I received an email solicitation from an SEO Company in India.  I guess they’re bored tonight or their sales team was having a bad day, so they did the ‘auto form spam’.  Essentially or most likely, they have a piece of software that crawls websites and will find a form on a website and auto fill it out.  Maybe they actually have a sales rep doing it manually.

So I hit their site and did a bit of snooping around.  Luckily for me I came across their “Live Chat” and figured I’d have some fun.  I’ll let you read the rest for entertainment purposes: (ps. I’m jerry )

jerry:
have question

Welcome jerry! Your request has been directed to the Sales department. Please wait for our operator to answer your call.

Call accepted by operator Sales. Currently in room: jerry, Sales.

Sales:
HI..this is Vijay how can I help you?
jerry:
hi vijay how many seo’s do you have at bestseowon?
Sales:
are you asking about how many people work in our company?
jerry:
yes
jerry:
i got an email talking about my site so i’m curious about your company.
Sales:
Ok…right now we have 300+ professionals working here in 3 shifts
Sales:
and my official website is www.auroin.com
jerry:
ok. your site, www.bestseowon.com is a pagerank of zero, why?
Sales:
my website is www.auroin.com
jerry:
then why did the email solicitation say bestseowon.com?
jerry:
and thats where I came to chat with you
Sales:
Ok…that’s only to establish initial contact
Sales:
what is your website?
jerry:
it also gave me a ’seo score’ of 85%. how did you come up with that number?
Sales:
may I know your website?
jerry:
not yet
Sales:
then how do I guide you?
jerry:
well, i find it odd that an ‘seo company‘ would be soliciting for leads when if they ranked their own site in the search engines people would be contacting them. don’t you?
Sales:
If you can tell me your website we can talk
jerry:
what computations did you use for 85%? Surely you guys used something….
Sales:
If you can tell me your website we can talk
jerry:
www.xxxxxxxxxxaaaa.com
jerry:
now tell me how you came up with 85%
Sales:
One sec…let me check your website
Sales:
we check the title, meta description, alt tags etc., and calculate if they are relevent to your business
jerry:
oh ok. why 85% then?
jerry:
does this help? http://www.semrush.com/search.php?q=xxxxxaaaaa.com&x=0&y=0&db=us&stype=domain
jerry:
or this? http://siteanalytics.compete.com/xxxxxxxaaaaaa.com/
Sales:
what are you trying to tell me?
jerry:
Dear Head of Business Development at xxxxxxaaaaa.com, Were you aware that you are paying every time your online marketing advertisement is clicked? It hurts! I know, as many of our clients have shared this frustration when I first talked to them about how to drive more quality prospects to their sites – without having to constantly pay for every click. I thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not getting more organic (FREE) search engine traffic for xxxxxxaaaaa.com 1. Your home page rank is 2, this can be improved further. 2. Your SEO score is 85%. This can be improved as implementing on and off-page factors will fetch better results in major search engines. 3. Open directory listing is not available. If you can stomach more bad news about what your site needs, and are curious to know what our working together would involve, then I would be glad to provide you with further detailed analysis in the form of a SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) SITE REPORT – FREE OF CHARGE. I would first need to know that you are serious about using our services, as the report would involve several hours of our research. To brief you about the company, we are an ISO 9001 certified team of over 500 SEO specialists in the USA, UK, Australia and India and would like to talk with you about how you should be winning new business from the search engines, without paying advertisers over and over again for it. SEO is not instantaneous, it is not free, but it is the only sensible internet marketing choice. Your return on investment (ROI) after 6 months of SEO will be at least 3 times that of paid advertisements, and many times greater than our cost. In fact, we guarantee that in the first month of our work you will see an improvement in ranking, link popularity and traffic or we’ll work for free until you do! Our clients’ consistently tell us that their customers find them because they are at the top of Google. Being on the top left of Google (#1- #5 Organic positions) is the best thing you can do for your company’s website traffic and online reputation. Ironically, It’s very likely that had you spent your last 6 months of online marketing dollars on SEO instead of paid advertising that you would have 3 times or greater the traffic today and not need the paid advertising at all. Fortunately you can still start today and begin getting that traffic in just a few weeks. We look forward to discussing our SEO plans with you. Sounds interesting? Feel free to email us or alternatively you can provide your best time and phone number to call you. Best Regards Sales Team —————————
Sales:
are you there?
jerry:
im trying to figure out why an ‘seo company‘ is spamming me when my rankings are outstanding.
Sales:
we have also written if you are not interested mention it and we will not send it again
Sales:
just one line could have saved your time as well as mine
jerry:
do you know what this means for seo? “we are an ISO 9001 certified team of over 500 SEO specialists”
Sales:
what are you trying to prove or tell? you don’t want to receive emails from us…correct?
jerry:
you guys are a joke. i can’t wait to post this transcript on my blog. you spammed my client. no wonder SEO is given such a bad name because we have to deal with spammers like you auto filling out web forms.
jerry:
iso 9001 – hilarious
jerry:
good luck spamming people for clients
jerry:
go sell something

