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Fred and Wilma advertising Winston Cigarettes
A tale of automation gone hilariously wrong.
Once upon a time, when the internet was still cooling, dinosaurs and woolly mammoths inhabited the earth and, link exchanges or reciprocal linking were “all the rage”, 468 X 60 banners (in rotation) were thought to be effective advertising.
Fast forward to when the Great Google frowned upon such contrived methods - or as Aaron Wall put it, “Matt Cutts Announces Death of Cheesy Link Exchange Networks” they became as unfashionable as smoking and bottled water. (Smoking bottled water was never socially approved - that we know of.)
Anyway, none of that has stopped odd people from still committing what Mr Cutts clearly says is an SEO mistake: “buying a random software package that they think will get them a gold mine of links“. In fact, he said that way back in August 2005, so you’d imagine most folk would have caught on by now.
Nooooo, you’d be wrong.
There are still a few bronto crane operators at the internet quarry.
This very weekend, I got an exited email from someone promising me the moon, the stars and the Holy Grail in terms of traffic from their howevermany pages, 200k subscribers and a “PR 4 rankded by Google” (Spelling mistake included.)
Goodness knows if their claims are true (I’m too cynical to be objective and, based on what I’ve seen, they do not merit the scrutiny of proper research), but they mentioned a huge figure they spend on Adwords monthly and their site (which I shall decline to link to) was verging on Made for AdSense quality, with three Adsense ads crammed into “above the fold” or “in yer face” placements.
Considering how long these things have been frowned upon and that Google said it was disabling Adsense arbitrage publisher accounts as of June 1st LAST YEAR, you can see why I think this is a dinosaur. Frankly, I’m surprised the site still exists. I’m even more surprised that their Adsense account still exists.
It almost made me wonder if the email had taken years to arrive!
Here’s the funny part. Their obviously automated email said, “I saw that your site, secret-tenerife.com, is linking to The Ezseonews.com site.” (Yes, so?)
Later, it says:
In order for me to put your big 468 X 60 ad
on my super busy forum, targeted exactly to
your market (Internet Marketing), I need a real
link back to me on your homepage. Not some
link buried deep within your site.
So, they’ve made the faulty assumption that anyone who links to Ezseonews.com must be an internet marketer with a site related to internet marketing. (Well, no anyway, ‘coz Andy’s advice or products can help anyone, in any market.) That assumption took real stupidity, which beats artificial intelligence every time!
Their artificially stupid software doesn’t realize that secret-tenerife.com is a site about Tenerife (Duh!), nor that Dr. Andy Williams, who owns The Ezseonews.com site and, who I’ve met, also lives on this island. Besides that, I linked to him there only because he happened to mention the local weather.
You know, just about as irrelevant and far from internet marketing as it gets.
Actually, the email (usefully) included the link they’d found on my site (talking about the snow) and included the description of my site (taken from the meta description), that is clearly all about Tenerife (and not internet marketing.)
Since I do not publish email addresses online, this “person” had to have gone to some trouble (potentially using devious means) to get an email address to send their spammy request to. You’d think, if they could do that, then they could at least sight check that what they are going to send makes some sense.
Of course there are things you can automate to make life easier.
This, I think we can conclude, is not one of them. 
Written by Pamela Heywood - Visit Website | Leave a tip | Buy me something
