Link exchange spam – I've had enough, thanks!

Search engine optimizers are getting on my nerves. To cut a long story short, they are sending spam to Spam Links to try to get all sorts of sites listed.

The worst of it should be familiar to anyone with a website with a decent page rank — "Link Exchange" subject line spam, offering to include a link to my site in an awful link farm, in exchange for me placing the link of choice (unrelated to spam) on my website with their provided fluff-piece.

Even Google gets this stuff:

Dear google.com, I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories...

Some SEO spam that I get is asking for an anti-spam site to be listed on... well, usually the most inappropriate page of the 100+ pages on Spam Links. Most of the sites aren't even spam related. Some let me know that they have added my link to their site, and then demand that I add their site in a particular way or... their link to my own site will be removed! Oh. No. Some examples of the badly worded email I get:

I've visited your site today, and I appreciate the site. My below mentioned website is similar to yours. Kindly consider listing it under your "Links" section.

As a part of ongoing campaign to increase the Link Popularity of My website I am looking for some good potential sites like yours.I review your site and find that, in SEO perspective your site is Perfect. Also, this would be a great resource for my visitors too.

I have my client website related to "Email Security". This website provides details for Secure email wordwide...

I thought a good place on your site to link from would be on your links page.

As you are probably aware that a three way link exchange is a great way to boost up your page rank in major search engines.

The cause of all this is unscrupulous or unskilled (or both) SEOs using bulk keyword searches. They search the web for websites that match a keyword search (in some cases, they even include the keywords they used to find the page they are wanting to get linked from), harvest the contact email addresses for those websites, and then send bulk email to the contacts asking to be linked to. Let me be quite clear: there is no grey here. There is no accident, and no excuse. This is simply spam.

It was with particular dismay that I opened a recent "link exchange" spam, to be met with a familiar domain: MiraPoint.com. They are well known for making RazorGate, which is a network appliance spam filter. They had apparently contracted a company called DigitalGrit, who appeared to have taken it upon themselves to really out-do all of the other SEOs and make it totally obvious they were sending spam.

Two emails arrived within the same second, both identical save for the page they wanted linking from, and the keywords they wanted me to use to link to the site. Slam-dunk spam, as far as I was concerned. DigitalGrit followed it up with a further two bursts of two emails, structured almost identically to the first batch. MiraPoint have not replied to several emails asking for an explanation.

[Update: DigitalGrit have sent a reply in response to this blog post, which is included in a new post. I have also edited the section above to more fairly represent what I experienced.]

MiraPoint are not the only anti-spam website pushed like this, but I haven't given the others the chance to explain themselves, so I shall not list them. One of the anti-spam sites was carrying out their own optimization. They claimed not to have sent significant numbers of emails, but they did use an SEO tool, Web CEO, that is essentially an email address harvesting and bulk email tool; using it would seem to lead almost inevitably to spam, by design:

Use the link exchange software of Web CEO to sort websites based on how you want to contact them - personally or automatically. The Link Partner Finder helps you create bulk messages using templates. This link exchange tool harvests the e-mail addresses from websites you wish to contact. You’ll be proposed with patterns of letters to your potential link partners, provided for possible cases. The software can send large quantities of messages automatically. But you should create personalized letters to those that are most important for you

.

LinkMachine has been another source of link exchange spam, and there are probably quite a number of SEO tools that work this way.

Some blackhat SEOs do not even pretend that what they do is not spam. One even hosts a blacklist of sites not to contact, which Spam Links is a member of. I will be sure to check it for any new links...

There is a key difference between the spamware programs and what seem to be more responsible packages, such as Solo SEO, that allow the user to discover "potential link partners". They talk strongly about assessing quality, and do not automate the contact process.

While I am not totally enamored with the concept of building links by going begging, an application should at least not automate the process to the point that spamming is trivial. Why is automation a concern?

Consider what happens if everyone who owns a website acts like that, and the answer should be quite clear. It is the usual catalogue of reasons why spam is wrong. Search engine spam is also an issue, since the point of link exchanges is usually to gain ranking in search engines, rather than direct traffic from the link-hosting sites.

What obviously moves a link building email campaign into the realm of spam is when the website owner the request is sent to is clearly not soliciting link exchanges, or does not run the kind of website that accepts links, particularly if the link has nothing to do with the website's topic. It all comes back to the reason that spam is defined as unsolicited bulk messages - if you bother a lot of people who do not want to hear from you, you are a nuisance.

If you automate the contact process, you cannot know if the website owner is soliciting link exchanges; if you use templates to contact the site owners, they cannot reasonably know that you are not spamming, and will react accordingly. It is in everyone's interests to be straightforward, upfront, and to bear in mind that webmasters are not just a resource to be exploited.

[I received a reply to this blog post from Steve Curtin, Corporate Vice President of DigitalGrit. I have included it unedited in a new post.]