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TWSD: SEO Spamming
It’s no secret that I get a lot of spam. It’s no secret that some catches my eye enough to actually write about it here. Today’s spam is an email that actually made me laugh, though. Somewhere, some gardening site paid a lot of money for search engine optimization and got ripped off.
We own the site samspade.org. It’s down now, victim of a major hardware crash, but this was a site with a number of tools for tracking spammers. This morning, I got email about SamSpade.
My name is Tina from <some random gardening site>.
I am the SEO and marketing manager over here.
As you probably know, having backlinks from related sites helps increase your rankings in Google.
Well, I was just doing a search on Google.com for “Samspade” and your site popped up! This is you, right?
Well, check it out…
Since we both target a similar audience, Google will give us BOTH extra love if we each place a simple link to one another.
Not a lot of work and plenty of benefit to both of us.
I know you probably get requests like this all the time, I know I sure do. So, to stand out, I went above and beyond by setting up a customized page telling my site visitors about your great site! 🙂
Poor Tina. Her SEO optimization software mistakenly keyed off of the “spade” in our domain name and decided that we sold weeding tools. Not so much. Of course, the company that “Tina” bought her software from is well versed in spamming, both SEO and email. The domains are all obfuscated behind whois protection. The domain the mail came from doesn’t exist. They’re using gmail as a contact address. They’re hosted on LiquidWeb.
Maybe it’s not poor Tina after all. Maybe this isn’t just some poor person trying to get a leg up. Maybe it really is just a major spammer looking to spam their new website. Poorly. And with no finesse.
Fun article, but why would being hosted by LiquidWeb be relevant?
LiquidWeb has a blackhole for an abuse desk and don’t seem to care if their customers spam. Reports go unanswered and spammers never seem to lose their hosting.
Thanks. I didn’t know.
I’m sorry you feel that we do not respond to abuse complaints. Our Security team does take action and investigate every single abuse report, but we also give our customers the benefit of the doubt so you may not see an immediate reaction from us.
If you encounter another email like that, especially from our network, please do send it, along with headers, to our abuse queue, and cc me (benny at liquidweb dot com). We take the abuse of our network very seriously, and will do what we can to keep it clean.