One of our clients contacted me recently because she had received an e-mail (which she didn’t recognize as spam) that promoted services that would enhance her search engine ranking for keywords where she was said to be lacking. The client owns a campground in the Thousand Islands region of New York State. The salutation of the spammer’s e-mail was “Hi Business Owner” (very professional), and the name of the spammer’s own business was spelled incorrectly in the signature. (I think that the keyword here is “red flag”!) The company is located across the border in Canada. (Good luck in getting a refund from another country after you get ripped off.)

Anyway, the client pointed out that she gets similar solicitations (via both spam and telemarketing) on a weekly basis. To her credit, she questioned how they repeatedly find her site if is allegedly so hard to find. Good point! She also questioned how it could be possible for everybody to always be in the top ten search results. The answers are that software robots are used to harvest search results and then to harvest either an e-mail address that is linked directly from the site or is associated with the site’s registration. The spam usually starts with the statement that the sender has “just visited your site”, and that is somewhat true, except that they don’t ever point out that it was actually software on autopilot that found your site.

In the pitch to our client, it was pointed out that her campground “ranked in position 53 in Google for the phrase ‘Campgrounds New York’”. (Gee, I wonder if every New York campground received this same spam solicitation.) As I pointed out to our client, the very broad term “Campgrounds New York” that was used for the example is absurd. Nobody can expect to be at the top of that page of results other than CONY (the Campground Owners of New York) and similar directories of New York Campgrounds. For her business to come in at # 53 for such a broad term is actually quite good when one considers that there are over 200 CONY members.

What the spammers didn’t point out was that our client’s website is the #4 result (and the very first actual campground result) for the logical terms “Thousand Islands Camping” and “Thousand Islands Campground”? Of course not! That wouldn’t suit the effectiveness of their sales pitch. They would be happy to take the client’s money to improve her search position for terms that could only possibly come at the expense of her site’s position for the most important terms.

My advice to my client, and to the readers of this post, is to be very skeptical in reacting to spam like this. Anybody can come up with a set of keyword phrases that can make any business look very bad while ignoring any relevant keyword phrases that might not serve their purposes. Please do not even think of responding to people who conduct their business in this fashion because that is why we all continually get spammed. If even 1% of the people who receive spam like this respond to the “offer”, the spammers are making money and will continue in their practices.