A curious e-mail

Justin Blanton -

While I’ve received numerous link-exchange requests (from people who are looking to increase their Google rankings), I’ve yet to get one quite like the one I received yesterday morning:

Dear Sir/Madam,

I recently visited your website (https://www.polymath.net/links.php) and noticed you have a link pointing to driverguide.com.

Since I have a similar kind of website mabey you could also link this one.

The URL of my driver resource site is https://www.driverfiles.net

Kindest regards,

Johan Struijk

DriverFiles.net

It’s quite obvious that the owner of driverfiles.net (notice the lack of the link here and in the paste above  :P) is running some sort of automated sniffer to seek out sites that link to DriverGuide so that he may e-mail the owners of said sites and request that they add a link to his DriverFiles site. While devilish, I can’t say that this isn’t a good idea — it’s certainly going to get the guy more hits to his site. I might make a few suggestions though — try to make the spam look a little more personal. For example:

  • Replace Sir/Madam with Justin
  • Change the From address to a real name (not info@)
  • Don’t say you visited my website and then point to my links page as if that is my website
  • Next time, use the contact form or send to my actual address (again, not info@)

I promise you Johan, if you follow these simple steps, your spam will be much more effective and your life much more meaningful. Keep up the good work.