How to Win Friends & Influence People in SEO
A friend of mine manages a popular music community site. We were talking about spam on community sites – and what happens if/when you become parasite host du jour.
He promised to share a cracker of an email he’d received from a disgruntled spammer when his splog got nuked. It’s too good not to share:
(Identifiable details have been redacted, natch).
From: < *********@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 3:44 PM
Subject: [I want to do business with you] Why take it down?I joined your site, and made a profile and a blog. I got my ********.co.uk blog entry ranked #1 for the search term “size 42 blue shoe widgets” and somebody at ********.co.uk took down my blog AND my profile page.
Why do this? To “fight spam,” right? Listen to me and listen closely.
I am driving FREE TRAFFIC to your silly little site & you TURN IT AWAY? Really.
Traffic that – who knows? – maybe will end up STAYING ON YOUR STUPID SITE for awhile & heck, maybe even BUY SOMETHING. From YOU. Or from one of your.. hmmmm.. ADVERTISERS?
Perhaps I should contact all your advertisers and inform them that somebody at your firm is actively TURNING AWAY POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS of their products.
Yes. Yes indeed. That is PRECISELY what I shall do.
Good day.
Oh by the way, if you want to put my profile & blog back up, you can find the url simply by typing into google.co.uk the following. (If you type it in quotes, your crappy site’s #1; without quotes it’s #2.):
“size 42 blue shoe widgets”
What a charmer, eh?
What the hell are show widgets?
A searchy-pseudonym to protect this idiot’s identity, I imagine.
Exactly: a five word non-competitive search phrase.
If this guy is going to talk to advertisers, then why not say who he is? Extorsion should not be allowed.
This is so funny, good capture of how things really work, I agree he should say who he is.