Since Google ranks sites primarily by how many other pages and sites link to them, unethical people have been trying to boost their site rankings by tricking others into creating links to them.
Link exchange spam, i.e. unsolicited offers to reciprocally create links to each other’s sites, has been around for many years. Recently I came across a new twist, broken link suggestion spam. You’ll receive a personal looking email like the following that tells you about a broken link on a page on one of your sites, with an suggestion for a replacement link target (boldface added by me):
Hi Joe!
Sorry to bother you, my name is Kate Austen, I’m a teaching assistant for a sociology class. I’ve been doing some research online for an upcoming lesson on the urban legends, myths, and hoaxes, and your page was very helpful. Thanks so much!I noticed that on your page (http://www.joewein.de/hoax.htm) you have a broken link http://www.urbanlegends.com/index.html (an old page about urban legends)… May I offer a thought on a possible replacement? http://www.costumesupercenter.com/csc_inc/html/static/btarticles/urbanlegendsandmyths.html It has some great information about several urban legends and myths. I found it to be a great resource during my research, and it would be a great fix to your broken link. I’ve added it to my bookmarks, along with your site
Just thought I’d let you know
Take Care,
Kate
kate@professor-research.org
I plugged some phrases from the above email into Google and it found the following similar email (boldface also added by me, please compare the two):
Crystal Sawyer
crystal@studentresearchers.orgHi!
Sorry to bother you, my name is Crystal Sawyer, I’m an education major from upstate New York. I’ve been doing some research online for a class project and your pages were very helpful. Thanks so muchI noticed that on your page (http://www.apfn.org/apfn/mmm.htm) you have a broken link http://www.nara.gov/exhall/charters/declaration/decmain.html (an old page about science projects)… May I offer a thought on a possible replacement? http://legalmetro.com/library/historic-us-documents-the-charters-of-freedom.html It has some great information about teaching children how to do experimental science projects. I found it to be a great resource during my research, and it would be a great fix to your broken link. I’ve added it to my bookmarks, along with your site
Just thought I’d let you know
Take Care,
Crystal
crystal@studentresearchers.org
The number of identical phrases is far to high to be a coincidence. Looking at the sender domains professor-research.org and studentresearchers.org, the registrant on both is hidden behind the anonymization service domainsbyproxy.com.
I would say chances are good that both “Kate” and “Crystal” are the same person and that this person works for a company offering paid search engine optimization (SEO) services to boost their customers’ website rankings. They add some editorial contents to the customer website and then deceptively ask owners of sites with a high Page rank (PR) to replace broken links with links to these new pages by posing as students and researchers with no obvious commercial interest in the link target site.
8 responses so far ↓
1 John // Jan 16, 2010 at 03:19
You can add “Abby Reed” to your list. I just got the same email informing me of a broken link and suggesting a link to some fake diploma site as a replacement.
2 Randall // Jan 19, 2010 at 07:49
Another one: ‘Meagan Brown’ ( meagan@professor-research.org ).
This person suggested a replacement link for a website section that hasn’t existed in months. This suggests they’re working from search engines or archived webpages, and not from actual sites.
3 Randall J. Scalise // Jan 19, 2010 at 08:43
Just got one from
Dr. Beth Noble
beth@professor-research.org
4 John Langhorn // Jan 28, 2010 at 04:40
I was trying to visit this site today studentresearch.org but their webiste is not there, gone with fordinng access on the root index page.
So i did a Yahoo seach! NOT a G*oo*le search
and found your post.
F**k G*oo*le they are probably the ones who send this SPAM.
I got this in my email box just hours ago.
————————————————–
Broken Link
From: gloria@studentresearchers.org
You may not know this sender.Mark as safe|Mark as junk
Sent: January 27, 2010 2:47:37 PM
To: list@nudistlinklist.com
Hello, I just wanted to let you know that on this page: http://www.nudistlinklist.com/world.html you have a link to: http://www.armage.demon.co.uk/nuff/ (Naturism in the UK) which seems to now be gone. I’m currently working on a paper on Nudists and the Naturist lifestyle and I found this page had a lot of helpful incite: http://www.datehookup.com/content-nudists-and-naturists.htm … As I was browsing the thought occurred to me that you may also find it a helpful addition. Your other resources have proven quite useful to me as well, thank you for putting them together. Cheers, Gloria Mitchell
————————————-
Makes you wonder.
They never asked for a link exchange here?
Odd never the less.
5 Joe Wein // Jan 28, 2010 at 08:56
Hello John,
they did ask for you to link to their (presumed) customer’s site, they just didn’t promise you a link in return, so yes, technically it’s not a link exchange spam.
Not sure why you’re so emotional about Yahoo vs. Google. Everyone is entitled to his own opinion I guess
I use Google because it works well. Way back, I used to use Altavista for all my searches, but switched to Google when that came along and yielded better results.
I don’t hate Yahoo and still do use some of their services. I’ve used their email offering much more than their searches. I probably would be using their services more if they hadn’t crippled their free email by disabling POP access, unlike Gmail which still offers it.
6 John // Jan 28, 2010 at 12:40
Hey Joe
I too was an altavista user till G* came along. It also was for the relevance of the search.
Today however, not the case. Yahoo is yielding far more effective returns for a search rather than G*.
Emotional! Perhaps.
Time that someone else in the world of searches steps up to the plate. Why? because lets face it, G* or whoever you use is priming the first page with at least 60% or better of paid advertising or linking to something they are making a buck off.
They are enough monopolies in this business already, why succumb to another.
Good luck to all in your search
Be Happy, be nude.
7 interesting, Y 4 u, G* 4 me // Mar 3, 2010 at 17:52
‘Y! is yielding far more effective returns for a search rather than G*’
hmm, i kbnow sombody who often has yahoo selected a ff searchplugin. i may need to find info, so i’ll search, but the yahoo results are unspectacular, i’ll then pulldown to switch searchplugin to google, and “bingo” a few god resultsamong the 1dt 10.
leading to hypothesis: we search for diffferent class of info. and/or we have adapted our searchphrases to our favored search provider.
8 interesting, Y 4 u, G* 4 me // Mar 3, 2010 at 17:55
i hoped to find exact seo-crap clones by searching the seo-spam’s spellcheck-error excerpt: “page had a lot of helpful incite”,
but this comment page is the only find (yeah, by google search)
hmmm
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