This is one in a series of posts reviewing and looking at how some of the SEO companies which use bulk emails/spam with ‘we can help your terrible site’ type emails really can (and actually mostly can’t!) help your site.
Read some simple explanations of some of the SEO terms used on this post…
This time the email came in from a Kanti who was using an @gmail.com email address with his name and another word relating to this sort of thing in it.
The subject of the spam was “1st to 10th position in Google rankings” and went:
Hi,
Hope you are having a good day!
While having a look at your website, I just found out that your website lags significantly on On-Page SEO optimization techniques. Moreover, your website also does not have significant backlinks for your set of targeted keywords means your website is almost invisible to your potential visitors.
Do you know Off-page and On-page optimization is something that is crucial for every website owner? Would you love to see increased traffic on your website? Don’t you like your website to be in the topmost results on search engines when someone searches for keywords related to your website?
I am associated with the topmost SEO Company. As a team, we provide the one-stop solution to the website owners for getting higher ranking in the popular Search Engines like Google.
Some of our steps to increase the ranking of your website in an organic way are as under:
On-page Website Optimization as per Google’s Guidelines.
Relevant Keywords Research
Keywords Optimization
Link Building/Back Link Creation on high DA websites
Submission to Search Engines and Directories
Submission to Article Directories
Competition Analysis
Creation of Optimized Content (Blogs, Articles, Social Sharings)
…and everything else needed to get your website on the topmost ranking in the search engines.
NOTE:
We are also an expert in recovering the websites penalized by Google. Kindly contact us today to save your website.
SEO is one of the dedicated services offered by our IT organization. If you are interested in designing and development of a new website or eCommerce Store or redesigning your existing website, we will be happy to provide the most competitive quotation for that also.
Kindly reply back to this email to get the best quote and the highest level of professional services to ensure ranking of your website on the topmost search result page of Google and other popular search engines. Once I hear back from you, I will use my official email ID to initiate the things further.
Look forward to your response.
Kind Regards,
Kanti [Name removed for privacy]
SEO Analyst
It seems that the new standard SEO spam template is along the lines of “you’ve got a nice looking site but it still needs our help…”. The funny thing is that it didn’t mention a specific site, but it did come into my business site’s email. But I thought I’d try asking about a different site, my Christmas one, and see what happens!
Hi,
That sounds interesting. Please can you look at my site www.whychristmas.com and see what you think?
Thanks.
The next day, I got a reply from Ranjan who was using an @webbraininfotech.com email and it went:
Hi James,
Happy New Year [This arrived in the last week of January but never mind…]. Hope you are safe there!
I am Ranjan a colleague of Kanti. I am taking care of Business Development activities at Web Brain InfoTech.
You may visit us at www.webbraininfotech.com
As requested,
Thanks for your interest in our Proposal. We have helped number of small, mid & large size businesses to grow online. With our SEO Services, we have helped them to get good traffic, leads and sales with business. We can help you with your business too.
We have had a look at your reference website https://www.whychristmas.com/ and it’s really a good website but there are still many areas to work and get better results. We have listed few items and here they are to your review. Please check below:
Meta Tags need to be updated on all pages of the website.
The homepage and rest of inner pages have a low volume of text content which search engines can interpret as ‘thin content’.
We could not find Google Analytics & Search Console integrated with the website.
Backlinks count is very less and need high quality backlinking work.
Some of your link URLs do not appear friendly to humans or search engines.
Your page has failed Google’s Core Web Vitals assessment.
We have not detected a Facebook Pixel on your page.
No associated Instagram profile found linked on your page
No associated LinkedIn profile found linked on your page.
Need to enable server side caching for better performance of the website.
Please visit link below to see our SEO Packages. This package includes SEO and Social Media Marketing works. We don’t charge any extra fees for Social Media works. It is included with our SEO Package.
[There was a link to a PDF of their packages]
Please check our client results here [There was a link to a PDF of some clients]
We can connect using below:
[Removed for privacy]
We don’t offer any contract but we suggest our customers to please stay with us for minimum 4 months to see best results with business interms of Keywords Positioning, Traffic, Leads and Sales.
We will send you every week our work report for your check. You can track all works and keywords progress there. Also what activities we will do, it will be reported to you. So nothing will be hidden.
Here are our key points to success:
Complete analysis of client website.
Analyze 3-4 top competitors.
