posted by: Joseph Hershey
As a registered domain and website,
Two Guys Named Joe, Ed and I often receive email form letter requests from what appears to be either
SEO /
SEM firms, or ever industrious website owners.
The request goes something like this:
Dear Webmaster,
As far as link exchange is concern, we know that it is basically, a major factor for improving websites ranking. We would like to exchange links with your site.
could you please provide us your link details so that we can place your link at our web page
and pages associated with it.
We are thankful to you for putting our links on your site.we are requesting to you that mind telling us, where u have placed our link.
Our links information are as:
…
[ several sets of http links, etc ]
…
i’m egarly waiting for your response.
Thanks & regards
[ name and email address left out ]
This bites. I can imagine people really gig on this type of thing and exchange links back and forth with each other. It can come across as a potentially lucrative businesses setup with the expressed purpose of simply soliciting these types of exchanges on behalf of themselves, and / or their “clients”.
But how distasteful. This is worse than regular spam, and let me tell you why — because it takes two. It takes two to participate in this thing. It’s not just one guy sending you ads upon ads of unwanted cheap VIAGRA with hot stock tips. The criminal on the first part actively solicits active participation of the party on the second part. The party on the second part has to share in the game. And that’s where my brother has pulled me down to the gutter with him.
And how do you resist? There’s an implied promise for some nefarious rewards of higher search rankings, etc. Oh, and who doesn’t want that. That’s kind of like free sex to a site owner, no?
Now, I can only assume that when the sender presents themselves to be an SEO firm, like above, that either 1) they are, and they’re offering you a legitimate link to some page they have (it may be the only one they have, but it’s there for the purpose of receiving your incoming link), or 2) that they aren’t a legit business, just a fly by night scammer.
In the case of the fly by night scammer, they’re not really interested in linking to you, they just want to social engineer you into providing a link on your site (prominent placement is best). You and everyone that clicks on the link gets to a page full of ads or the like. Maybe the link itself isn’t a page, but just a direct click through in and of itself. And they get at least one click, one from you because you have to test it out, right?
In any case, I didn’t see myself smiling in that last bit at all. There’s nothing there for you. There’s no real royal Nigerian money waiting to be transferred safely into the United States.
Sigh.
If you’re wise, and you receive one of these emails, or one of it’s many variations, your first reaction is the like for the Nigerian 419 type scam — cringe, gag, and delete — not necessarily in that order.
Think about it.
You’re not the only one that got this email. Your email was scrapped from the web, or was on some list, or was a common one for domains, i.e. administrator@somedomain.com.
Being that you’re not the only one, there are some number of people who reciprocate with eager anticipation of more traffic. Yeah to higher traffic!! But the real winner is the “SEO firm”. They blanket email the world, and play the numbers game. They would seem to win no matter what the return rate is. .1% of the world’s email available email addresses is still quite a lot. Further, when they get 1 out of a 1000 returns, they get a link referring in to them per every 1000 spam sent. You, you get 1 referring link in. Not an even exchange anyway you look at it.
I can only picture some guy on my TV tube in the middle of the night…
MAKE MONEY FAST !! Put up your Adwords page, get lots of people to link to it in order to drive traffic to it, then drop out and surrender domain name registration before registrar company charges you for it.
NO MONEY DOWN !! We’ve done this and we’re millionaires !! We have a system. You can do this too !! Don’t wait, buy the system now. We do the email, we do the domain registration… blah blah blah
Can you say, “the only people making money fast here are the ones selling services to people who want to make money fast.”
Hmm, how about — Can you say Domain Kiting ?
Oh man. I thought I was special. I thought I could make money or get raise from my boss by working with these guys.
Unfortunately, nothing in all this is sounding good so far.
