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February 07, 2005

So some guy with an online shop for electric scooters spams me to set up reciprocal links on our Web sites (I point to him; he points to me).

The information and services offered on your site would be of great value to our visitors, and I believe, your visitors would find great value in our sites. Because yours and our web sites are complementary rather than competitive, we see the synergy here as an opportunity for our mutual benefit.

This piece of spam was addressed to my dannyg.com domain, but I think it's fairly obvious from my site's home page that I'm no fan of spam. The prominent link to this site should put an exclamation point on that. I can guarantee you that this sender didn't visit my site before sending the spam message.

(The message's headers and other clues within the message indicate that the message originated in India, and the whole spam effort is being launched by a "search engine optimization" firm based in the U.S. It's possible that Scooter-Boy fell prey to other spam from the optimization outfit that promised to boost the company's search engine ratings.)

The only thing that his products and services have in common with my products and services is that his scooters run on electricity, and so do the computers my visitors use. Maybe I should give him a special URL to post to his list that points to a page that advises visitors not to buy from the scooter guy because he's a spammer. I'm not about to provide Scooter's URL here to boost his rankings ("You probably think this post is about you, don't you?").

While I'd dearly like to get my sites high up in the Google rankings (which is aided by other sites linking to my sites), I won't buy, con, or spam my way up the ladder. If others find me and like what I write, then I hope they'll provide pointers this way. I'm sure there are plenty of folks out there who think I'm crazy and/or stupid for not playing the search engines for loopholes. So be it.