Blog homeI love receiving positive feedback about this blog. For example here is an email I received today:
A lady in my office just got back from vacation and she keeps recommending your site so I decided to check it out for myself. After spending a half an hour browsing through your site, I’ve got to admit that she was onto something. I have bookmarked it and will check back regularly to keep up with what’s new.
About what I do, I work for Viking River Cruises, which deals with European river cruises among other things. Since the material on your site and my site are kind of similar, let me know if you would like to work something out with us.
I have a team of writers available that can write articles, web pages, blogs, etc… You name it and I can probably make it happen.
Good eh? Except, hang on a minute, it doesn’t seem quite right. So I start an email conversation with this person. Here is the next reply (to my question about how we are similar)
We are interested in a text link to the Viking River Cruises website. Both our sites are in related to the travel industry so that is why I thought of yours.
Ah - a link. Why didn’t you just ask in the first place? By now I am confident that I am dealing with an SEO agency rather than someone who works for the actual cruise company. They did try to obfuscate this by communicating via an @vikingrivercruises.com email address rather than their agency domain.
Things that were unusual with this and lead me to this conclusion:
- Looking at the email headers I can see the source - gmail - when - for a large cruise company - I would expect to see email coming from a corporate system
- Although writing on behalf of the company, no job title or telephone contact details are given
- I can see the SEO agency (From Santa Monica, USA) looking at the blog in my web stats…… (after the first email)
The best bit is I have found the person who sent me the communication - in Linkedin. Alongside their profile is the rather relevant statement about their SEO activities:
Currently, I wear a white hat to combat the dark side. The dark side is alluring but ultimately a vortex for bad karma.
So - is this black hat or white hat SEO agency behaviour?
Certainly grey, at least. I don’t really like SEO agencies. I would have been happier if they had just “come clean” to start with. Still wouldn’t have given them a link mind you.
* And of course if I am wrong, I will publish an apology here. But I am not Wong am I?
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I don’t think you are wrong here. I have received similar emails and the trigger for me is the “We are both in travel”, yeah, except you sell travel and this blog is about the travel industry, and what I write about is not always nice commentary about the travel industry. If it’s any help, I had a discussion about this with a journalist from USA Today who said that he sees this kind of PR/SEO spam all the time. Blogs are getting it now because they are becoming more mainstream.
…And I was about to send an email to the same guy. I have received exactly the same email saying so many great things about Hotel-Blogs.com. I am glad I didn’t…Thanks for saving my time Alex.
Your post really made my day!
Guillaume
“Wong”…??
Surely you mean “wrong”, Alex? Or perhaps not…
I stopped answering emails like this so long ago. It’s really sad at one level to distrust half the emails that end up in your inbox, but I guess that’s just the way things are. We still have a links area on TP, but I check emails for that about once every two months. Thinking of ditching it though, just to save the hassle. Would be a shame for the sites that we’ve personally gone out and validated, but maybe we could find some other way to give them some publicity.
@ Stephen & Guillaume - thanks for the support
@ Kevin - no typos!
@ Sam - indeed - I have stopped answering this kind of email too….. unless I can make a post out of it!
Me too. Someone offered me $100 to run an ad for Tesco Travel Insurance on my blog…
The links on my site are only for blogs I read regularly and really rate and for tour cos that I have worked with in the past and would recommend happily to anyone.
I think this practice is pretty underhand… but I’m also amazed at how US agencies in particular think people who blog regularly will fall for it… As you’ve shown, a little investigation quickly makes clear what’s going on…. and shows the agency (and by extension their client) in a pretty poor light.
@Jeremy - the approach you had sounds like it is simply for straight advertising, rather than apparent underhand SEO work.
hi Kevin… yes…. it looks like that… But the approach was kind of odd. Rather underhand… again an odd email address from some agency I’d never heard of. Googled them a bit and found that they were bragging about their ability to get websites up the google rankings by doing clever link-placing activity. I’d love to think that Tesco really want to advertise on my blog as they see it as so full of readers it will generate lots of sales… but actually, I think they’re more interested in just having a link on there. And if that means paying me $100 to stick an ad on my site… no problem. Jeremy
Hi Jeremy
You wrote
“The links on my site are only for blogs I read regularly and really rate”
My ego bubble is easily burst you know……. Least Kevin will be happy.
:)
Alex
You know, Alex. I think your site is awesomely good. Someone I know keeps recommending it to me and after having a read it myself, I think the same too! I just happen to have a blog that’s quite similar… So ‘let me know if you’d like to work something out’ !
(I don’t have a hat collection either)
@ Alex - Add me to the list of people who received exactly the same email as you from Viking. Word for word. Including the ego boosting opening of “A lady in my office just got back from vacation and she keeps recommending your site so I decided to check it out for myself.”
3 “leading” travel industry blogs! Blimey! These guys have really tried hard haven’t they.
Yawn. I get this crap daily. It goes into the bin that’s called Spam. It stands out a mile. Nice compliment then the usual we want a reciprocal or buy a link.
I wonder if these travel companies really know what these “SEO” / “Marketing” companies get up to. I’m thinking of a recent post I read about a well known SEO / marketing company (that works in travel too) who sent one of their staff around various mobile phone blogs leaving comments about their client.
Seems good business practise to employ people and have them within the business where you can monitor their path around the net.
… and I have to add that companies think its a good idea to our source SEO over to foreign shores. Not a good idea, leaving yourself open to massive problems.
Hi Darren
Yeah - I know its a bit boring….. but this is why I was trying to give the concept wider coverage - so that people would understand that we don’t really like being on the receiving end of this kind of “faked” communication. I am sure there are people who read this blog who pay agencies to do this kind of marketing for them.
Don’t you think exposing the brand that pays for this kind of thing would get through to the right people in the end? Much more satisfying (for me) that just deleting!
I was also trying to get a discussion going on whether this kind of marketing is ethical or not (on the black hat / white hat scale). Not sure that discussion is going anywhere - except we all agree we don’t like this kind of email!