Most website owners have received spam emails claiming to have come from SEO professionals wanting to ‘improve their rankings in the search engines’, and usually they’re very easy to spot. Most of these spam emails come from Gmail addresses, rather than registered domains, and they don’t contain any information that is specific to the website in question – even the name of the website they’re supposedly talking about is absent in some cases.
However, a recent spam email that was received by one of our clients was a little more tailored, seemingly featuring specific details about their website’s rankings within Google, and the level of its indexing. The keyword here of course is ‘seemingly’, as the email, from a Malcolm Wright of ‘SEO Doctors’, was actually spam and had been auto generated.
A quick search online usually helps to detect emails such as this, and this particular UK based SEO company has already received some exposure for its use of email marketing.
So, what did this particular SEO expert claim?
From: “Malcolm Wright” <malcolm.wright@seo-doctors.co.uk>
My name is Malcolm Wright. A senior search consultant at SEO Doctors, which is part of an SEO Group that has been established for over 10 years.
The website for SEO Doctors doesn’t work, neither does the website of the registered owner of the domain, The Web Clinic Limited. This isn’t looking good so far, anyhow, on with what Malcolm has to say for himself:
Excuse the unusual approach, however I am writing to inform you that I recently visited your website, ***********.co.uk, during a routine survey of web sites which may be capable of higher search engine performance, resulting in an increase in online sales or leads. I hope this information may be of use to you, if not then I apologise for any inconvenience caused.
No apology needed Malcolm, it’s not an unusual approach – just a spam one.
From my initial observations, your website is probably underperforming in the major search engines such as – Google, Yahoo, and Bing (formerly MSN Livesearch). When searching on a topic, you probably are aware that most people don’t look past the first page of search results. I struggled to find you in the first couple of pages of Google, meaning that you could be losing out on a significant amount of business. As such I did a bit more digging.
Interesting, Malcolm hasn’t said what he’s actually searched on in order to ‘struggle to find’ our client, nor he has explained how he found them in the first place, if they do not rank on the ‘first couple of pages of Google’.
After checking the search engines, I ran a back-link check on your site. Back-links are the number of times your site is linked through another website. Your website has 5 back-links, meaning it’s not very popular.
Back-links also help build your site’s Google Pagerank score which show’s how trustworthy your site is. Right now your site has a Google Pagerank score of 0/10, which is probably one of the main reasons why your site isn’t showing up in the first page of the search results.
OK – we have to intervene here. As this email is obviously an auto generated email (as you will see if you read some of the other blog posts about Malcolm’s spam) you’d think they’d have fixed the grammatical error on “show’s how trustworthy” – why the apostrophe? Secondly, our client has a PageRank of 2 – so Malcolm’s research isn’t exactly spot on.
The final check I applied on your site was page indexing. The more pages your site has indexed with good content and unique keywords, the higher you will rank. Right now, your site has only 298 pages indexed by Google, which is quite low. This can be down to many reasons which we can help resolve.
Wrong again Malcolm, Google shows the website has having 368 indexed pages. Despite getting the facts wrong, and his own website not working, Malcolm then launches into the hard sell…
SEO is not rocket science as many would suspect. It takes a lot of man hours in hard work and research, something a lot of companies out there, just aren’t prepared to do without charging thousands per month. We are different, because we tackle every single issue with your website that effects how the search engines perceive you, through a combination of expert consultancy and direct work. Thereafter. putting you on the first page of search results in major search engines by working on your site month on month for a minimum period of 12 months. It’s a no-nonsense approach that cuts through marketing fluff to the core of what it takes to get a site to the top. We know what that is. We know how to do it.
This all sounds too good to be true Malcolm, how much are you charging for this service? It must be thousands of pounds per month, surely?
With pricing starting from as little as £35 per month to promote a profitable search phrase per month, your website is too important to let it go to waste, especially when UK online sales were up by 30% to £59.8 Billion compared to last year. Don’t forget we back our work with a money back guarantee.
Wow, where can we go for this deal?
If you are genuinely serious about improving your online revenues and want professional SEO as it should be done for a flat monthly fee, please visit our service website at www.seo-doctors.co.uk which provides more details about our excellent service and a call back form. See a selection of our excellent testomonials and example results achieved recently on behalf of our esteemed clients.
Thanks for that Malcolm. We did try and have a look at your ‘testomonials’, but your website was down so we couldn’t. Otherwise we’d have taken you up on your service straight away.
Whenever you receive an unsolicited email touting SEO services such as this, you should use Google to find out if the services are genuine, and if the company can be trusted. Google the name of the person that email is supposed to have come from, Google the name of the company, visit their website (if it is mentioned in the email, and if it works) and finally, Google a section of the email to see if anyone has posted it online.
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i never believed in SEO services. ive already paid for some of that and it never produced any results. if youre a webmaster and you want to optimize your site for search engines research how to and do it, no need to pay some random spammer hoping that it will be good.
i run about 40 websites, these SEO professional spams are a real problem i must be getting over 10 of these spams per day throughout all my websites. im really sick and tired of it!!!!
Hi Guys
I stupidly fell for the guaranteed 10 top position in Google or your money back. I signed a 12 month contract with http://www.WebClinic.co.uk in Lancaster last year and my rankings have gone down and two of the key words they took on have not even been ranked in the first 500 places in Google. I tried to cancel the service which they declined and they have now passed my account to a debt recovery agency in Bradford, a real nasty outfit and just said pay up or will send you to court and have your company blacklisted.
It all started with an email out of the blue from Carl Wilkinson, they then passed the details on to Tony Haslam who told me that they use staff from India and not in house as they told when I signed up.
BEWARE stay clear of this lot.