To digress briefly…
The link exchange you give means what to the likes of Google? (If you know search engine basics, skip to next paragraph.) They scour the net. They crawl around, looking for pages, and page links. From all of their trouble, they come up with keyword relevance search rankings for your page and everybody else’s page in reference to a set of content as captured by certain terms, or keywords, that one would use to find pages, or websites, with content like yours. The higher you rank, the more relevant (better) your site is suppose to be for the person searching for content. okay. enough on search and rank. The bottom line is the higher rank you have for keywords that drive traffic to your site, the higher your relevance is in the great blue sea of the internet and supposedly the higher traffic you have, the more eye balls you have looking at you, and the more profit you can glean from your site. Granted, profit may be measured in the amount of attention you get period, which has it’s side benefits.
Google is open to an extent to how they ascribe rank. They share the broad method and maybe a few specifics, just enough to gain people’s trust that their results mean anything — internet street cred.
With that, it’s the SEO’s job to get high rank for clients in exchange for money, or free sex, depending. If I’m wrong, tell me. But this is all I can figure out from these people. This is what they market and sell openly on their sites and marketing material. SEO’s sell internet discoverability of their clients by “optimizing” their clients content and participation in the internet community to promote their client’s visibility rank against a selected set of keywords deemed relevant to the client’s business and customers. The customers want to spend money, they search using keywords, your site is either up top and forward, or forever forgotten and lost in the mist of the internet cloud.
To some businesses, this is the difference between life and death. To some businesses, this is the difference between a good and bad year. To the lucky, this is not as heavy of an influence to the bottom line as word of mouth reputation.
To those that this means life and death, this type of SEO link sharing sounds like a good idea. Why not give them a link if they give me one too?
( Hmm, don’t the get rich quick with no effort no money down scams always work better on the highly motivated desperates ? )
Back to responding to the SEO spam creeps…
So what happens then, when you say “sure” and give ‘em what they ask for? You give ‘em a link, they get thousands. You have a link to a site that has content that has nothing to do with yours. They have lots of inward links from a lot of sites with content that has nothing to do with theirs. They get a boost in rank ratings to start. Google thinks twice to say these guys have undeserved links because their content has nothing to do with the site content referring into them, they’re black listed.
And you know what Google does with sites that link to or are linked from a black listed SEO gaming site? eeeeeek. Yep. You get black listed yourself. You are guilty by association. In the linked internet, you share to some extent the joys and sins of everyone else that’s associated with you. That’s how the Google deems referential integrity and rank standings in the community that is the cloud.
Did you get a boost from your single link in from the SEO ? I don’t think so. But after Google gets a whiff of their gaming, you sure do lose, maybe not to recover. How would you recover? You have to first realize what happened. Then you have to break all your out going links to them. They you have to request, and hope that they break their links to you. ( not likely ).
You might as well get yourself a new address and start over.
You sold your soul to the SEO devil.
Your search rank credit’s gone to crap.
You’re site’s credibility is bankrupt.
The only way out is through it, live the pain, own up to it, repent, ask forgiveness, and get a new website address and start over.
Yep sucker. Welcome to the SEO Lover’s 12 step program.
Oh, and by the way, don’t forget, everyone that loved your site and shared links to / from you, they’re de-listed too. They’re associated with you, a known SEO gamer, after all.
Sorry brothers. Your friends and family have to go to the ALANON equivalent for the SEO Lover’s 12 step program.
Don’t do it. Just say [delete] !!
—-
If you think I’m full of crap, let me know why. This is my best analysis on why you don’t want to respond to these seemingly enticing offers of free link sex on the internet road to hell.
If you agree with me, let me know that too. I haven’t heard a lot of people talking about this genre of sophisticated spam scam.
In the very least, don’t answer back to these people for the same reasons you don’t answer back to the Nigerians.
Just say [delete] !!
I had the chance to check out the new Sony Reader yesterday at my local Borders book store, and my daughter was with me. Consumers have longed for an ebook that has the look and feel of a page in a book. There’s something about holding the binding of a book and turning the pages like we have done for ages. Making the transition to an electronic device for reading is difficult, and Sony is trying to accommodate that need with their new Sony Reader product.
