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?

Home


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.

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You might be a spammer if….

You feel the need to add

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT A SPAM OR AUTOMATED EMAIL, IT’S ONLY A  REQUEST FOR A LINK EXCHANGE. YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS HAS NOT BEEN ADDED TO ANY LISTS, AND YOU WILL NOT BE CONTACTED AGAIN.IF YOU’D LIKE TO MAKE  SURE WE DON’T CONTACT YOU AGAIN, PLEASE FILL IN THE FOLLOWING FORM: <link>
PLEASE ACCEPT OUR APOLOGIES FOR CONTACTING YOU.

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Tagged.com's newest trick

I signed up a disposable address at tagged.com last summer, to see how their signup process went and how aggressive they were at marketing.
They mailed me maybe a dozen times over the course of a month and then the mail stopped.
Until today.
Today I got two messages from tagged.com, one from Sophia C (33) and one from Melinda E (27). The messages are identical except for the names and some of the advertising on the bottom.
I find it a bit coincidental that after all the recent news about Tagged that I start getting mail from them again. Mail that is not from anyone I know. Mail attempting to entice me into logging back into the tagged site.

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You want to sell me a list?

Over the years, some of my clients have found it expedient to give me email addresses at their domains. These addresses forward mail addressed to laura@clientsite to my own mailbox. Generally these are so I can be added to internal mailing lists and have access to their internal tools.
It’s often amusing to see the spam that comes through to those addresses. Over the last few weeks I’ve received multiple spams advertising an email appending service.
Let the irony sink in. An email appending service is sending me an email at a client company offering the client company the opportunity to append email addresses. “See how accurate our appending is!”
How accurate can a service be if they can’t even target their own spam correctly?
In addition to the appalling targeting they’re also violating CAN SPAM (no physical postal address), their website is a collection of broken links and they don’t provide any company name or information in the email or on the website.
To top it all off, the mail says, “if you’re not the right person to act on this mail, please forward this to the right person.” Followed by a standard legal disclaimer that says, “The information contained in this e-mail message and any attachments is confidential information intended only for the use of individuals or entities named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail at the originating address.”
I wonder if blogging about the utter email incompetence about mail from David Williams, Business Development (phone number: 800-961-5127) violates the confidentiality clause?

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