It wasn’t the first time they sent me something either, it happened once before.

Now, just yesterday, I received even another piece of mail requesting the same amount of money for another listing. Persistent little bastards they are. Here’s just a snippet of the supposed “Listing” includes (taken straight from the letter, word-for-word):

Domain name submission with up to 8 keywords / phrases to 20 established search engines

Initial search engine position and ranking report sent to you via e-mail

Quarterly search engine position and ranking reports sent to you via e-mail

“Up to 8 Keywords / phrases” for only $65, boy, what a BARGAIN (not). I don’t know what they mean by “20 established Search Engines” either, but it sure doesn’t develop a trustworthy stance in my eyes. Search Engines don’t work that way.

Apparently they keep all their “records” at web-listings.net (the company’s website). Be sure to take a look at what I found on their FAQ page:

What are ‘meta tags’?

The meta tag in HTML is not a required tag when you’re creating your web pages. The meta tag is used by search engines to allow them to more accurately list your site in their indexes. While modern search engines mostly look at the content of your pages, meta tags are still sometimes important for ensuring that the search engine properly classifies your site. For assistance in generating your meta tags, see one of the many free online meta tag generators like this one or this one.

What is this, 1998?!? What major SE has used them recently?

Don’t they know how Search Engines operate? Major, “established” ones such as Google have thousands of datacenters they use to display their results to users. What one person sees in their results is NOT what someone else sees, and on top of that, rankings fluctuate, meaning they don’t stay the same forever. New sites come up with better page content for targeted queries all the time.

Something else also smells fishy here, as I don’t know how they received my actual U.S. Address. And I don’t remember giving it out to anyone. The only possible way they could have obtained is through accessing my whois information.

This is the third letter I’ve received from “Web Listings Inc.” And I have more than a suspicion that they’re attempting to scam me, given the ridiculous “Services” they offer, along with the unprofessional approach they’ve taken towards me and my website. They even make special note in the letter to only send checks, and they highlight the point “DO NOT SEND CASH”, hmmmm, wonder why?

SEO / SEM Companies should be contacted by their Potential Clients, not the other way around!

5. Respond with false interest

Here’s something to try, if someone just sent you an email claiming you need Viagra, tell them you would like to place an order on 100 subscriptions to it. And have them send it to a false address, preferably somewhere offshore and remote, so by the time they send it out, it’ll be to late.

But make sure you don’t use your real name, credit card numbers, etc. There’s no way you’d want them to gain hold of that information.

4. Spam them back

What is the primary reason spammers choose to spam? For money and business reasons. So if you concoct a plan to re-spam them back. Here’s what to do:

• If someone places a “Visit My Website” Comment on your blog or forum, first get a hold of their IP addresses to make sure it’s really the site owner or admin spamming you.
• Next, do some brief research on what their site is all about
• Then, visit their site and do the exact same thing, maybe even double the effort.

You should have a ball watching them work fast enough trying to clean everything up.

3. Mock them

Sometimes you may receive spam in a public place on the internet (such as a discussion forum, for example) promoting their product or website. Most of these spam messages will probably contain incoherent phrases in blog plugin posts or traffic generation posts.

Note however that this only works with the moderately intelligent spammers, as some just decide to spam and never return.

2. Locate and Destroy Social Manipulators

John Alexander uses this method on StumbleUpon and it guarantees to get some pretty nasty replies.

Some people like to spam social media sites for their own benefit with offers like “Stumble You, Stumble Me” (Which are against their Terms of Service, BTW). So why not have some fun and uncover their evil intentions to the rest of the social community?

1. Expose the Spammers for what they are

Take one of Adam’s blog posts for example. He captures the spammer’s information and finds some sick, twisted way to turn the tables on them.

This is an excellent way to obtain great thoughts on what to write about on his blog. So its a win-win situation for him, he gets to screw with spammers and have great website content at the same time.

Now, I know that spam is cold to begin with, but if we were to place it in a really cold place, how long would it survive for?

I think that if we somehow freeze the spammers capabilities of creating spam itself, then we could put an end to it. I realize this is a huge undertaking, and am not exactly sure what would be required do perform such a daunting task.

I leave those thoughts up to you

Here’s one of them that was unlucky enough to be caught:

Best CreditCard | bestcreditcard@gaamail.com | immediate-carde.cn | IP: 200.80.233.130

I have recently applied for a new credit card for good credit history and I was very surprised to learn that they offer an additional one which I can give to anyone I like – my relative or friend. As my daughter has just achieved the age right for credit card, I presented her the additional one. If you are looking for good credit cards for you and your relatives, you can find them at

discover card 0

Ne72Ma9rod

I had no idea I could find credit cards at “discover card o” that easily Ne…. I don’t feel like typing the rest of your name ….rod. I’m so happy you were able to find one for your daughter, too. How did you know I was looking for credit applications without even knowing my credit history and background, or without mentioning my name at least once in your comment, I mean sheesh.

Seriously, do you blog comment spammers even know who you spam? Or are you just too dumb to come up with “targeted spam”? I’m predicting the former and the latter.

And if you look closely, I’m not disclosing the email or IP Addresses; spam doesn’t deserve to be disclosed (plus, read my privacy statement).

