No, I do not require your ‘website design and SEO services’.
Editor’s note: This article has been sitting in Pending since May 14th, 2014. Ten years later, I am finally publishing it. As is. Not for any real reason, I just noticed it was sitting there and decided to finally set it free. Funnily enough, ten years later, I still get these emails and, ironically, I get a lot less of them now the site is dead and I don’t use Jetpack any more.
I don’t know why, but the Daily SPUF’s email address gets some annoying spam emails. Most of them get filtered out, thankfully. Just having your email address somewhere online guarantees that you’re going to get spam email. Even if you only have one email address and only use it for signing up on sites, it’s possible to still get spam. I mean, email addresses are nice, juicy data that gets sold on by the likes of Facebook and Google.
No matter what, everyone gets spam. But right now, a particular bit of spam is pissing me off. I keep on getting emails asking if I want website design and SEO services. Sometimes it’s just web design. Sometimes it’s web design and apps. And occasionally, they’ll offer everything and the kitchen sink.
They’re all the same.
While the companies are different and the text is often different, there’s always a pattern. They always claim they’re part of some large group of IT experts and they’ve worked for some big companies. Of course, they don’t mention who they’ve worked for. They’ll then ask if you want whatever services they’re offering and will say that they’ll get you a quote. Despite not knowing what you actually want.
Then they tell you to send them some sort of contact details for more information. Which they’ll probably sell on to some other company.
I don’t need this crap.
Most of these just offer me web design, with a side package of SEO. But obviously I don’t need these at all. You can tell that I don’t need these at all by the fact that I have a website. I’ve had this Daily SPUF website for a long time now, and, while we’re not the busiest gaming blog around, we are at least consistent. Really, emailing a website and asking them if they want a website is just retarded.
But even if you’re not like me, someone who can build their own websites, it still seems really weird. Because if someone had someone else build a website for you in the past, will they use a random cold-call site? Probably not. They’ll just go back to whoever made their original website.
The SEO offers though are particularly dangerous.
Basically, if a company says they can get you to rank 1 on Google or whatever, run. These companies don’t just not work, but they can screw you over too.
How they work is quite simple. A company makes a ton of fake websites, then has them all link together, using your website URLs. You basically end up with a massive network of links, all pointing to your website. But when Google (or a similar search engine) realises that most of these websites are fake, you’re marked as a fake too. So, despite getting an initial bump from all those links, you end up getting punished alongside those fake websites, even if your website is real.
Now, it IS possible to be the first result on Google, but this takes a huge amount of time and effort. Heck, time is actually one of the better ways to increase your visibility. Stick to a name, a brand and a website and keep on sticking to it.
Sadly, these spam emails must work a little.
While I get pissed off at these emails, they’ve probably made money from someone, somewhere. It only takes one person to reply. In fact, a 1% response rate is considered not too bad when it comes to, well any mailshots.
Even spam ones like these.
At the end of the day though, it’s all just spam.
