Getting cross with all these SEO spam

[MISI_UK]

I get at least one a day telling me how badly my site is ranking how many hits I have on my site per month and promising things that they cant possibly offer!

The latest one is informing me that I only have just over 8,000 visits per month which made me laugh!!!! and then informing me that they can help me rank high for 'Christmas Gifts' :eek:

Its annoying me as these companies obviously pray on Businesses that are not capable of reading their own stats. So obviously havnt got a clue about SEO and get bitten by these companies.

Anyone else getting these? they are just beginning to really grate me! Im always working at seo and then I get emails telling me what a pants job im doing every day and promising things that make it sound so easy :rolleyes:

It just seems there is not enough protection out there to stop small businesses gettig stung. If it was a builder we would all know to be careful and there are associations to protect us.
However these SEO companies seem to be able to say what they like and give out promises that they cant keep and a lot of small businesses just setting up on the web get stung.

[GreatSEO]

Happy to get you ranking number one for sales and of course I will pay you 1k for doing it :')

I know what you mean. In fact I have known SEO companies to approach SEO companies with their offers.

If you are going to market yourself at least do it correctly and to the right sort of prospect.

Dave

[Spock]

Yep, they sure are annoying! Often I get a call and they say "we can get you on the first page of Google for this keyword for £££". I then point out to them that I'm already on page 1 of Google for that term in the organic listings. Then I get the bare-faced cheek of them hanging up!

They should save themselves some time and do a quick search before calling :rolleyes:

[Jolora]

i'm a web designer and i'm also sick of other companies (from india in particular) offering to make me websites...


the best seo one i've had has offered me top page of google for 'web design' - despite my domain only being a few months old... i wonder how much i'd have to pay up front... :p

[MISI_UK]

ridiculous! and why do they feel the need to tell you in bold how many visits you have per month? which is nearly always massively understated! Can we not read our own stats? how insulting! Even my very non techie crafters on my site are capable of reading their MISI shop stats on google for themselves.

[directmarketingadvice]

I get lots of these emails, too.

My favourite was an offer to SEO a domain I own that's just a parked page with the message "If you'd like to buy this domain...".

Steve

[QVA - Emma]

I think you should see it as flattering as it means your site can obviously be found well in order for them to contact you in the first place. If you didn't get the calls and e-mails then I'd start worrying:D

Yes it is annoying - I don't call anyone - they contact me and we take it from there.

The problem is everyone has a choice and a decision to make when one of these companies contacts you. I do think it is wrong that people are preyed upon who don't know the basic ins and outs of SEO, that said we are all capable of doing our own research and making that decison before we go ahead.

Emma

[davidjgoss87]

When I get calls from SEO firms, I keep them on the phone while I run their site through the W3C HTML Validator at http://validator.w3.org/ and tell them the result. The last one that called me had 81(!) errors in their code just on the homepage. For non-techs, that means they can't get their own website written in valid, semantic code. Most sites have some errors, partly because it's often hard to get valid code out of blog engines and content management systems, but an SEO firm with a hand-built site should get it virtually spot on - it's important and relevant.

[david64]

One thing you could try is blocking any email from India, the spam capitol of the world. Most of these emails come from there.

[webpromoterservice]

I get these every week and they are mostly from India

[david64]

Good post I was reading the other day about these scurrilous swines:

http://blog.tech.stylefeeder.com/2009/02/28/social-media-spam/

http://blog.tech.stylefeeder.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/geography-of-spam-small.png
(http://blog.tech.stylefeeder.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/geography-of-spam-small.png)

[Spock]

So how do you block emails from a certain country?

[Ali-v-8]

So how do you block emails from a certain country?

Block the ip address but that means you could lose out on people using foriegn ip's

[Spiderden]

So how do you block emails from a certain country?

There's a GeoIP patch available for email.
http://serverfault.com/questions/17067/block-spam-by-using-geoip-filter

[MISI_UK]

That could be useful. The amount of wholesale emails I get from India, china etc is also outrageous! They are trying to sell me mass produced handmade products. It they took two seconds to look at the site they would realize that I dont supply any of the goods myself and that mass produced products are forbidden!

I will look into putting a block on them, I get so fed up with deleting them!