Here’s the code you’re going to need to enter into Google Analytics (courtesy of Boston Media Domain).

1. Go to the GA Account for domain.com.
2. Click on Filter Manager.
3. Click on Add Filter.
4. For Filter Name, use something like Data Filter – PPC Keywords 1
5. Filter Type is Customer filter.
6. Choose Advanced.
7. For Field A -> Extract A, choose Referral and enter in (\?|&)(q|p)=([^&]*)
8. For Field B -> Extract B, choose Campaign Medium and enter in cpc|ppc
9. For Output To -> Constructor, choose Custom Field 1 and enter in $A3
10. The next 3 options should be yes followed by no for case sensitive.
11. Hit Save Changes.
12. Click on Add Filter.
13. For Filter Name, use something like Data Filter – PPC Keywords 2
14. Filter Type is Customer filter.
15. Choose Advanced.
16. For Field A -> Extract A, choose Custom Field 1 and enter in (.*)
17. For Field B -> Extract B, choose Campaign Term and enter in (.*)
18. For Output To -> Constructor, choose Campaign Term and enter in $B1, ($A1)
19. The next 3 options should be yes followed by no for case sensitive.
20. Hit Save Changes.
21. Almost done! Click on the link that says Analytics Settings, then click on +Add Website Profile.
22. Choose “Add a Profile for an existing domain” , make sure your domain is chosen, and enter in PPC Keywords for the Profile Name. Click on Finish.
23. Click on Edit besides the PPC Keywords profile. Configure Main Website Profile Information, Conversion Goals and Funnel, and Users with Access to Profile just like it was configured for the other profile.
24. Click on +Add Filter, choose “Apply existing Filter to Profile” , choose you’re other filters (if applicable) along with the two new filters you just created. Make sure Filter – PPC Keywords 1 comes in the list before Filter – PPC Keywords 2. In fact, these should probably be the top two filters. Hit Finish.
25. Click on Analytics Settings. Your new profile will have data in it within hours or days depending on website traffic.

Using Robots.txt – Matt Cutts video on search results and robots.txt blocking of pages.

Managing Your Brand – Joanna Lord

BrandJacking – What happens when a well known brand specialist turns evil?

Beyond Headlines – Getting your audience to read every word

Meta Tag Keywords - Usless.  Yahoo has now joined Google in ‘NOT using’ the meta tag.

Social Media Traffic – What are you doing with it?

Web Analytics Book – Avinash, who else?

Landing Pages with Yoast using Magento Commerce

I know what you’re thinking…how can that be possible!  Well it is.  Theres not too many companies that can pull off that type of activity without throwing up red flags, getting penalized, or quite simply getting banned by Google because they did something extreme.

1. Generate Backlinks by Creating Products That People Want

One of the easiest ways to build backlinks is to create a product that people want.  This particular company has released hundreds of products that have taken the net by storm.  They’ve released Apple applications for the iphone, they’ve released community based social networking platforms, and they’ve released multiple websites that visitors WANT to visit! Creating a great product that generates buzz is a key ingredient. Sometimes when you create buzz for a new product it can be bad as well.

2. Generate Backlinks by Staying in the Media…Good or Bad

Bad press and good press all have the capacity to get your site backlinks.  From IPO’s to the firing of executives, a link is a link.  This company has seen it all and continues to get hammered in news organizations across the web for their lack of innovation over the past few years.  Don’t get me wrong, they’ve also been the ‘hero’ of the internet and continue to dominate specific areas online.  This may be debatable by many who read this post, but its the truth, hands down.  They are one of the top 3 leaders in their industry, period.  You need to apply the same mentality to it If you’re a small business owner.  Go meet your local newspaper reporters. Take them to lunch and listen to them. Its always their job to listen to the latest news, happenings, and buzz, but be social and turn the tables for once. You’ll also want utilize the press release distribution services that are widely available  and are picked up by the search engines daily.  If you’ve made a big hire, announce it.  Released a new product? Announce it.