List all On-Page error of website and fix.
Do Quality Off-Page Works.
Content Works
Social Media works.
& More…
In meantime Please don’t forget to see below:
[Four links to PDFs and pages on their site to info about them]
If you find us suitable for your work. Kindly revert, we would be happy to work with you!
Looking forward for your positive Response!
Best Regards,
Ranjan |Sr. Business Head
Well, I decided to reply to Ranjan explaining more about me, that he was a spammer and why basically everything he put in his email was wrong…
Hi Ranjan,
I’ve been a web designer and developer for 20 over years. I like to reply to SEO spammers to see what ‘services’ they offer and the things they say and use to get clients.
My Christmas site www.whychristmas.com has also been on the web for over 20 years. It had well over 20 MILLION pageloads last year – so it’s doing pretty well!
Please can you tell me why you think it’s ok to spam people to get business?
Your initial email was IN BREACH OF ALL the pieces of anti-spam legislation listed below.
For the UK (where I live) you are not allowed to sent marketing emails to an individual without their permission – you did this: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/electronic-and-telephone-marketing/electronic-mail-marketing/
For the USA, you are breaking several of these guidelines for CAN-SPAM: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business
For CASL in Canada, you need consent to send electronic marketing – which you did not have: https://fightspam.gc.ca/eic/site/030.nsf/eng/00008.html (You also need other business identifiers in the emails, which your emails do not have.)
The Anti Spam Act in Australia has similar conditions for consent and identity, which your emails also met none of: https://www.acma.gov.au/avoid-sending-spam
Let’s look at what you said about my site:
Meta Tags need to be updated on all pages of the website.
All the meta tags on my site are VERY optimised. This is wrong.The homepage and rest of inner pages have a low volume of text content which search engines can interpret as ‘thin content’.
The home page of the site is actually one of the least entered pages via search engines (even though it’s normally one the first two pages of Google for just ‘Christmas’!). The site has LOTS of pages about Christmas, and that’s how most the vast majority of people actually enter the site using search engines. The home page passes Ahrefs content test fine. And the Inner pages of the site are amazingly content rich! So basically wrong.We could not find Google Analytics & Search Console integrated with the website
That’s because I use a privacy friendly analytics tool on the site. It’s just not Google Analytics. It’s quite easy to find if you view the code!Backlinks count is very less and need high quality backlinking work.
According to Ahrefs, my site has nearly 80,000 backlinks with an 84% dofollow rate. Using Ubersuggest from Neil Patel, it says my site has nearly 85,000 backlinks from over 11,000 domains and that both of those are ‘Great’. But you’re saying my backlinks are bad? That doesn’t seem to make sense to me… (Oh and it’s wrong.)Some of your link URLs do not appear friendly to humans or search engines.
Hmmm, yes, there are some underscores in some of the URLs on my site. It’s now thought that hyphens in URLs are better. But when I created the site back in 2000, the reverse was thought to be the correct thing to do! And anyway many of the pages with underscores in them are #1 on Google for their respective results out of several million results so they can’t be hurting the SEO much…Your page has failed Google’s Core Web Vitals assessment.
This is technically correct. HOWEVER, just saying it ‘failed’ isn’t the full story it is? CWV has six parts. My site gets 5/6 ‘passes’ and one ‘medium’. The medium is for Cumulative Layout Shift where it has a time of 0.211 seconds. A ‘pass’ on CLS is 0.200 or less. So my site ‘fails’ VLS and so CWV by 0.011 of a second. However, my site gets a Google Lighthouse Performance score (which is made up of CWV) of 96/100.But if we look at your site, if fails all six parts of CWV. Your site’s CLS is 0.457 and the Lighthouse Performance score is 4/100. So what site do you think needs optimisation!?
We have not detected a Facebook Pixel on your page.
This is because: 1. I don’t carry ads on my site, so I would never need a Facebook Pixel and 2. I care about the privacy of the visitors to my site! So irrelevant.No associated Instagram profile found linked on your page
This is true. Because I don’t use Instagram. So that’s fine then!No associated LinkedIn profile found linked on your page.
My site isn’t a business. Thus LinkedIn is completely irrelevant to it.Need to enable server side caching for better performance of the website.
This is VERY wrong. My site has multiple caching layers server side! (Hence the 96/100 Performance score.)So your analysis is basically either wrong or irrelevant on every count!
