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So, this morning I went through my usual routine, checking email, mainlining caffeine, sucking down 23 ounces of raspberry iced tea, etc. And when I went to gmail, I noticed something strange:

I also had 4 chat requests, all from people with SEO in their gmail username. Now, SEO link request spam is nothing new, but the timing is weird. So I decided to take a look:

So here are my questions:

1. I don’t have an online beauty store or a jewelry related website, so why am I being targeted by people saying “We would like to exchange links only with Jewelry related website” ?
2. SEO spam is really no different than any other kind of spam…..the people sending these messages are no different from the people selling v1agr4 or c1ali$. They are just trying to hit as many people as possible hoping that .00001% of people will bite. So why are these emails coming through instead of being caught by gmail’s spam filter?
3. Does this actually work? I mean, do people actually benefit from blind emailing web site owners to ask for link exchanges on sites that are completely irrelevant? I understand PageRank, and just don’t see how much site owners would gain from absolute garbage link farms.
4. What can I do? Is there a good way to create, say, a text file to use as an additional filter? I’d love to be able to set up a gmail rule that looks at a blacklist I create, and if one of the sites listed in my blacklist is in the body of the email, the agent would delete the message.

I did a little research to see if my name landed on some kind of “Hey, this is a really good guy to spam” list. Some things I noticed:

• These people have multiple email addresses- A quick google search of the email addresses turns up zero results. They’re using multiple addresses to send this stuff (when they’re put on a blacklist, they’ll just move to another email address). In addition, they’ll often send the email to a huge list and will actually include their real address in the “to:” field. For example:

Searching the first email address yields no results, but searching the second gives some results. The first is an SEO link exchange request conversation from a debian list.

• The sites they list in their signatures do not exist. This was strange to me. If you’re going so far as to spam the world to get links, why would you put a fake site as your signature?
• Once you’re on one of these lists, it’s insane, as everyone replies asking for links to their sites. Meh.

Is anyone else getting these all of a sudden?

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