3. Generate Links by Generating Content

As much as its been said over the past several years, its true.  Content is king.  One way to generate backlinks is from user generated content creation. This company has created multiple platforms that allow users to register, post, and interact with one another which fills up the servers of the search engines with more and more content to index.  This user generated content comes up in thousands of search queries everyday.  Imagine for a second that real, genuine, user generated content could make you a millionaire.  Many sites are doing just that.

Lets take a look at DigitalPoint.  Shawn Hogan owns this web property thats a basic community forum running vBulletin Software.  Hundreds of post are created everyday on that site.  Webmasters everywhere reference a specific post or a specific solution by embedding links to Shawn’s site. Anytime you have members that are linking to your site based upon the content already on there is a win-win situation for both Shawn and its users. He’s built thousands upon thousands of links to his forum this way.

Back to our sample company. What makes one of their web properties so hot?  Real content, real useful.  The interaction of the community drives butt loads of content on the site. Providing answers to questions is their key ingredient.  Hundreds if not thousands of people link to it daily.

4. Generate Backlinks by Updating Your Site With The Latest News

Updating your site regularly with the latest information is a no brainer.  Most small business owners may have static pages on their site, but some may also have blogs.  Update it.  Use WordPress and let it ping Google each time you make a post.  Wordpress is also great with the timestamp feature.  Sit down and write some blog post and timestamp them with different dates.  Its a fantastic way to save you time and it will help prevent you from scratching your head not knowing what to write next.  If you’re new to blogging you may find yourself writing multiple post over a one hour time period. Try not to stare at the screen like a zombie waiting to write and idea.  Find what suits your time schedule best and take advantage of it.

The company I’m referencing yields more pageviews than you can imagine.  Don’t worry, I’ll get to their name in a bit.  What you need to take away is the fact that not only can a large corporation use the above referenced material to build out their online presence, so can the small mom and pop shops.  All of what I’ve mentioned so far isn’t rocket science.  Its far from it.  The speed at which someone chooses to perform the above definitely is and its obviously limited to the size of your company.  Its a small catch 22, but I’m sure you get the point.

5. Generate Backlinks with Social Bookmarking

One of the easiest link building techniques is through social bookmarking sites.  Most of these sites are dofollow links so take advantage of them.  Filling out your profile page with your link should be the first step.  Secondly, go ahead and add your site to the most popular social bookmarking sites like Folked, Blinklist, Oneview, and others.  You can do a simple search through Google and find tons more.

“So Who is the Company that built 62 Million backlinks in 15 Years?”

Its Yahoo.  Yahoo has consistently created products that people want.

Their ‘Yahoo News” is the number 1 news source on the internet.

Yahoo Answers is one of their web properties that has been very successful through the content that users generate.  You can apply the same methods to your own business site by utilizing community forums, or a “Facebook-like” web application.

All of the above are scenarios can be scaled down versions of what Yahoo has done over the past 15 years, but they remain the same for any business owner.  If you can implement the features I listed above, maybe you can achieve 62 million backlinks in 15 years. But if you’re a small business owner, I’d shoot for a few thousands first

We’ve spent the past 2 years focusing so much on our clients site, and we always put them first, but we have to bring our site, and SEO, back up to speed.  We’ve got a few man hours to use and I’m going to put them to good use.  I’ll have Nicole write a few extra articles and add more information to the site so bare with us….

If you have any feedback please feel free to do so.

Thanks,

Keith

It appears that Chrome isn’t too fond of Google Adwords. Thats a bit odd I thought, so I opened up Firefox to make sure everything was ok and sure enough, no issues.

Just to lay all the cards out, I’m guessing my version is a bit quirky. I’m running Snow Leopard with my Macbook and have the latest developers version of Google Chrome (when’s it coming out again?) . I’ve seen, and more importantly experienced, the speed of Chrome and figured I’d use it for today. After all the plugin support is in the final stages so it shouldn’t be much longer.

Anyway, has anyone else experienced this issue?

“Looking for SEO services. Need onsite and offsite optimization completed. Looking for a long term contract of 6 months. Whats your price?”

Nowhere in the site does it mention the keyphrases they’re trying to target. I wish I had a penny for every time someone asked me “what my rates are”, I’d be filthy rich.

Why Does it Matter?

