Spammers and SEO people used to post lots of comments on news sites and blogs, linking to their clients’ websites. Now that Google punishes the linked sites, these guys are scrambling, begging and threatening to get publishers–their victims!–to remove the links that they posted. I get quoted by The Awl‘s Brendan O’Connor in his story about the phenomenon. He also talked to some of the spammers and found them bafflingly unreformed:
My favorite are the emails from OneFlare.com.au.
“We have discovered that a company we hired to help promote our website have used a variety of questionable techniques to secure links,” Selena Le wrote on October 20th. “These links were placed purely for SEO purposes, with the intention of manipulating search rankings.”
“We have discovered that a company we hired to help promote our website have used a variety of questionable techniques to secure links,” Nick Chernih wrote on December 5th. “These links were placed purely for SEO purposes, with the intention of manipulating search rankings.”
You don’t say.
Spam to ask you to take down their spam!