The only difference in the spam from engine to engine is that Yahoo can’t catch sites with redirects.

In conclusion

There are lots of things I haven’t looked at here like:

• Where are these guys located?
• who are they?
• where are they spamming from?
• how deep are the levels of their parasitic link networks?

Its easy to see why the spammers are promoting this. Its really good money for the most successful. It doesn’t seem to be worth the same as the good old “meso” days. Mesothelioma was an adsense fueled spam phenomena which made it easy and fairly low risk. In comparison this spam craze is fueled by selling something that can earn you serious jail time.

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