Well, hell, lets go ahead and explain how pricing SHOULD work with your service provider. The first reply you should get back is:
“What keyphrases are you trying to rank for?”
I mentioned this in another comments section on another post. Someone was thinking about signing up, with a spam company none the less, yet doesn’t understand the difference between a longtail phrase and short tail. Not everyone should and certainly a CxO shouldn’t, but if a SEO provider doesn’t mention it, you should raise an eyebrow and scratch your head.

Longtail Keyphrases – Keyphrases that are easy to rank and are not searched as often. How can you tell? Take a look at the search results at the top right of the results pages. It will say “1 out of x results”. If the number of x is under 1 million, thats a longtail keyphrases. I don’t care if its a one word phrase or a 10 word phrase. I’ll be able to rank that site for that longtail keyphrase in my sleep. Want proof? Google “ijango scam“. Its two words with 24,000 search results. On number 4. I did absolutely nothing except write a post and moderated the comments. Quite a few website owners linked to my blog post on the topic but no effort was involved on my part.

Shorttail Keyphrases – Just the opposite. One word, two word, and three words typically. Google “Miami real estate“. 27 million sites competing against you. You better be ready to open your wallet because you can forget about overnight success. You should be in it for the long haul. Its going to take alot of effort to rank that well. Great content, great quality links, and tons more.

So what are my rates? What are the rates of a SEO service provider? Completely depends on your keyphrases you want to rank for. As for my pricing, anywhere between $300 per month up to $3500 per month.

So I figured I’d have some fun with a spam email that was sent to one of my clients:

===================
trrankingtop@gmail.com
Sales
Team
202 657 7095
1 221, 6th Block, Malleshwaram
Bangalore
Kansas
309804
Subject: SEO Trial Offer – xxxx.com Dear Head of Business Development at xxxx.com, If you’re interested in showing up as a first page result for more search terms on Google, Yahoo and Bing, reply back with all addresses you’re looking to promote. I thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not getting more organic (free) search engine traffic for xxxxx.com 1. Your home page rank is 0, this can be improved further. 2. Open directory listing is not available. 3. Your site has 0 Yahoo back links, this can be improved further. We are looking forward in doing business with your company and we are certain that you will be HAPPY with this business connection. For your convenience we offer 30 day FREE trial. Please email or call us today USA Toll Free: 8888 TRYSEO USA Direct: 202.657.5242 UK: 207.193.0857 Australia: 28.011.3995 India: 674.258.2780 Best Regards Sales Team ——————————————————————————– PS: This is one time email; we will not contact you again if you do not respond to this email. You may also ask us to “remove”. PPS: We will be happy to provide our information like 24×7 CRM support, Skype, Web-based live chat, video conference, go to meeting, IM etc. upon getting response from you.
Submit Submit

================

So I figured I’d email them back of course

Do you resort to spamming?
Maybe you resort to spamming web forms in hopes of getting new SEO clients?

Perhaps you suck so bad at obtaining clients the only thing you can do is resort to spamming….

If this sums up you, then have we got an offer you can’t refuse!

You’ve automatically been enrolled in:
“How I Suck So Bad I Get My Clients By Spamming”

You’ll learn how to find forms online and then fill out information. This sure fire way is guaranteed to piss everyone off and get you zero clients…..BUT WAIT theres more! Now for only $595.00 per month, you can learn to:
- Analyze Site Links
- Create Viral Buzz
and thats it! For just $595.00 thats all you will get. There are no extras, nothing else to offer you because $595.00 is one hell of a deal! What do you expect for $595.00 per month?

So what are you waiting for? Sign up now for $595.00 per month and you’ll be the biggest sucker of all!

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Do you think they’ll bite

=========
UPDATE: 9:01am the 11th
I found out who they are!

Hello Sir,

Thanks for the response.

Yes, we do have a website you can look at www.AuroIN.com

About Our Company
We started our Operations in 1999 and our SEO business initiated in the year 2004. We are proud of our growth rate and today we are the largest SEO Company India, Certified by ISO 9001:2008, DIC, DGFT and STPI.

If you require I will happy to provide more information about our company, process etc, I look forward to hearing from you.

If you are interested, please confirm us to prepare a Site Analysis Free of Cost that will provide you a roadmap of how we can promote your site. Ideally that report should reach you in 24 hours from now.

Regards,
Raj

To know more about:
Why SEO with AuroIN http://www.auroin.com/why-seo-auroin.htm
SEO Plans, features and prices http://www.auroin.com/seo-plans
Talk to our 24/7 support team http://www.auroin.com/contact.htm

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