As you can probably tell, I’m not interested in your services.
Please do not spam me (or hopefully anyone else) again.
It’s been well over a week now I’ve not heard back after that one…
I’ll post an update if I ever do get a reply.
Their Report & Recommendations
I covered basically everything they said was ‘wrong’ with my site in my email reply. As you can have seen, they were rather amazingly wrong on basically everything.
But let’s look at their site and see what it looks like…!
Looking at Their Site
With SEO spammers, I also like to look at their sites, to see if they practice what they preach (I mean would you trust a plumber who had leaking and rusty pipes all over their own house?!); and also to compare their site with a site they say they can help…
Their site is https://www.webbraininfotech.com
For HTML Validation, my Christmas site has no errors. Their site has 199 errors and 13 warnings.
Using the ‘WAVE’ Accessibility Testing Tool, their site has 100 errors and 29 contrast errors. My Christmas site has no errors of either kind!
That has to be one of, if not, the most errors for HTML and Accessibility I’ve ever seen on a site!
Using the Google Lighthouse speed test tool their site gets:
Performance: 4(!!!!)
Accessibility: 80
Best Practices: 54
SEO: 66
My site gets:
Performance: 96
Accessibility: 100
Best Practices: 100
SEO: 100
So my site is MUCH better across the board, and especially in ‘Performance’ – where they’ve got one of the lowest scores I’ve ever seen.
When their site does load (with performance score of 4/100 you can imagine that takes a while), it comes up with two different overlays, one for a newsletter signup, which covers the whole screen(!) and one for Facebook chat. So you have to close two things before you even get to the site. Grrrrrr (They’re actually running THREE ‘chat’ apps on their site, Facebook, WhatsApp and Tawk – that could help to explain why things take sooooo long to load!)
There’s no Heading 1 on the page. This is a vital (and basic) piece of SEO. Yet so many SEO spammers don’t bother with it on their own site.
The alt text on their site’s logo is ‘logo’. That’s terrible – for SEO and accessibility.
There are two ‘meta description’ tags in their code. You only want one as search engines can get confused if there are multiples.
It’s now early February, yet there’s still a Christmas themed image in the carousel at the top of their home page!
There is a privacy policy page on the site, that’s good. What’s not good is the actual contents of this page. It basically tells you nothing. Certainly not enough to cover international privacy laws like GDPR. They also don’t tell you that they’re collection full IP information with Google Analytics and other tools – which is also in breach of GDPR.
Interesting, the copyright on their site says 2010-2022. But their domain was registered in May 2015…
There are lots of good testimonials on their site – and they look genuine. So they’ve got some happy clients.
There are also lots of ‘awards’. But all logos are very very ‘clip arty’. On a banner on their home page, it says that they’ve been given awards by: the “Daily Herald” – but that’s a news paper from Chicago which doesn’t give out web awards; the ‘Red Herring Global 100 Award’ – Red Herring is a media company which gives awards to innovative startups – I’ve searched the Red Herring site (which lists the winners) and can’t find Web Brain Infotech anywhere on it…; Hubspot – that’s a software company and does give out awards – but I can’t find Web Brain Infotech anywhere on their lists of award winners; Your Story – another startup promotion site – but 1. they’ve got the wrong logo(!) and 2. I can’t find them anywhere on the Your Story site; and there’s also the logo for CBS8/KFMB-TV – a TV station in San Deigo – I’m pretty sure they don’t give out web awards!
Now I could be wrong and they’ve got awards from all those places, but I can’t find them!
What I know I am right about is that Web Brain InfoTech are spammers who break multiple pieces of international legislation when trying to get clients as I also explained to Ranjan.
You might also remember that the subject of the initial spam from Web Brain InfoTech was “1st to 10th position in Google rankings”.
But Google has something to say about claims like that…
Beware of SEO companies that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google.
from Google’s “Do you need an SEO?”
Conclusion
Web Brain InfoTech are SEO spammers. They spam from behind random Gmail accounts.
The subject of their spam makes a claim which Google say not to trust. That subject also breaks the CAN-SPAM Act.
Basically everything they said needing fixing on my site was very wrong.
They’ve got one of the slowest sites and one with the most HTML and Accessibility errors I’ve ever seen.
So if Web Brain InfoTech say your site needs SEO help, the delete button might be a better option.
But, as ever, the choice is yours…