Just when you think you’ve heard it all, we get a story like this. Scum spammers, masquerading as SEO consultants, have recently been flooding blogs with comment spam for an insurance agency in Australia. We here at Irreal get spam for similar (but not, apparently, the same) outfits on a regular basis.
Now Google has changed the rules a bit and fixed things so that “legacy spam” is actually damaging to the concerns that it was supposed to help. In response, the company has sent out emails asking (demanding?) that the blogs victimized on their behalf now remove these links (because they “may be harmful either to the future marketing and reputation of [our company] or our search results”) and to notify them when said links have been removed. I really wish that I had received one those emails but, sadly, I remove spam from the comments as they come in so I won’t have the opportunity to make a choice reply.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo received one of these emails (see the story like this link) and summarized the situation as the company paying SEO consultants to spam blogs around the globe and then sending cease and desist notices when the scheme backfires. I’m not sure the email rises to the level of a cease and desist notice but it is rather demanding, especially in its insistence that the sender be notified when the links are removed.
If you were under the delusion that shameful behavior has boundaries, this story should disabuse you of the notion.