1. It’s Spammer infested
2. They think Google’s Toolbar PageRank is important (which it’s not)
3. They think submitting to Web Directories is important
4. They think Reciprocal Link Building is important
5. They think Article Submissions are important
6. They think Press Releases are important
7. They think submitting via Social Bookmarks is important
8. They actually applaud participation in Link Programs
9. No creative Forum Icons
10. They think “Google is Evil”
11. They promote splogs
12. They promote Espionage
13. They promote Link Scheming
14. They promote Blackhat SEO techniques
15. They promote Stumble Exchanges
16. They promote Digg Exchanges
17. They promote Clickbank Posts
18. It sits on a sub-domain
19. It’s too big
20. Members have tried to sell their accounts
21. Trying to filter all the good posts from the bad posts is like finding a needle in a haystack
22. They actually have an “Interesting Junk” dropdown menu in their forum toolbar (Under “Fun Stuff”)
23. Reputation is disabled in the “Members List”
24. For DP: Quantity > Quality
25. Their “Greenish” Color Scheme reminds me of Vomit
26. Their Link Exchange / Sales Forums have over 460,000 posts
27. They banned Alexander the Great
28. They have an entire forum devoted to Keyword Tracking
29. The Administrators don’t care about the quality of the forums
30. The Moderators don’t care about the quality of the forums
31. They hire paid forum posters
32. Just look at some of Nintendo’s Pictures
33. They ban members for silly reasons (like thread bumping)
34. They got banned from Stumble Upon
35. There’s a”Politics and Religion” sub-forum, it’s suppose to be a webmaster forum
36. Everything is about links, links, and more links to them
37. Insults seem to be tolerated (like here)
38. Just looking at the site hurts my eyes
39. Threads often go off-topic
40. Don’t Piss off Crazy_Rob, he’ll ban you
41. They actually have a “Personal Attacks” Sticky, as if insults weren’t obviously bad.
42. Copy and Pasted Articles flourish
43. Too many self-promo threads
44. Too many link-drop threads
45. Some members are arrogant, and believe competing communities are jealous.
46. They condescend towards Doug Heil as if his IHY community is second-rate
47. Lots of cell phone spam
48. They overvalue “Article Marketing”
49. Many new webmasters get sucked into their logic
50. Profanity filter is turned off
51. Their logo’s odd
52. You can’t even make out what’s underneath their logo (it looks something like a barcode)
53. All their “Google” Stickies relate to PR
54. People who generally try to help others out go relatively unnoticed
55. Their membergroups are insulting (Peon, Grunt, etc.)
56. They have over 500 self-proclaimed “SEO Experts“
57. The forums look nothing like the main site
58. Their forum design is uninspiring
59. They don’t care who they ban, even high-ranking contributing members
60. HTML isn’t a sub-forum of programming, like the rest of the web languages
61. There is no moderation accountability
62. There is barely any reputation accountability
63. They actually have a marketplace for website traffic, as if having something to unique to offer your visitors isn’t enough
64. Sorting through the filth gives me a headache
65. Members get super freaked out when DP goes offline
66. The guy who wrote the Reputation FAQ is banned
67. “Who’s Online” options are severely limited
68. The forum’s “Get-rich-quick” logic undermines the purpose of the web and internet
69. Some actually try to sell blackhat methods to newbies
70. It gives off a “Creepy, Slyish” vibe
71. Definitely not enough moderation for a board their size
72. They don’t welcome new members well (usually you get a welcome PM from an admin, but not from DP)
73. They are arrogant enough to have their own “DPified” Google FAQ
74. Allowing users to switch between vBulletin styles makes the site look unprofessional
75. Many threads aren’t even posted in the right forums
76. They have no Design & Development stickies. Wouldn’t some coding resources be useful for creating a “good” website?
77. They have a “Legal Issues” forum, anyone else detect the oxymoron?
78. The site’s owner (Shawn) isn’t even active much on the forum, (I doubt he even has that much influence anymore)
79. Popular ≠ Valuable
80. Absolutely no forum for “Site News and Updates” can be found
81. There’s no specific DP copyright info for the forums (it should be at the bottom, near the vB copyright info)
82. It’s server is often slow
83. Limited selection of “Digital Point Solutions Tools”
84. “Forum Jump”, for the most part, is *pointless*
85. Everything’s about money over there (with entire forums dedicated to affiliate programs and PPC advertising, not to mention the 2,000,000+ posts in the DP marketplace)
86. They have two seperate sub-forums for Google Adwords
87. Whitehat SEO is virtually nonexistent
88. Web hosting is also virtually nonexistent
89. Read this post
90. Or read this post
91. Many members’ signature links are filled with pointless links with anchor text such as “PR4 Link Exchange” or “Hot Thai Girls”, etc.
92. Their Directory forum is underneath the “Search Engine” Category, do they even know what a Directory is?
93. No web marketing advice for long term site stability
94. For allowing usernames like FuckingPirate and Shittywall to exist
95. They tend to be hypocritical (they don’t mind manipulating sites like Digg and Stumbleupon, but when it comes to Ethical Legal Issues, there’s nothing pertaining to internet marketing)
96. Their spammy ideas and link schemes sometimes spill over into other forums
97. Difficult to understand the site name, and how it relates to the web
98. The community doesn’t collectively care about long-term website worthiness
99. Did I mention it’s a spammer heaven yet?
100. A community containing that much filth isn’t worthy of all the backlinks gained from this blog post

I could probably have come up with more, but I’m too tired to think right now.

(UPDATE 4/20/2008 = I’ve opened up a new blog post about this list over here, so all questions and comments should be directed there.)