More SEO and Linkbuilding Spam - Farica.SEO?
November 10th, 2008I wanted to share with you another SEO (search engine optimization) and link building spam email one of my clients received and forwarded to me. If you remember my previous article about how to tell whether a company that sends you unsolicited email is virtuous, you should be able to decipher this one yourselves:
The email was from [email protected]:
Dear Sir/Madam,
We are a Webpromoter Company with primary focus on
1. Affordable Link Building
2. SEO Services
3. Search engine marketing (SEM) consulting to Clients
4. Directory SubmissionWe have a dedicated team of professionals to serve you in Link building and SEO.Our Link Builders who specialise in getting theme based targetted links for Client’s website.
We strictly work on performance basis and can assure you of getting qualitylinks for your site as well.
We offer the best part of our sincerity and would help you achieve your goal for top ranking and online business development.
We are looking forward a long term business association with your organization.
Assuring you of our best services at all times.
Thanks and Regards,
Farica
Let’s go over why you should probably not respond to this email.
1. Where’s the name of the company? Hmmm, not mentioned.
2. Where’s the company website? Hmmm, nowhere in sight.
3. The return email is a Gmail account?! That’s professional!
4. “Dear Sir/Madam”…always nice to get personalized emails.
So just for the heck of it, I emailed them to ask them whether they were a real SEO company.
No response 
Emails from “real” companies will clearly state their company name, and usually have their address and phone number. “Real” companies, will have a website - especially if they’re in the SEO and link building business. “Real” people from “real” companies will have an email address that’s based on their website domain, not a free email service like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.
I guess some folks fall for these email scams - which is why I’ll keep posting articles like these - to help warn folks.
Jill--------------
J. Olkoski
Aldebaran Web Design, Seattle
Jill Olkoski has a BS in Engineering, a BS in Computer Science and an MA in Clinical Psychology. She delights in using her advanced technical and psychological skills to help small business owners develop cost-effective and successful websites.
February 16th, 2009 at 6:22 am
I used to have the same opinion about people who claim to be professionals while using a free email account like Gmail. And then I started finding real professional people who did just that, even when they had their own domain name. Their explanation is all about server reliability. Many companies that host websites are reliable enough for serving webpages, but not reliable enough for email. For many people, having their website down for a week is more tolerable than having their email down for a week.
Also, thank you for your thoughtful articles.
February 16th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Hi Carl,
Thanks very much for your comment. I have not had that same experience at all - all of the websites I’ve designed use email accounts from the domain, and only on rare occasions are their email server issues. Having a website down for a week means your web hosting company is simply awful. At the worst case, websites on shared hosting go down for maybe a few hours - and the email servers (different machine from web servers) are typically unaffected. So I have not experienced difficulty hosting companies keeping their email services reliable - and whenever I’m shopping for a new service, I’ll generally be extremely wary of anyone with a free generic email account - too many scam artists out there.