Yes, Pakistan is undergoing tough economic conditions, no doubt about that. But we didn’t know that Government of Pakistan, and Ministry of Finance in specific, will get this serious in raising funds that it will start selling (high page rank, .GOV domain, extremely valuable) links to webmasters so openly.
This might sound sarcastic to you, but this is happening in real, no jokes.
http://www.mtbfpakistan.gov.pk/ has sold four outbound links already. Go and check its footer yourself. Even worse, these links include Po*n and Viagra products, a shame for a government website to even have such words on its homepage.
Only a person with SEO expertise will understand the (search engine ranking) juice a government website with such high page rank can bring to his/her website. These are usually very lucrative links but the problem is that these government (of Pakistan) domains are official properties and no one should be able to sell links on these domains.
We are assuming that these outbound links aren’t sold officially and the money isn’t sent to national exchequer.
It appears that the webmaster is making extra bucks through sale of links on these government websites. Technically speaking, this is a chargeable and heinous offense.
We have said this before and I will repeat it again: Its time for the government of Pakistan to get real professionals to manage its web presence. Its now or never situation for them. Allah save our country!
Thanks Salman Baig for tipping us on this. Salman was offered a link too, on which he chose to report it instead of buying such valuable link.
Update: October 20th, 2012
mtbfpakistan.gov.pk is down now and giving 403 error.
Update: October 23rd, 2012
mtbfpakistan.gov.pk is back live now and external links, mentioned above, have been removed.
